One Store Fits All? How is it that everyone on earth seems to be happy shopping at Walmart? "Eight out of ten American households shop at Wal-Mart at least once a year. Worldwide, more than 100m customers visit Wal-Mart stores every week. Photographs circulated over the internet and purporting to come from the Exploration Rover show NASA's recent discovery of a Wal-Mart on Mars. The mathematics of big numbers suggests that Wal-Mart's growth must slow. Amazingly, the opposite appears to be happening." The Economist 04/16/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 7:21 am
The Curious Mindest That Puts Brooklyn On The Fringes "When people talk about N.Y. as the cultural capital of the world, they usually mean Manhattan. The rich institutions in the other four boroughs live marginalized lives, always clamouring for a sliver of mindshare and deeply resenting the inertia that keeps people stuck on the island in the middle of the city. Take the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Built more than a century ago as an expression of the manifest dreams of Brooklyn, which was still its own city, at 560,000 square feet it is the second-largest museum of art in the city, and one of the largest in the United States, with an outstanding collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 7:04 am
Liechtenstein Museum Reopens For First Time Since WWII The Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna recently reopened. "The collection is one of the largest and most valuable private collections in the world, and belongs to the royal family of Liechtenstein, the tiny country wedged between Austria and Switzerland. The museum closed on the eve of World War II in 1938 and since then the artwork has remained hidden behind castle walls in Liechtenstein. Until its closure the museum was regarded as a must-see among Vienna's cultural wealth." Chicago Tribune 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 6:33 am
Close Quarters - Art All Around Washington DC's Renwick Gallery has hung paintings in the way of old - stacked one atop another, cheek by jowl. "They knew how to blow minds back then. And their trick still works. Paintings palpitate inches apart, in skylit orgies of imagery that revives the now-forgotten aesthetics of the sublime, in particular the sublime of being overwhelmed and transported by sheer mass: by Niagara Falls, by world's fairs or by molding-encrusted public rooms crammed with oil paintings -- everything that the puritans of modernism would oppose." Washington Post 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 9:42 pm
Designing A Museum: A Campaign Of Ideas Winning a high-profile competition to design a public building is as much a campaign as a proposal of ideas. Mary Voelz Chandler observes the process of choosing an architect for the new Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. "It's not a comparison of negatives, but a comparison of positive matches with the organization's goals. All these people could deliver a beautiful building." Rocky Mountain News 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:46 pm
A Bad Row At London's British Academy "Reports this week of a conflict at the Royal Academy between the head of exhibitions, Norman Rosenthal, and the secretary, Lawton Fitt, may be the most serious crisis a British gallery has faced since 1988, when an inexperienced director at the V&A caused an international outcry by dismissing five of the museum's senior keepers." Richard Dorment observes that "the president and council of the Royal Academy would be mad even to contemplate sacking a man of Rosenthal's stature. Is it possible that they have forgotten what he has done for the Academy - or, for that matter, done for this country?" The Telegraph (UK) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:22 pm
How Is The Value Of Art Decided? What makes a Van Gogh painting worth $82.5 million and another good painting worth millions and millions less? "The art world has capitalized on the fact that most people believe they can't really understand why a work of art is worth what the market is asking. It helps to realize that the process of setting value is different for dead artists such as Van Gogh, whose works now trade more like commodities, and living artists, whose worth is still being determined, particularly if they are young." Christian Science Monitor 04/16/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:19 pm
Getting In To Affordable Art The Affordable Art Show movement is taking off. The shows are "now a regular event in London and New York and six months ago he tested the water in Sydney, attracting 13,000 visitors and selling more than $4 million worth of art. Now it's Melbourne's turn, with the Royal Exhibition Building playing host to works from 120 galleries, 500 artists - and nothing more than $5000." The Age (Melbourne) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:11 pm
Modern Music In Modern Art "For whatever reason – and speculation could fill many a book – modern visual art is far more widely accepted than modern classical music. Exhibitions of Picasso and Matisse draw huge crowds, and even hotels mount abstract art on their walls. But mainstream modern music by the likes of Stravinsky, Poulenc and Janácek, some of it nearly a century old, remains a hard sell. Genuinely atonal music, from Arnold Schoenberg to Elliott Carter – the equivalent, you might say, of abstract expressionism in painting – isn't popular even among highly trained professional musicians. Surrounded by modern painting and sculpture, though, modern music can make more sense." Dallas Morning News 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 6:36 am
A Crescendo Off A Single Piano Note? Lars Vogt is a pianist who seems to believe the impossible. "Power, he says, 'has nothing to do with the force of hitting a key. You see some pianists attack; that's what makes the sound ugly and not resonant,' he says, demonstrating with a welter of loud but indistinct notes. 'If the fingers are very close to the keys, you always have a feeling of drawing the sound out - rather than pushing the sound into the key. You can be a lot more intense in the playing while still making the piano sing.' Sit down and try to do it yourself, and you realize that much of Vogt's success comes from his head rather than his hands. He imagines the sound and wills it into being." Philadelphia Inquirer 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:28 pm
Scottish Opera On The Line "Scottish Opera has, for reasons hard to discern, acquired pariah status. No one will speak up for it. Less than a year after the triumphant conclusion of its Ring Cycle, generally held to be one of the great post-war Wagner productions, it is cast in the role of profligate - elitist, unpopular, and irrelevant. Apparently unwilling to conform to the demands of contemporary cultural policy, it has retreated into the ranks of the untouchables, tarred with the great New Labour crime of being non-inclusive. The time has come, say its critics, to shrug it off, to clear it from the desk, to consign it to outer darkness. Except that no one can quite bring themselves to say so." The Scotsman 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:08 pm
The Battle For Florida The state of Florida slashed arts funding last year. But arts supporters were cheered in the past few weeks when members of the legislature proposed a cultural trust fund that would provide long term funding for the arts, restoring last year's cuts. But Governor Jeb Bush has been throwing cold water on the plan: "The priorities of the future should be established by future governors and legislatures. That's the general principle that I support and believe in.'' Miami Herald 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 7:08 am
Arts Against Bush "Anti-administration politics are busting out of their usual homes in music, books, fine art and standup comedy, and crossing easily over into feature films, theatre, and even mainstream television shows in the run-up to this November's U.S. presidential election. At the same time, many of the flag-waving, administration-friendly movies that Hollywood rushed to produce in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, either foundered in development or are bombing at the box office, including the current The Alamo." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 6:54 am
Aussie Arts - Flinging Open The Doors Australia's most venerable stuffy cultural institutions have found new life in the past decade. "Some call it "a renaissance", others "a revolution". Either way, many of our most august institutions have reinvented themselves. The walls that once protected their vast collections of artefacts and books from the ravages of the outside world have become porous. Why? In short, they have been rejuvenated by the internet." Sydney Morning Herald 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:34 pm
Old Culture War Fears Bedevil Arts Funding (Still) The failure of a major initiative to fund arts in Cleveland came down to some very old issues left over from the culture wars of the 1990s: "The reluctance to approve government-administered money for the arts might be due to the two deep-rooted and opposing fears that the Mapplethorpe battle caused: Would the grants pay for art that the public finds incomprehensible, unattractive, obscene or blasphemous? And would the government place restrictions on artists' freedom of expression as a direct or indirect condition of the grants?" The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 6:52 pm
Globe-Trotting Nagano Conductor Kent Nagano is suddenly the man of the moment. "Nagano, 52, was in the news last month when the Montreal Symphony Orchestra put an end to weeks of rumors and officially announced that he would become the orchestra's music director starting with the 2006-07 season. In February, the Bavarian State Opera named him to succeed Zubin Mehta as general music director, also beginning in 2006-07. He is currently music director of the Los Angeles Opera, Berlin's Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and the Berkeley (Calif.) Symphony Orchestra, a post he has held for more than 25 years." Chicago Sun-Times 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 6:38 am
Two Decades Of AIDS And Theatre In the past 20 years an astonishing number of plays have been influenced by the AIDS epidemic. "With all the loss, it would be a mistake to ignore the astonishing theater that has grown in the dark soil of cataclysm. We can almost put our arms around a definable body of AIDS dramatic literature that has energized the theater in the years between the first "Normal Heart" and this one." Newsday 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 6:45 am
A Play About The Great Critic Kenneth Tynan was one of the great theatre critics of the 20th Century. "Now Tynan, the brilliant writer who made his name on The Observer in the 1950s and helped to launch a new tradition of stagecraft in Britain, is about to become the subject of a Royal Shakespeare Company play." The Observer (UK) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:02 pm
Getting Off On Off-Broadway Where's the interesting theatre in New York? "Everyone knows that 99 percent of the most interesting work is happening someplace other than on Broadway. Indeed, on any given night, more than 40,000 people are attending the theater somewhere in New York City, and about 14,000 of them are parked at one of New York's nearly 300 off-Broadway playhouses." Denver Post 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 6:57 pm
Denver's Library Saloon Tradition According to the Hennen's American Public Library Rating index, between 1999 and 2001, the Denver Public Library was America's No. 1 library. But budget cuts last year have closed the library one day a week and forced other cutbacks. Does this mean the city will have to return to its past, when its first libraries were located in saloons? Rocky Mountain News 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 6:29 am
University Buys Murdoch Library The University of Surrey has bought the personal library of writer Iris Murdoch. "The collection of more than 1,000 books - many of them with her own remarks in the margins - surrounded and influenced her from 1952, when she began writing the first of her 26 novels, until a few years before she died of Alzheimer's disease in 1999." The Observer (UK) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 7:05 pm
TV Commercials - From Rage To Oblivion People are reported to watch 714 commercials a week, or 37,000 a year, yet it is difficult to think of five of them offhand. For a decade or so, watching ads was as fun as joining the kind of religious cult that plays heavy-metal albums backward, laboriously noting the various shout-outs to Beelzebub. Such fun insists that pop culture is a game run by evil, Orwellian masterminds, who can't fool us! If a certain innocence predated our almost insane distrust of the advertising industry, then this same distrust has now melted into ennui and fatigued resignation. If any of you have ever lived near a smelting plant or airport, you understand perfectly this process, from novelty to rage to obliviousness." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 6:58 am
Reinventing Scottish Ballet Ashley Page took over Scottish Ballet a year ago as the company relaunched itself as a modern dance company. In that time, he's reinvented everything. "Page is reclaiming the past while updating the repertoire with his own works, curator as well as creator. How Scotland reacts to this policy has yet to be determined. The Festival Theatre was by no means full, though Edinburgh audiences are notoriously wary of Glasgow-based culture, and Scottish Ballet has a damaged reputation still to repair." The Observer (UK) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/19/2004 6:40 am
A Martha Graham Story The Martha Graham Dance Company is in residence in New York once again. "The Graham legend, a mythology in its own right, contends that she combined the Puritan and the sensualist in her makeup; ostensibly this made her an authority of sorts on forbidden games. Today, forty years after the premiere of Circe, its would-be sexy parts seem dopey to the point of embarrassment." Seeing Things (AJBlogs) 04/18/04
Posted: 04/18/2004 9:40 pm
