I’ve spent the last few days in Washington DC. Mostly, I’ve been here for meetings at the Mother Ship, NPR. But I’ve also been out and about tasting the sights and sounds of a city that has become dear to my heart over the past couple of years.

I’m going to share a few brief thoughts about the things I’ve been up to, arts-wise, in far-away DC over the past few days:

1. Roseanne Cash residency at the Library of Congress: It was a treat to hear Cash perform the songs from her forthcoming album in order, in their entirety, with her band. There are one or two lovely love songs in the mix. But the tracks all sounded the same to me. I could have done with a little more variance in tempo, at least. Still, Cash has a gorgeous alto voice, full of longing. And her band, headed by guitarist John Leventhal (who’s also Cash’s husband) played lyrically and with a good amount of swing, despite the constraints of the austere Coolidge auditorium. I wish I could have been around for the other two installments of Cash’s Library of Congress Residency. On Friday she played with a bunch of her singer-songwriter friends; and on Saturday she had an onstage discussion with poet laureate Natasha Tretheway. I’m sure these two southern ladies would have had a lot to talk about.

2. Celtic pipers in downtown Alexandria: I’ve been thinking a lot about the pleasure of coming across what I like to call “Random Acts of Culture.” It’s always fun to plan a trip to the opera or the movies or a museum or whatever. But stumbling upon interesting art lifts the spirit in a way that no premeditated cultural event can. When I mooched over to Alexandria yesterday afternoon with a friend in search of lunch and a bit of consignment store shopping, we ran into a wonderful parade of pipe bands. There different ensembles, all dressed in full Scots and Irish regalia, played in turn and then merged at a cross-roads in the middle of town to make music together. The sidewalks were jammed with people. The bagpipes roared and whinnied. The tartan flapped. I was in heaven.

3. Great American Square Dance Revival at St. Stephens Church: A big old church in the middle of the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC is the site of regular country dance meet ups. The place was packed and my friend Zach and I hoofed it for a couple of hours to the sounds of the Mostly Mountain Boys playing old-time tunes. What I love about events like this one is that the barrier to participate is so pleasingly low. It costs $5 to get in and you don’t need any dancing talent whatsoever to participate. Plus it’s a great way to meet new people and get to know old friends better.

4. Van Gogh Repetitions exhibition at The Phillips Collection: It seems obvious that anyone who wants to get good at anything needs to engage in lots of repetition of that activity. But this small but powerful show makes the act of repetition explicit in a fresh way by looking at how Van Gogh obsessively retraced specific subjects, looking for ways to improve them or otherwise see them anew. I found it exhilarating to be able to examine several different versions of the artist’s L’Arlesienne and Postman paintings for instance, seeing how his brush stroke changed and colors intensified. The only challenge is getting away from playing the game of ‘spot the difference’ when you look at the similar canvases.

A great new, monthly classical music series launched this week at Denver’s most prominent jazz club, Dazzle.
The series invites comparisons to the classical programming at Le Poisson Rouge in New York. But the Denver series so far has a different vibe to that of the New York venue. It’s more intimate and judging by the repertoire plans for the coming months, looks to be predominantly focused on 20th century music.
What was great about the inaugural concert was the high talent of the performers (many of whom play with the Colorado Symphony) and the adventurous nature of the programming. I was introduced to several 20th century composers whose work I had never encountered before as well as a slew of local talent.
Among the musical delights were Stravinsky’s Fanfare for Two Trumpets (1964) a boisterous little piece which sounds like two brothers squabbling and making up in the space of 60 seconds, Jean Francaix’s jaunty Quartet for English Horn and Strings (1971), and short experimental works for solo clarinet, solo bassoon and solo double bass by, respectively, Isang Yun, William Osborne and Tom Johnson.
But the evening’s eccentricity award went to a galumphing song cycle by Rodger Vaughn for soprano voice and tuba. I found the piece to be a bit twee and gimmicky. Yet in as much as works for this combination of instruments are rarely written and even more rarely performed, I was glad to be in its company for 10 minutes if only for the novelty value.
The only truly “Classical” item on this classical music series program was a performance of the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s Piano sonata No 17 in C minor. But even this standard bit of repertoire came with a twist – the work was fastidiously performed by Ashia Ajani, an earnest 16-year-old student at Denver’s East High School. The organizer of the series, James Bailey, aims to include a performance by a young musician in many of the series’ concerts. This is an excellent idea.
The cabaret-style atmosphere of Dazzle, with its low ceilings and solicitous waiters is perfectly suited to chamber music. My taste buds, eyes and ears were all engaged.
In a space like Dazzle, the music and audience need to breathe, perhaps more than in a conventional concert hall or church setting. I wanted a little interstitial downtime to just soak up the atmosphere and chat with my neighbor about the strangeness and beauty of what we just heard. So while I enjoyed the brief introductions that some of the musicians gave from the stage, I could have done with less program-note pontificating from Bailey between each act.
The lineup for the coming months looks fierce. I’ll be back for more.
Here’s what’s on:
January 7: A program of French quartets featuring Claude Debussy’s string quartet, two works for saxophone quartet by Max Dubois and Eugene Bozza, and Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Performers include the Denver School of the Arts Student Quartet and the Lamont Saxophone Quartet.
February 4: Piano works by Eric Satie performed by Andrew Lee.
March 4: Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Scheonberg performed by the Playground Ensemble.
April 8: Arias of “sex, betrayal and revenge” performed by artists from the Denver chapter of Opera On Tap. Opera on Tap is a national network of classically trained singers who perform works from the operatic cannon in bars.
May 7: A world premiere by Colorado Symphony percussionist William Hill, Hout by Louis Andriessen and a piece by Vineet Shende – Throw Down or Shut Up – which will be performed by the University of Colorado Faculty New Music Ensemble.

USA Today is running a poll to decide which airport in the country has the best art. Denver International Airport (DIA) is one of the front-runners, along with Albuquerque, Chicago, Dallas and Miami. USA Today will announce its list of Top 10 Airport Art destinations on Wednesday.

I’ve been exchanging emails with Chris Stevens, the manager of the art and culture program at DIA, about the USA Today contest.

DIA is home to some of the country’s most polarizing public art pieces including the much-reviled “Mustang” (aka “The Demon Horse”, pictured left) which crushed and killed its creator, artist Luis Jimenez, when it was under constructions nearly six years ago.

“While we are not a large market, the airport does hold some of the most famous and infamous pieces of public art in its collection,” Stevens said.

Stevens is concerned about the adjudication of the USA Today competition. “It is not as much about the art as it is about who has a better marketing and social media campaign,” Stevens said.

Yet in a way, it makes more sense for airport art to be judged by regular citizens (as opposed to professional art critics) than other kinds of art. Airport art is by definition public art. So why not let the public decide?

Having said that, I’m sort of bored with hearing locals and tourists complaining about works like “Mustang” at DIA. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, from a Denver Post article that was published in February:

“He looks like he’s going to kill me,” Jennifer Newson said in the DIA terminal. “It’s not really settling when you’re driving to get on a flight and then you see the ‘demon horse.’ ”

I happen to think “Mustang” is an awe-inspiring piece. I kind of wish the top international art critics would weigh in on this one — and some of the other works on display in airports across the land that tend to attract fairly superficial and predictable responses from the general public but generally go un-appraised by art experts.

With airports becoming increasingly dedicated to the idea of stimulating travelers’ hearts and minds as they wait for their flights, airport art could use some intelligent commentary — alongside the thumbs up / thumbs down evaluations of the passing public.

 

Denver is currently undergoing a planning process to develop a new cultural plan for the city. The last time this was done on a significant scale was in 1989, when strategies that have made a lasting impact on the city’s cultural landscape — such as the decision to allocated 1% of all public building project budgets to the commissioning, creation and installation of public art — came into being.

On Monday evening, city cultural policy officials held a town hall meeting to summarize the progress of the plan development so far and get further input from members of the public. I don’t know how many regular citizens were in attendance at the meeting. There were about 100 people present in total, and I recognized many of them as arts and culture industry workers of one kind or another.

When Ginger White, the deputy director of Denver Arts & Venues, the city’s cultural body, talked about the results of the survey in Monday’s meeting, it was particularly interesting to see that respondents consider Denver to be very nearly as much of an arts town (84%) as they think of it as a sports town (94%).

Sports come out on top, which isn’t a surprise in a place where Peyton Manning and John Elway are regarded as near-deities and traffic on the freeways comes to a standstill when the local teams are playing (which is to say that it comes to a standstill almost on a daily basis.)

But the arts came in a close second, which is very heartening. If this question had been asked in the 1989 survey — which it wasn’t according to Daniel Rowland, a spokesperson for Denver Arts & Venues –  would the answer have been the same? Somehow, I doubt it.

There were more than 800 people who responded to the poll. But in a city of more than 600,000 people, that’s a very small sample. So it’s hard to be too optimistic about the survey results. Also, the biggest challenge for the city in terms of developing this cultural plan as far as I can see, is reaching beyond this core group of mostly white, middle-class, public-radio-listening folks who work in cultural fields.

The administrators in charge of developing Denver’s “Imagine2020” culture plan are well aware of this issue. In their phone survey, they weighted the sample towards African-American and Latino homes. Still. I think much more work needs to be done to get a true assessment of how Denverites feel about their city’s cultural output.

Daniel Rowland disagrees. “We painstakingly made sure that the 800 respondents were a representative sample of both the city’s demographics and geography,” Rowland said.  “It’s a statistically valid sample of the city’s 600,000 residents.” This last comment may in fact stand up to reason: Denver is an extremely white city. I should also add that although the phone survey questioned 800 or so people, Denver Arts & Venues talked to more than 5,000 people in drafting the plan, including more than 4,200 that provided input online or in person at the Imagine2020 public meetings that have been held in recent months.

I’ve been in this country for 16 years and yet still I struggle with certain customs on this side of the pond. Tonight’s Halloween culture is a case in point.

I was briefly at home between meetings at around 6pm — the time of day when most of the local kids decked out as dragons, fairies and pandas were out with their parents doing the trick or treat thing.

This is the first time I’ve ever had to encounter this custom first-hand. Trick or treat wasn’t a big thing in my community growing up in England. I don’t think I ever went around the neighborhood begging sweets, and I have only the scantest memories of putting on fancy dress. And in this country, until I moved to Denver three months ago, I’ve always lived in massive urban apartment buildings where you simply don’t have to deal with children brandishing plastic pumpkin containers demanding candy on October 31.

In my new reality as a homeowner in a leafy, family-oriented neighborhood, however, I was determined to get into the spirit of things. Though I stopped short of donning a fright wig and fangs, I went to the grocery store on my way home and bought a big bucket of chocolate buttons in festive colors to hand out to the local kids.

That turned out to be a mistake: Not being a parent myself and never having trafficked in Halloween treats before, how was I supposed to know that it’s illegal to hand out unwrapped confections to minors?

I only found this out when my friend Dan informed me, after I’d answered the door a couple of times and blithely shared my candy with crowds of eager small people, that the naked chocolate buttons that I was cradling in a bowl might lead to a lawsuit. “If the kids get sick, their parents might blame the unwrapped chocolate buttons,” Dan helpfully said.

I was incredulous.

When the doorbell rang a third time, I found myself standing on the stoop in front of a gaggle of children asking if I could speak to their parents who were standing in the shadows behind them. “Hello parents!” I said in my most be-nice-to-me-i’m-a-clueless-brit voice. “I’m from England. I don’t know anything about Halloween and I just found out that I’m not supposed to give unwrapped candy to your kids. But these chocolate buttons are all I have. I promise they’re not poisoned!” I said, emphasizing the point by shoving a few of the sugary morsels into my mouth.

I heard laughter from the shadows. My neighbor, Tica, stood on her stoop next door giggling. An adult in a cat costume finally came to the rescue. “I’m Tracy. Don’t worry, I trust you,” she said. The kids grabbed handfuls of chocolate, stuffed them into their pumpkin containers and disappeared into the night. One or two of them even managed to say thank you.

After repeating my performance three or four times every time the doorbell rang, I finally got fed up of making excuses for myself. I switched off the porch light and retreated to my kitchen where I sat in the dark with the remaining candy and a glass of Pinot noir.

Next year, it’ll be mini Mars bars firmly embalmed in shiny wrappers all the way.

It’s fascinating to see how arts institutions dedicated to the work of a single artist or movement work to develop their audiences and areas of interest. In the case of the Clyfford Still museum in Denver, finding ways to keep the work and legacy of a single 20th century American painter fresh is an ongoing challenge.

Beyond exhibiting the artist’s work from as many different angles as possible (how soon will they run out of angles, one can’t help but ask?) the museum regularly develops projects that are only tangentially connected to Still.

For example,  in the summer, I attended a baseball game at the Rockies Stadium with a bunch of museum fans. The link? Still was a big baseball fan. And in the coming weeks, the institution will host “DiSTILLed,” a handicrafts and cocktails night, and co-host a screening of the movie Persepolis with the SIE Film Center. I guess the artist liked a tipple while working on his needlepoint. And here’s how the museum is going about justifying its interest in screening Vincent Parronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s animated film based on Satrapi’s luminous autobiographical graphic novel about growing up in Iran in the midst of the Islamic Revolution: “After the film, join Bruce MacIntosh (Denver Comic Con and Comics for the Classroom), Stephen Brackett (the Flobots), and Vincent Piturro (chair of Metro State University film department) for a panel discussion that will address the symbiotic nature of the comic-strip format and the moving image, illuminating Still’s own process from drawing to painting and painting to drawing.” So there.

In the latest and most ambitious of its efforts to broaden and deepen people’s understanding of Still’s life and work, The Clyfford Still Museum just announced the launch of a research center. “Multidisciplinary in its approach, the CSMRC will develop programs and research encompassing the period in which Clyfford Still’s art flourished – circa 1920 through 1980,” the organization declared in a press release. “The Research Center will foster humanities-based engagement with the Clyfford Still Museum collections, its archives and the manifold ideas they embody.”

Envisaged as a series of projects rather than a physical space, the center will run a fellowship program, prepare and distribute scholarly publications, and conduct symposia and other public programs. The first research center-oriented event was a recent symposium organized by the museum which took place in New York.

The core audience for this new endeavor is the academic community — and as there are currently no art history PhD programs being offered in the state of Colorado, having a research center dedicated to this field goes some small way towards filling a hole in the local scholarship landscape.

However, as Dean Sobel, the museum’s director, explained to me on the phone, the fellowship program is being set up to attract not just art historians from universities, but also thinkers across many disciplines, from composers to philosophers to poets. “Clyfford Still was interested in ideas,” Sobel said. “We want to use our collections and facility as a vehicle to broaden knowledge not just about Still but about the humanities more broadly.”

The Clyfford Still Museum isn’t the only art institution to have a research wing attached to it. The National Gallery in Washington DC and the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, NM are other examples of art institutions outside of academia with a research mandate. But there aren’t many museums that choose to go in this direction. Sobel thinks this is because the larger museums, with their broader mandates and much more obviously public appeal, can’t so easily leverage something as focused as an academic program. “Many museums find it hard to do this kind of stuff because it doesn’t have much return on investment,” Sobel said.

The niche-iness of the Still Museum might give it an edge when it comes to developing ways to link the arts and the humanities. As Sobel put it: “What would seem like a luxury for a general museum, is possible for us.”

Every other week here in Colorado it seems there is news of Christo’s ongoing battle with opposition groups regarding the installation artist’s plan to drape six miles of the Arkansas River in translucent fabric. If given the green light, the installation will be in place for two weeks. But the process of making it happen has taken 21 years so far.

Christo loves to talk about how the endless protests and law suits involved in bringing his ambitious works to life are as much part of the artistic process as the end product. In an article for The Denver Post a few days ago, Christo is quoted as describing these battles as “invigorating.”

“We are not masochists, but we are enjoying the communication with so many varieties of people. Usually the art world is a small club of professionals.”

However, it turns out that the “communication” that Christo is interested in is rather one-sided.

At CPR, as mentioned in my last post about Dale Chihuly, I’m working on developing a segment entitled “Yes, But Is It Art?” The aim of the series is to cultivate a more holistic sense of how people perceive art than one usually gets from hearing or reading a single critic pontificating on a cultural topic.  My producer and I thought that the Christo debate might fit very well with our concept. The plan was to assemble a few experts including the artist, the lawyer who’s representing one of the main opposition groups, and an academic who specializes in studying large-scale landscape art installation projects.

The only trouble with the plan was Christo’s refusal to participate.

The artist was very happy to come in and do a solo interview. “Christo does not do group interviews, but would be happy to provide a one-on-one interview in the CPR studios,” an aide wrote to inform us.

We wrote back to explain that we weren’t interested in a one-on-one and that we wanted, rather, a group discussion in order to delve more deeply into the process Christo allegedly so prizes —  “the communication with so many varieties of people.”

But we were told no.

“As you know, discussion of the work (supportive and critical) is indeed part of the process and the art,” the aide wrote. “And, as the artist, Christo observes the dialogue but does not take part in it directly.”

It’s Christo’s prerogative to remain cool and aloof from the discussion, I suppose. But this attitude does seem disingenuous to me. The artist has created an amazing sandbox here. Why won’t he come play in it nicely with others?

Yesterday afternoon, I received a press release with the words “Breaking News” at the top of it. Had there been a huge explosion at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts? Were priceless works of French art stolen from the Denver Art Museum just days before the opening of the big Passport to Paris exhibition on Sunday?

No. It was a press release for an exhibition of glass art by Dale Chihuly that’s opening at the Denver Botanic Gardens next June.

Not only does this appear to be a fraudulent use of the term “Breaking News,” but it also worries me immensely that Coloradans might consider the opening of an exhibition by Chihuly to be something worth making a song and dance about — and nine months in advance, no less.

Now my quibble isn’t so much about Chihuly. Many people consider him to be a great artist and I’m not going to get into a debate about the merits of his work at this point,though I am hoping to interest him in appearing on a radio segment I’m developing at CPR entitled “Yes, But is It Art?” (The PR at the Botanic Gardens doubts that the artist will be interested in participating in this discussion, but says that Chihuly might well be up for “a regular preview interview.”)

The issue is to do with the provincial mentality that considers this to be news worth sharing in such an overblown way. Now some might say that Chihuly’s first exhibition outdoors in a Rocky Mountain setting is a sign of Colorado becoming more prominent on the national arts map. I would say that this isn’t the case. And making a fuss about it only makes us look more parochial.