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Weekend, February 14-15




Ideas

Love - After The Artists, Scientists Weigh In Is there a bigger theme in the history of art than love? Poets, playwrights, composers and artists have explored love from all sides. "Romance has seemed as inexplicable as the beauty of a rainbow. But these days scientists are challenging that notion, and they have rather a lot to say about how and why people love each other. Is this useful? The scientists think so." The Economist 02/13/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 7:51 am

Visual Arts

Stokcholm Museum Reopens After Building Ailments Force Closure It was devastating when, just three years after its new building had opened in 1998, Stockholm's National Museum of Modern Art had to close because of water and ventilation prolems. "Now, after two years of refurbishment and improvements, the Swedish National Museum of Modern Art is reopening on 14 February, with its building, designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, hopefully cured of all its ailments." The Art Newspaper 02/13/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 12:48 pm

Architects And The Public Imagination "Denver, like much of the rest of the country and even the world, obviously has become swept up in the swelling enthusiasm for good design, a trend reflected in everything from Target's sale of objects by name designers to blow-by-blow coverage of the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. Clearly, fueling part of this interest has been the rush in the past couple of decades by art museums to construct signature buildings by established and up-and-coming architects." Denver Post 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 11:45 am

Bostons' MFA Goes To Vegas Why is Bostons' Museum of Fine Arts doing, traveling a show to the casinos of Las Vegas? "What even the critics can't deny is the appeal of the paintings. So far, the Bellagio's Monet show has been a smash, drawing 18,000 people in the 10 days after its Jan. 30 opening. At that pace, and with its $15 ticket price, the MFA could earn even more than $1 million - the total figure hinges on attendance - by the time the show closes in September." Boston Globe 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 10:48 am

Music

In RoadTrip: Of Orchestras And Big-Name Soloists Violist Sam Bergman and the Minnesota Orchestra play the legendary Musikverein in Vienna: "When the marquee sports the name 'Joshua Bell,' you can be sure of a full house, but you can also be sure of an audience that has come exclusively to see Josh play, and you therefore have some work to do to convince them to take an interest in whatever else is on the program." RoadTrip (AJBlogs) 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 12:01 pm

Playing Around With What Beethoven Wrote Modern audiences are used to performances that try to get as close as possible to a composer's intentions. So it will likely be a shock when Leonard Slatkin performs Beethoven in versions as interpreted by Mahler. M"ahler, like many before and after him, simply filled in places where notes were missing. The range of most of the woodwind instruments had increased, too, so Mahler used the added notes to keep the flutes, say, from having to drop an octave for a note or two." The New York Times 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 9:15 am

Vienna Embraces Ozawa A year-and-a-half ago, Seiji Ozawa finished up 29 years leading the Boston Symphony, and headed for Vienna to direct the State Opera. "Ozawa seems energized by all the change. Some critics and musicians felt that he had overstayed his welcome in Boston, that 29 years was too long a marriage for any conductor and orchestra. He acknowledges that it was a long time, adding that his style is to work slowly and methodically. But now he finds himself living in an even more musical city, associated with two of Europe's great musical institutions. And already Vienna has adopted him as its own." The New York Times 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 9:09 am

A Met Legend Departs Last week, Joseph Volpe announced that he was stepping down as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His departure will end a remarkable 42-year association with the Met. "Improbably, that association took a Flatbush-born high school graduate with no advanced education, no musical training and scant feeling for opera from an entry-level job as an apprentice carpenter to the general manager's office in 1990. It is sometimes said of a hands-on chief executive who has worked his way to the top that he knows every nail in the place. This is really true of Mr. Volpe, who hammered quite a few nails into the place himself." The New York Times 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 9:00 am

Music Under Glass - In The Museums "Over the past decade, popular music has decisively joined visual art and science as a subject for museum treatment. Just in time for the midlife crisis of rock 'n' roll, advocates of popular music and chambers of commerce found common cause: suddenly, music was not a diversion or an embarrassment but an asset. And these museums promise visitors an irresistible package deal: a pilgrimage, a party and some painless education." The New York Times 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 8:46 am

Conductor Berates Audience, Musicians From The Stage Conductor Daniel Gatti and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra had just finished a performance in Naples, Florida and the audience was applauding, when Gatti quieted the crowd: "Gatti, 42, began by apologizing for the quality of the performance, explaining that the orchestra had been on tour for two weeks. Then, in heated, broken English, he berated everybody there - the presenters, the orchestra and the audience - for a full two to three minutes." Washington Post 02/14/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 8:18 am

Arts Issues

Americans For The Arts - How To Spend $80 Million In 2001 Americans for the Arts learned it was getting a bequest of between $80 million-$120 million. And what will AFA do with the money? "The first installment in January 2003 topped $3 million, and a comparable cheque arrived last month. The board is handling the funds with great caution. Newly established committees for investment and planning decided to put most of the income into an endowment to extend the value of the donation beyond 30 years, with a target of $100 million." The Art Newspaper 02/13/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 12:44 pm

Is This Who We Are? A new book paints an unflattering picture of Americans: According to statistics the author has collected, only 48 percent of American adults understand that the earth orbits the sun yearly. A mere 15 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Iraq or Israel on a labeled map, and 11 percent can't find the United States. Americans consume a ton of ice cream apiece in the course of a lifetime, spend more on fast food than on higher education, discard 20 billion diapers annually, and develop 9 square miles of rural land every day." Boston Globe 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 11:22 am

Theatre

Making Lear Work For Christopher Plummer The Stratford (Canada) Festival production of King Lear is much anticipated on Broadway, where's it has sold $2 million worth of tickets before opening. But there was one big hurdle in making the show work in New York. She show stars Christopher Plummer, 76, who "is only able to perform the emotionally and physically taxing role of Lear for five shows a week. It's a real stretch to make revenues match expenses when the whole company is being paid for eight shows a week but only performing five. "It was very clear that Christopher was not in a position to do more than five performances a week. The advantage is that Christopher is at that rare moment when he's able to do Lear." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 11:54 am

Publishing

Shakespeare In Flesh-And-Blood We don't know very much about Shakespeare the man, do we? "What I think is that literary scholars have played down the historical aspect of Shakespeare. They almost feel his biography doesn't matter, that he's a genius who lived outside time. He had a house and kids and wrote plays and we don't need to know anything else." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 12:06 pm

Amazon Outs Its Reviewers Last week, thanks to a technical glitch,Amazon.com's Canadian site revealed the actual names of customers who wrote reviews on the site. "The weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book — when they think no one is watching." The New York Times 02/14/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 8:25 am

We're Being Buried In Books! Each year more and more books are being published. "The most recent figures show that, in 2002, total output of new titles and editions in the United States grew by nearly 6 percent, to 150,000. General adult fiction exceeded 17,000 - the strongest category. Juvenile titles topped 10,000, the highest total ever recorded. And there were more than 10,300 new publishers, mostly small or self-publishers." Washington Post (HC) 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 7:48 am

Media

Acting In The Golden Age (Right Now) "It has long been an article of faith among movie lovers of all tastes that the present — any present — is but a pale shadow of the past." But critic A.O. Scott writes that there is mounting "evidence that we are living in an extraordinary period, one we will eventually look back upon as a golden age of screen acting." The New York Times 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 9:04 am

Rich: The Hypocrisy Of The SuperBowl Stunt The reactions of CBS, Michael Powell and the FCC, protesting parents' groups, MTV and just about everyone else complaining about Janet Jackson in the Superbowl halftime show are so hypocritical they're laughable, writes Frank Rich. "You can argue that Ms. Jackson is the only honest figure in this Super Bowl of hypocrisy. She was out to accomplish a naked agenda — the resuscitation of her fading career on the eve of her new album's release — and so she did." The New York Times 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 8:40 am

Note To The Music Biz: Locking Up Content Is Dumb At a time when most music and movie industry producers are introducing some kind of copy protection in their products, some observers predict that locking up content won't last. Instead, at some point producers will "realize that they'll make more money out of a flat fee model than by trying to force the world - particularly developing countries - to buy expensive content under lock and key." The Register 02/13/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 7:43 am

Dance

In Praise Of Ashton Frederick Ashton created the English ballet style. "Probably no other 20th Century choreographer rivals Balanchine for longevity, output and stylistic innovation. Both were born a century ago this year, both died in the 1980s and both boast incomparable legacies, masters of just about every aspect of their fields." Chicago Tribune 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 11:38 am

Altogether (Not Quite So) Different New York's annual Altogether Different festival has traditionally been a place where the latest young new experiment choreographers could show there work. But its focus has shifted, and the new generation of choreographers is wondering where the "experimental" disappeared. The New York Times 02/15/04
Posted: 02/15/2004 9:22 am


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