Last weekend, American conceptual artist Spencer Tunick photographed around 1,800 naked people lying prostrate on the bleachers at the Viennese soccer stadium that will host the Euro 2008 soccer final on June 29.Tunick's body of work comprises many projects involving large numbers of naked people posing together in unlikely surroundings. One of the artist's latest endeavors took place on a glacier in Switzerland, where 600 people stripped off in temperatures of about 10 Celsius (50 F) last August. His biggest project to date involved 18,000 … [Read more...]

Somehow inbetween launching a production company, performing his latest monologue Citizen Josh all over the country, planning a new TV/Internet program and starting work on his next solo show, Josh Kornbluth has managed to find the time to revamp his website and join the blogosphere.I don't know how the man does it.Most people know the Bay Area-based performer for his politically-charged solo shows and the Sony Pictures Classics feature Haiku Tunnel which caused a stir at The Sundance Festival in 2001. But beyond all these worthy achievements, … [Read more...]

One of the loveliest aspects of being an arts & culture -- as opposed to entertainment -- journalist is that I don't often have to pursue famous people for interviews. I reserve only the highest admiration for writers who not only manage to secure meetings and phonecalls with celebrities but then also somehow go on to write articles and books that don't merely repeat the dull stuff about these "A" listers that the public has read a thousand times. Doing these things requires amazing skills and creativity and very few people are up to the … [Read more...]

Why are human beings so obsessed with completing unfinished artworks? The world's desk drawers must sequester untold numbers of semi-developed plays, novels, paintings and string quartets. Yet for some reason, the idea of the unfinished artwork is a source of unbridled fascination for many of us.Some of these artistic fragments are masterpieces in their own right. The two existing movements of Franz Schubert's famous 1822 Symphony No. 8 in B minor (popularly known as The Unfinished Symphony) are a case in point, as is Geoffrey Chaucer's The … [Read more...]

Often when I receive responses to posts I write, people refer to the texts as "articles." Which leads me to wonder whether the word "blog post" and "article" means the same same thing to most people who read material on the Internet. To me, there's a huge difference between what I post to ArtsJournal / chloeveltman.com and the content that magazines and newspapers commission me to write. For one thing, it usually takes me an hour or less to create and publish a blog post, whereas an article can take weeks or even months to research and write. … [Read more...]

I don't keep up with the world of musicals as closely as some other arts scenes. But the news that the Broadway musical Glory Days was shutting down after only one performance made me feel sad. Penned by 23-year-old composer-lyricist Nick Blaemire and 24-year-old librettist James Gardiner, the 90-minute, pop-driven musical deals with four friends sorting out their differences a year after high school. My feelings don't have much to do with the work itself, which I didn't see during its preview run or on opening night. When I was in New York a … [Read more...]

Lately, tea drinking seems to have reached epidemic heights in the U.S. Only a few years ago, tea drinkers in this country were lucky to find anything other than crappy Lipton's brand black tea in grocery stores and restaurants. These days, tea emporiums are flourishing, run-of-the-mill corner cafes stock a wide selection of brews from standard black teas to more adventurous greens, whites and reds, and Americans all over the country are exchanging their cafetieres for teapots. The other day, I was even able to obtain a cup of camomile tea in … [Read more...]

There's something daunting about putting the word "national" on the front of the name of an arts organization. Being a ballet company or orchestra is one thing; being a national ballet company or national orchestra is quite another. Somehow the term carries an awesome amount of baggage with it.The sheer size of this country and its fragmented legislative system which favors private support of the arts has prevented an American National Theatre from taking root, even though the idea has had -- and continues to have -- many supporters from within … [Read more...]

One of the worst things about spending an evening at an a cocktail party in England is having to answer the question, "what do you do?" This is a phrase I don't hear that much in the U.S. Americans may ask "what do you do for a living?" but that's not quite the same as "what do you do?" because it doesn't allow that little "do" word to run amok and come to represent the sum total of a person's existence.While in the U.K., people are only allowed to apply the "do" word to the activity they undertake everyday to keep a roof over their head, in … [Read more...]

Some children's stories aren't just written for children. They're for adults too. From Aesop's Fables to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland to the Dr. Seuss classic, Oh, The Places You'll Go! kids books are packed with important life lessons for grown-ups.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 novella The Little Prince is no exception. Inspired by the author's career as an aviator, the book tells the story of a an airplane pilot who meets The Little Prince, an intense young man with a crown of golden hair, after his plane crashes in the Sahara … [Read more...]