Visual Arts The Barnes - Art Held Hostage A new book chronicles the decline of the Barnes Collection's fortunes. With a collection valued at $6 billion, the Barnes today finds itself broke and unable to pay its bills on its own. Here's the story of how it finds itself in this predicament... The New York Times 05/11/03 Posted: 05/11/2003 9:14 am In Opposition To Modern Art The founder of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow has little use for modern art. "I have met plenty of people who have told me that I ought to like modern art. There is some place for 'ought' in life, but none at all in art; art is a gift, not a duty. A benighted view of art has a stranglehold on the few who choose what little art we are aloud to see. And the public acquiesce, because what else can they compare it with? It is one of the most pernicious myths of modern art that we have discovered the great art of our age when, in fact, we have hardly begun to look for it." The Times (UK) 05/08/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 2:19 pm Guggenheim Closing Vegas Outpost "The Venetian Resort said yesterday it is closing its Guggenheim Museum, ending a high-profile commercial effort to deliver culture to the gambling masses. The museum's only show featured the history of the motorcycle as art." Los Angeles Times 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 2:10 pm Sorting Out What's Missing At Iraqi Museum Reports of what's missing from Iraq's National Museum after looters got done have been contradictory. "The number of items stolen during and after the war from one of the world's premier collections of early-civilization antiquities appears now to be much smaller than first suspected. Thousands of pieces, however, are missing. Although many of the thefts are being attributed to looters, some appear almost certainly to be the work either of insiders or experts." Los Angeles Times 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 1:35 pm Western Scholars, Curators Offer To Help Iraq Museum Concerned archeologists, scholars, conservators and arts administrators in the West have been meeting in recent weeks to try to find ways to help Baghdad's National Museum, which was looted in April. There still isn't enough information about losses at the museum to take definitive definitive action, but "we are also very concerned that the inventory of the museum's collection be done by individuals with academic and museum qualifications, not the military, and that guards and other people who worked in the museums be rehired." Los Angeles Times 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 1:30 pm Looking For Canadian Art Sarah Milroy goes looking for what's new in Canadian art across the country. "Art schools in Canada pump out more than 23,000 graduates a year, and a zippy, techno-friendly bunch they are too. After a few days on the trail, though, I started to realize that most of the best artists I spoke to, or heard about, shared a common tendency: an interest in the disposable, the futile, the abject, the slightly unravelled." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 12:39 pm Music A Good Reason To Tour "For most of the last two weeks, North Dakota's major cities, and nooks and crannies all around, resonated to the strains of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington and its individual members. The visit was part of the orchestra's American Residencies program, which has so far consisted of 11 tours to 12 different states over a dozen years." The New York Times 05/11/03 Posted: 05/11/2003 9:05 am Previously: What's The Point Of An Orchestra Tour? The San Francisco Symphony is off to Europe on tour. Robert Commanday wonders why? "A decade or two ago, the received rationale was that such tours were necessary for the promotion of record sales. Whatever truth there was in that — and no convincing evidence was ever offered — that reason certainly doesn’t hold today in today’s marginalized record market. It was also argued that the orchestra as collective instrument benefitted from the repeated performances. Again, that might have been true 20 or 30 years ago, but the current level of today’s orchestral ensemble is not going to be significantly heightened by touring." San Francisco Classical Voice 05/06/03 What Makes A Great Piano? "Yes, pianists grouse that Steinways are not what they used to be. Yes, pianists ascribe whatever faults they found in whatever Steinway they just played to every Steinway. And no, the majority would never play anything but. Steinway knows all this. Every new piano that rolls out of the Steinway & Sons factory — in Astoria, Queens, next to oil tanks that block the view of the Rikers Island jails — is an attempt to refute the notion that the only good Steinway is an old Steinway." The New York Times 05/11/03 Posted: 05/11/2003 7:24 am The Music Critic Problem - Hearing It On Radio Is Better What's wrong with contemporary music criticism? "The customary practice is that anyone can be approached for his or her opinion on the latest film, play, novel or exhibition. Behind the convention is an ideology: that the less you know about the subject in advance the better, since your ignorance connects you to the audience." On radio, however, one can hear and compare the music and be guided by someone who knows what they're talking about... The Guardian (UK) 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 12:53 pm Remembering The World's Greatest Jazz Concert Ever "It has been called 'the greatest jazz concert ever.' On May 15, 1953 - 50 years ago this Thursday - alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bud Powell, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach assembled at Massey Hall in Toronto for their first and only time as a unit..." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 12:42 pm Florida Philharmonic Ceases Operations The Florida Philharmonic has laid off "all but five of their 111 employees and suspended operations Friday, saying the symphony had run out of money. The Philharmonic's 80 musicians and the rest of the orchestra's employees received their final paychecks Friday, two weeks before the scheduled end of the season. Eight concerts were canceled." Miami Herald 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 12:33 pm Region Without Orchestra The shutdown of the Florida Philharmonic leaves South Florida without a major symphony orchestra for the first time in decades. The Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale) 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 12:15 pm Previously: Florida Phil Prepares For Bankruptcy The Florida Philharmonic prepares to go out of business. "The Philharmonic changed the locks on its rehearsal hall Wednesday and faxed a legal notice to the governor's office and mayors of the municipalities where it performs, advising officials of its intention to file for bankruptcy. That notice stated that the Philharmonic "has developed plans to permanently shut down" and that "employment separations are expected to commence on or about May 9." The Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale) 05/08/03 People FBI Investigated Aaron Copland For 20 Years The FBI was convinced that composer Aaron Copland was a Communist and spent "two decades and more monitoring Copland's whereabouts, analyzing his comments and taking note of his friends and associates. The result is an inch-thick FBI file, replete with blacked-out passages, released to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from late 1997. The papers make clear that the government's interest in Copland did not end with his 1953 testimony at Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist hearings - transcripts of which were released this month." New Jersey Online (AP) 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 2:07 pm Has Ingmar Bergman Made His Last Film? Has Ingmar Bergman made his last film? "The last day, the way he was, and the way he said goodbye, he didn't only say goodbye because the film was over. He said goodbye in a way I knew meant 'this is the last time I leave a film set as a film director'." BBC 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 1:48 pm Theatre Acting Retreat Becomes Historical Center Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne werre America's greatest theatre couple. In the early 1900s the Lunts built an estate in Wisconsin as a retreat, "filling it with treasures of antiques and decorative arts, and luring such luminaries as Laurence Olivier and Noel Coward to rest here outside the spotlights' glare. Now it has joined the ranks of Wisconsin's historic home-museums. Upwards of 20,000 visitors a year are expected to tour the Lunts' estate, which has been turned into a world-class center for theater history and arts. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 05/11/03 Posted: 05/11/2003 9:17 am Publishing When Book Clubs Need Help The very words 'book club' can bring to mind the peace of a bright living room, where women balance plates on their knees, listening eagerly to one another's opinions, not letting anything distract them from serious literary discussion. The reality is something different. As in any leaderless group, people do what they want: show up or not, read the book or not, talk the entire time or sit mute, or ignore the book and do a lot of just plain catching up with one another." Enter the paid book club facilitator. San Francisco Chronicle 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 1:57 pm Media What Happened To TV Arts Programming... The BBC will attempt to launch new arts programming later this year. Good, but "why should arts television need relaunching? Whatever happened to the arts on television? What happened was, in part, a loss of nerve. This has taken various forms. First, expelling the arts from the main channels. We have seen the almost complete disappearance of the arts from BBC1." Second, the tone of TV arts shows in recent years has shifted dramatically. "The heyday of arts television was the product of an era with different values and assumptions, reflected in several great landmark series." The Guardian (UK) 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 1:48 pm Where Are The Romantic Leading Men? "Romantic comedy used to mean grown-up sex appeal, dazzling wit and fizzy, sparring dialogue, typically delivered at a breakneck pace." Not anymore. And why not? A lack of male actors who are good at it. "Few seem to want to risk playing romantic leads, and one suspects few could pull it off. In part, this is because film acting styles have changed over the past 30 or 40 years. The long shadow of Method acting hangs over actors today. Men need to look deep inside themselves to plumb their characters' motivation; it's a serious business, and hard to square with classic romantic comedy, which calls for deadpan devilry, a barely controlled madness, and a willingness to don a tuxedo and look suave and silly simultaneously. Who's up to it?" The Telegraph (UK) 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 12:18 pm Increasingly - TV Execs Negotiate With Themselves For Shows Increasingly, American TV networks buying shows are the same people who produce the shows, and the complicated relationship is changing the rules of the business. "Such incestuous discussions are increasingly common in the industry, where a handful of giant companies occupy both sides of the negotiating table, produce much of the programming on the air and increasingly play financial hardball to offset their ratings losses. The squeeze is being felt not just by talent but also by the agents and managers who represent them. Independent producers, meanwhile, have been pushed to near-extinction. Only 11% of last year's new prime-time programs came from companies other than major studios - and most of those were low-cost reality shows." Los Angeles Times 05/10/03 Posted: 05/10/2003 11:25 am Dance Music That Makes You Move John Adams on why is music is good for dancing: "I feel that what makes my music different from a lot of contemporary or avant-garde work is that there is always a sense of the body in it. I think that was largely missing in so much of the cerebral contemporary music that started with Schoenberg and was so pervasive from the 60's until the 80's. I never had any interest in that kind of composition; I always conceived of music as something that comes from the physical being, from one's body." The New York Times 05/11/03 Posted: 05/11/2003 9:08 am