Restoring Baghdad's Culture "Baghdad may once have rivaled Rome as a symbol of urban splendor, but most of its historic landmarks are gone. Many of the uniform beige subdivisions and drab commercial buildings constructed in the last 50 years are crumbling — an apt symbol of the failures of modernization. The city's ornate palaces are painful reminders of the authoritarian rule of Saddam Hussein, who is now in American captivity. Coping with this architectural and cultural loss is clearly beyond the scope of responsibility of the U.S. occupying authority." Los Angeles Times 12/16/03
Posted: 12/16/2003 7:49 am
Beck's - Seeing The Future "A sculptor, a singer, and a painter were shortlisted yesterday for the Beck's Future Prize. For those who cherish the annual awards as the Where the Wild Things Are corner of the art world, it is some reassurance that Tonico Lemos Auad sculpts cuddly squirrels and lions out of carpet fluff and also draws on bananas; Susan Philipsz records songs and broadcasts them over public address systems; while Hayley Tompkins makes scribbled marks on scraps of school graph paper." The Guardian (UK) 12/16/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 8:53 pm
World's Most Endangered This year's list of 100 most endangered cultural monuments is out. "The 2004 list has some surprises. Antarctica appears for the first time. The polar caps may be melting, but surely protection can be found for Ernest Shackleton's expedition hut. The hut is infested with microbes. I can testify that the ruins of Ephesus, the ancient pilgrimage city with the Temple of Artemis, now in Turkey, are infested with tourists. I felt like a total pest when I visited that site six years ago. The place was crawling with us. The list also features sites that straddle national boundaries." The New York Times 12/16/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 8:38 pm
MoMA's $40 Million Buying Spree The Museum of Modern Art has bought $40 million worth of art as it builds its new $858 million home. "Most prominent among the acquisitions is "Diver," a drawing by Jasper Johns that is widely considered to be one of the most important works on paper of the 20th century. The museum said it had also bought several other seminal works by modern masters like Picasso and Francis Bacon." The New York Times 12/16/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 8:33 pm
Barnes Hearing Concludes - Pew makes Pitch For Move The Pew Charitable Trust s is unlikely to continue supporting the Barnes Collection if it is unable to move to downtown Philadelphia. Pew preseident Rebecca Rimel testified at a hearing to determine whether the Barnes should be allowed to break its founder's trust to move. Philadelphia Inquirer 12/12/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 6:29 pm
In Search Of Old Baghdad "Few cities in the world occupy as strong a hold over the collective imagination as Baghdad. Set at the crossroads between East and West, the city was one of the first great power centers of the Islamic world. Its name still conjures up a mix of images, from the rich intellectual heritage depicted in its ancient texts to the exotic fantasies scattered through the pages of the "Arabian Nights." Its emergence as a world capital marked the beginning of centuries of cultural dominance by the Middle East at a time when Europe was floundering through the Dark Ages. Today that legacy has understandably been pushed to the background." Los Angeles Times 12/14/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:45 pm
- When Baghdad Aspired To Modern Greatness There was a brief time in the mid-20th Century when Baghdad aspired to being rebuilt as an international city. "More construction took place in Baghdad during the second half of the 20th century than at any time since the Golden Age of the Abbasid dynasty came to a close nearly 750 years ago. Most of this new work was Modern in spirit and represented a radical break with Baghdad's past. Among the international architects with major projects here were Frank Lloyd Wright, then nearing the end of his career; Walter Gropius, a founder of the Bauhaus; and the Italian Modernist Gio Ponti. They were soon followed by a rising generation of Iraqi talents who sought to infuse Western architectural forms with a more local sensibility. Together, such architects transformed Baghdad into a modern city — one whose defining urban features were rooted in the cultural traditions of the West." Los Angeles Times 12/14/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:44 pm
- How Sadaam Rebuilt Baghdad Sadaam Hussein remade Baghdad. "Like other dictators of the past, Hussein saw himself as a great arbiter of taste, an architectural patron cast in the mold of a Cosimo di Medici. He was a familiar figure in architectural circles and on construction sites, where he would often sketch out his ideas on scraps of paper. The competitions Hussein sponsored attracted some of the world's most celebrated architects. His aim, he often claimed, was to reestablish Baghdad as one of the world's great architectural capitals." Los Angeles Times 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:43 pm
London's Shortage of Old Masters "The yawning gap between the best and the rest in the art market has rarely been wider than at last week’s Old Masters sales in London, where there was precious little of the former on offer." The Telegraph (UK) 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:41 pm
2003: Buildings Of Bombast Which were the great buildings of 2003? "Structural bombast and aesthetic razzmatazz were the order of the year. Blobby, amoeba-like buildings competed with wacky tours de force... The Guardian (UK) 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:31 pm
When Art Gets Too Big For Ideas The art commissioned for Tate Modern's giant turbine hall has been getting bigger and bigger. But is bigger really better? "Art that overwhelms, 'total immersion' art, invites suspicion. Some think it intellectually, ethically, and politically dubious. Big art is routinely called "fascistic" - after all, Hitler's architect Albert Speer dealt in mega-structures and the Nuremberg rally was a triumph of number and mass." The Guardian (UK) 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:25 pm
Why The WTC Memorial Will Be A Failure In the next few weeks a decision will be made on which memorial at the World Trade Center site will be built. "The decision will be hailed by the powers that be as a victory for the people, for the open process by which it was conducted, for democracy. It will also almost certainly be a failure. The eight designs under consideration are widely considered uninspiring, banal, needlessly complicated, unimaginative and insufficient to evoke the horror of Sept. 11. But if you believe the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which is overseeing the redevelopment of ground zero, they are the best that democracy can provide, and that ought to be good enough for anyone." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:20 pm
NY Subway Musicians Go To Korea New York subway musicians are a constan presence underground. One entrepreneur thought they would be a hit in the Seoul subway, which doesn't have performers. So she rounded up some players and flew them to Korea. "They were featured on Korean talk shows and news shows, and their faces were all over the papers. And the buzz only increased as the days passed. On the day of their second performance, the musicians arrived at GangNam station to find several hundred people sitting quietly on the floor, some with their own mats, waiting for the music to start. By the time the trip ended two weeks later, the five musicians were the toast of the town, featured in just about every newspaper, magazine and TV show of note." Newsday 12/16/03
Posted: 12/16/2003 8:49 am
San Jose Opera - Dreading A Move To A New Home Opera San Jose is supposed to move in September into a theatre renovated for $75 million. But the finances of getting into the building and living there scare the company. ``We are running frightened,'' general manager Irene Dalis said. For 20 years, she has looked forward to moving the company from the 515-seat Montgomery Theater to the California Fox, she said, ``and now I dread it.'' San Jose Mercury-News 12/12/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 6:21 pm
Orchestras - Back To The Past (And Stuck There) Why must orchestras present such a formal presence? "No wonder young people find this museum approach such a turn-off. Linked to the earthen rigidity of most mainstream concert programming, and the general predictability of the repertoire, the majority of weekly orchestral offerings in the Usher Hall or the Royal Concert Hall can have as much pull as a traditional Church of Scotland service. Come to think of it, the audience profile in both cases is about the same - elderly and growing thin on the ground. Surely it’s time to freshen things up, bring our orchestras into the modern age and apply the creative touch to more than just the sound of the music." The Scotsman 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 5:24 pm
NY City Opera Leadership Changes Horses The 80-year-old chairman of New York City Opera, Irwin Schneiderman, is stepping down from the job. He's "leaving at a crucial moment for City Opera, which desperately wants a home of its own, having shared the New York State Theater for 38 years with the New York City Ballet. The company has long complained that the theater was acoustically unfit for opera." The New York Times 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 5:05 pm
What Happened To Korea's "Age Of Culture?" When he came to power last February, South Korea's new President Roh Moo-hyun declared that the 21st Century would be the age of culture and that he would help make it happen. But "like so many other quotes taken from the outspoken chief of nation, the depth of commitment to actually materializing his rhetoric remains questionable, at least after the administration's unproductive first 10-months of hollow debates, confusions and scarce achievements in cultural policies." Korea Herald 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:35 pm
Stratford Signs Exec Director To 2015 Ontario's Stratford Festival (one of Canada's largest arts organizations) has signed executive director Antoni Cimolino to a contract extension that runs until 1015. "Under Cimolino's stewardship, ticket sales since 1998 have increased from 523,000 to more than 600,000 and the festival has been in a budget surplus in each year of his administration. The operating budget has increased from $34-million to $51-million annually." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/16/03
Posted: 12/16/2003 7:42 am
Theatre U Why should someone go to a university theatre program in Texas rather than work at a proper theatre? Greg Leaming, artistic director of Southern Methodist University's theatre program says his program can do things other theatres can't. "There's no reason why a person can't decide to go to the theater and say, 'Let's go to SMU.'We have the resources to do larger things than professional theaters can afford to tackle these days, and do them well. We just have to keep the bar raised good and high." Dallas Morning News 12/16/03
Posted: 12/16/2003 7:21 am
Killing Books "If books are not the most perishable products of human civilization, they have, throughout recorded history, attracted the homicidal attentions of every conquering army. In large-scale versions of the penalty the Romans called damnatio memoriae, a punishment for individuals found guilty of committing crimes against the state which involved erasing every reference—whether on stone, in a monument or on parchment— to the person in question, invaders have settled not just for mass murder of the local citizenry, but have indulged in the wholesale disappearance of every written trace of a culture (as the Taliban did to non-fundamentalist Afghans), a language (as the Normans did to the Saxons), a people (as the Romans did to the Etruscans)." New York Observer 12/09/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 7:27 pm
Rings Wins "Big Read" Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has won the BBC's Big Read poll for the UK's most popular book. "The trilogy won 174,000 votes, 23% of the poll. The other main contender going into Saturday night was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which won 135,000 votes. Philip Pullman's metaphysical trilogy of children's books, His Dark Materials, came third with 63,000." BBC 12/14/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 6:06 pm
- Dismissing The Hobbit (But He's Still Around) Some critics are hailing the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy as a great masterpiece. But as books, the Tolkien project failed to impress literary critics of the time. "The Lord of the Rings must be one of the most comprehensively dismissed trilogies ever written. Critics have queued up since its publication nearly 50 years ago to denounce it. But JRR Tolkien’s story has outlived one generation of critics, and will certainly outlive another." The Scotsman 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 5:20 pm
Library Riles Patrons Over Plans To Sell Treasure The Providence Athenaeum library in Rhode Island is 250 years old, "a vestige of the days when America's settlers created private lending libraries because public ones had yet to be invented." But the Athenaeum has often spent more money than it has taken in, and "with a drop in stock market returns, the board decided to sell off the prize of its collection, a complete poster-size folio of Audubon's 'Birds of America,' valued at as much as $7 million. Now the birds are at the center of a raucous battle between the people who run the library and the people who use it." The New York Times 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 5:09 pm
World's "Biggest" Book In this season of "bests" lists, how about a "biggest" accomplishment? "Guinness World Records has certified that "Bhutan," a photographic journey across that Himalayan country, is the world's largest published book. It measures 5-by-7 feet when opened, and many of its dazzling photographs are full-page. The book is also among the priciest. Each hand-bound copy costs $10,000." Boston Globe 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:10 pm
Pop Goes The Culture Pop culture is everywhere. TV is pop culture. Ergo, there's more and more TV about pop culture. "The extent to which pop culture has become the focus of more and more TV networks is undeniable. It's the nature of it. Pop culture is the stuff everybody is talking about, and if everybody is talking about it, networks are naturally going to want to find programming that taps into that." Dallas Morning News 12/12/03
Posted: 12/16/2003 7:30 am
American TV's Longest-Running Shows What are the 20 longest-running shows on American television? More or less the same as they were last year. Longevity means never having to say goodbye. New York Daily News 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 5:02 pm
Iraq's First Movie In Ten Years "An arts school dropout is directing Iraq's first feature-length movie in more than a decade, shooting it with film he "liberated" from Saddam Hussein's culture ministry during the looting that followed the dictator's fall." Charlotte Observer (AP) 12/15/03
Posted: 12/15/2003 4:14 pm
