Images Of War, And Of A National Disgrace The photos that emerged from Iraq last week - showing American soldiers exulting next to naked Iraqi prisoners forced to adopt humiliating poses - are a disturbing piece of visual evidence that America is its own worst enemy, says Philip Kennicott, and only the stark reality of a photograph was able to bring that fact home to us. "These photos, we insist, are not us. But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals... [but] great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals... Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours." Washington Post 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:49 am
I'll Take Three Memories To Go... The human mind is a mysterious thing. Or is it? "Memory-improving and memory-deleting medicines may be available within five to 10 years. More than 40 drugs aimed at improving memory are currently going through clinical trials with the US Food and Drug Administration." Will there come a day when what we remember is the product of our own science? BBC 05/04/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 5:50 pm
A Week's Worth of Picasso A complete sketchbook, containing 26 separate works from a 1970 album of watercolors by Pablo Picasso, is going on display in New York this week. "The full book from the collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen was carefully unbound for framing, and will be reassembled for sale at $3.5 million. Such sketchbooks are very rare, as most belong to the Picasso family." The entire album was created in a single week, and reveals a deeply personal side of Picasso's late work. Boston Globe 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 5:56 am
Gehry vs. The TechnoGeeks MIT's new computer science building is a thing of beauty, "a gleaming 440,000-square-foot foundry for genius created by the world's most famous designer of buildings. The Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences is the latest CAD-spun, holy-shit wonder from Frank Gehry. So all systems go? Ready for liftoff? Not exactly." The technicians, engineers, and other tech geeks who will inhabit the place seem totally nonplussed by the whole building, labeling it "silly." After all, to the technical mind, there is no real reason for a building to look the way that Gehry's mind-bending structures inevitably do. Can logic and art coexist at MIT? Wired Magazine 05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 5:16 am
MoMA's Modern Museum (For The Art) While museums the world over have gone on a binge of commissioning trophy buildings by famous architects, the Museum of Modern Art is going with basic modernism (at $425 million). "A museum is not architecture, and it is not a collection. It is both. A museum, in other words, should not compete with its art. The midtown Modern, scheduled to open in late November after being closed for two and a half years, is 630,000 square feet of straight walls, floors and ceilings with no obtrusive columns or dead-end hallways. It is a building with a harmonic precision." The New York Times 05/05/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 11:11 pm
Brooklyn Museum's New Face The Brooklyn Museum is projecting a new face to the world. "Arnold L. Lehman, the museum's waggish, enterprising director, is emphatic about wanting to 'open the museum up.' He's trying to make it more like a town square than a temple. This sounds beneficent. But remember, nowadays everywhere you go is like a town square; a museum has the singular, sometimes transporting virtue of being a place where you can leave the group and immerse yourself in the richness and mystery of the group mind. Nevertheless, to those who might think his ideas are faulty, Lehman bluntly replies, 'I don't care.' Under his leadership, the museum has increased attendance and reinstalled the collection in showily painted spaces. Sometimes the results are illuminating, other times infuriating." Village Voice 05/04/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 10:55 pm
The Iraq Musem - One Year Later "One year after looters stole some of its most prized antiquities, the Iraq (news - web sites) Museum in Baghdad is undergoing a top-to-bottom restoration that its leaders hope will make it one of the premier museums and research centers in the world. The project is being funded by donations from around the world and is not likely to be completed for at least two years." USAToday 05/04/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 10:46 pm
- Rebuilding Iraq Museums "The Iraq National Museum could be ready to open in a few months. Physically the building could be opened. The construction work is done. But we wouldn’t want to do that until the security contract for physical improvements and upgrades is done. It’s up to the Iraq Museum staff to decide when the security situation permits reopening, and how much time they want to put into installing the gallery. Saddam would say, ‘Have the galleries installed in one month for my birthday.’ Now they have time to think about the arrangement." The Art Newspaper 04/30/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 10:42 pm
Banner Year For Opera in Toronto The Canadian Opera Company has released the numbers on its just-completed season, declaring 2003-04 to be one of the company's best years ever. 114,000 people attended COC productions during the season, bringing in $8 million of gross revenue, a 14% jump over 2002-03. Additionally, subscription sales were up 24%, and are already strong for next season. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:38 am
Toronto Music School Raising Money By The Bushel Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music is more than halfway to its $60 million fundraising goal after announcing a new round of $12 million in donations. The money will go towards a major expansion of the school, including a 1000-seat concert hall. Another announcement is expected in June, which should bring the RCM to 75-80% of goal. The campaign has been so successful that the school recently added $10 million to its goal, and redrew the expansion plans to include more studio and rehearsal space. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:33 am
Valkyries at Glastonbury The Glastonbury Festival is not where you would generally expect to find fans of Wagner's Ring Cycle, but the UK rock fest is giving Brunhilde a chance anyway. This June, the English National Opera will travel to Glastonbury with 91 musicians and 11 soloists to perform the third act of Wagner's "The Valkyries" before an audience of better than 100,000 fans, most of whom likely do not fit the standard profile of the opera enthusiast. For the ENO, it's a chance to reach out to an untapped (and young) audience; for the festival, it's just one more way to maintain its reputation as quirky and daring. BBC 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 5:25 am
Anything For A Buck With legal music downloading services like iTunes being judged as unqualified successes in the digital marketplace, you would think that the recording industry might finally be coming around to the notion that offering consumers a good deal on pop music is an effective way to build customer loyalty and increase revenue. But industry executives apparently aren't satisfied with the existing model: not only have they consistently resisted efforts to introduce creative pricing into the download business, they seem determined to raise the standard per-song download cost as quickly as possible. Wired 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 5:06 am
Recording Companies To Pay $50 Million Royalty Settlement To Musicians Recording companies have made a settlement with thousands of musicians to pay outstanding royalties. "The settlement, which amounted to nearly $50 million, was the result of a two-year investigation that found the world's largest recording companies had failed to maintain contact with many artists and writers and had stopped making required payments to them." The companies offered "an array of explanations like `we didn't really pay close attention,' and none were persuasive legally." The New York Times 05/05/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 6:21 pm
Monster Mashup (Taking The Mashup Challenge) "For some time, DJs - at first in England and later in the United States and other countries - have been developing a new style of remix, known as mashups, in which two songs are melded together. Often, the resulting track features the melody of one song and the vocals of another. Until recently, mashups had been the province of underground DJs, in part because those doing the remixing hardly ever had permission from the original artists to do so." But now, David Bowie has issued a mashup challenge... Wired 05/04/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 5:57 pm
Fire Destroys Southern California Arts Colony A Southern California fire Sunday night destroyed Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, founded in 1979 in the foothills of Palomar Mountain. "The fire destroyed valuable antiques once owned by the colony's late founders Ellen and Robert Dorland, including a Steinway grand piano believed to have been played by renowned Russian pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff." San Francisco Chronicle (AP) 05/04/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 6:16 pm
Chappelle's World It seems a bit much to call Dave Chappelle's comedy "ground-breaking." After all, Chappelle is no Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor, and he lives and a works in an era when comedy has busted out of the world of grimy basement clubs and onto TV screens worldwide. Still, what Chappelle is doing with his profane and ridiculous show on Comedy Central is changing the face of the network, and for the first time, bringing black viewers to a channel usually considered the province of white college students, Jon Stewart fans, and aging stoners. Chicago Tribune 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:12 am
Dodging The Glass Ceiling Marin Alsop is getting a bit tired of talking about the whole "female conductor" thing. After all, the 47-year-old outgoing music director of the Colorado Symphony is in great demand worldwide as a guest conductor for some of the world's greatest orchestras, and she's achieved bona fide stardom in the UK. And besides, isn't the classical music world too enlightened to still engage in petty sexism when a clearly talented conductor is on the podium? Maybe. But the fact that Alsop's name still hasn't made the short list for any of the major US openings in recent years suggests that there may still be some misogyny lurking in the wings. The New York Times 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 5:45 am
The World's Most Active Art Collector "Sheikh Saud Al Thani, cousin of the Emir of Qatar, is the world’s most active collector of art and the market’s biggest spender. For the past decade, Sheikh Saud has moved through the market like a whirlwind, collecting voraciously in a huge range of fields." Now he's building five museums. The Art Newspaper 04/30/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 11:46 pm
Shakespeare on the Lake "ShakespeareWorks, an organization that has brought the Bard's work to Toronto schools for several years, is raising $1.5-million to build a tent theatre at Ashbridge's Bay, in the east end of the city." The project is modeled on Vancouver's successful summer Shakespeare series, and the company's inaugural season kicks off in June. But concerns remain about promised federal funding which has yet to materialize, and the season will likely launch with barely enough cash on hand to meet expenses. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:24 am
Chicago Theater's Amateur Night "For the first time ever, Victory Gardens Theater's Chicago Stories benefit is sold out. A swank annual gala attended by some of the city's biggest power brokers, it has become immensely popular among philanthropists and drama mavens alike." The event features semi-autobiographical one-act plays by such local celebrities as basketball coach Phil Jackson and food writer/"Queer Eye" star Ted Allen. The results can range from embarrassing to hilarious, and the performances are now a bona fide hot ticket. Chicago Sun-Times 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 5:59 am
Broadway Aida To Close After almost four and a half years the Disney musical "Aida" is closing on Broadway. It's the first Disney musical on Broadway to close. "The Lion King," which has been running for more than six years, remains one of Broadway's biggest sellers. And "Beauty and the Beast" still draws sizable crowds after more than a decade. The New York Times 05/05/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 11:22 pm
Is Non-Fiction Getting Sexy? "Non-fiction is finally triumphing over its traditionally sexier cousin, fiction, evident yesterday when non-fiction books swept the Trillium Book Awards, Ontario's pre-eminent literary honours. In the English-language category, Thomas King's series of Massey Lectures, The Truth About Stories, beat fiction favourites such as M. G. Vassanji's Giller Prize-winner The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and Barbara Gowdy's The Romantic, which made the long-list for last year's Man Booker Prize." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:29 am
Disney Blocks Distribution Of Michael Moore Film That Criticizes Bush "The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush. A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax's distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore's film is deemed to be against Disney's interests not because of the company's business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many." The New York Times 05/05/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 11:06 pm
Why Are So Many Dancers Quitting The Royal Winnipeg? Nine of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's 26 dancers are leaving the company? Why the exodus? According to two of the dancers, "the ballet company is not being challenged creatively -- and they say that's the fault of artistic director André Lewis." Lewis has put the company on solid financial footing, but there is grumbling about his artistic choices. CBC 05/04/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 9:22 pm
Altman's Joffrey Film - Does It Translate In UK? Robert Altman's film about the Joffrey Ballet hits the UK. "There is nothing in the British scene that quite compares with Arpino, Joffrey, or the weirdly dated choreography that the company performs. But has Altman managed to paint a more universal portrait of ballet in which British dancers can recognise themselves?" The Guardian (UK) 05/05/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 9:19 pm
American Abstract V. European Story Why is modern American dance abstract while European dance is largely narrative, asks Joan Acocella? "For the most part, our choreographers have been modernists, in the Clement Greenbergian sense. Their primary concern has been their medium, dance. While all that was coalescing over here, people in Europe were voting huge subsidies for the arts, which were part of their national pride. They were also living lives different from ours. In the First and Second World Wars, the Europeans saw their universe laid waste, as we did not. Consequently, I believe, many of them could not give up representation, narration. They had to keep talking about the modern world, trying to figure out how it turned out the way it did." The New Yorker 05/03/04
Posted: 05/04/2004 6:10 pm
