America - Culture To the World? Samuel Huntington's now infamous new book argues that America is losing its sense of itself. This is an idea full of flaws, as Huntington articulates it. "Why isn’t internationalism, as a number of writers have recently argued, a powerful resource for Americans? The United States doesn’t have an exclusive interest in opposing and containing the forces of intolerance, superstition, and fanaticism; the whole world has an interest in opposing and containing those things. On September 12, 2001, the world was with us. Because of our government’s mad conviction that it was our way of life that was under attack, not the way of life of civilized human beings everywhere, and that only we knew what was best to do about it, we squandered our chance to be with the world. The observation is now so obvious as to be banal. That does not make it less painful." The New Yorker 05/10/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 9:28 pm
Cranach Painting Recovered In Georgia Georgian police in Tblisi have "discovered a painting by the famous German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder stolen from the Georgian State Museum of Fine Arts 10 years ago." Interfax 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 7:31 am
Art Beats Bonds, Stocks, Etc... The art market is hot for investors. And experts are saying that art as an investment is proving to be sound strategy. Partly this is "due to the highly variable returns of other asset classes over the last few years, Wall Street's fascination with alternative investments, and the excitement that accompanies record-setting auction prices." And, "academics and economists, armed with newly mined historical data, have demonstrated that including art in an investment portfolio can yield important diversification benefits thanks to the low correlation between art returns and those of stocks, bonds, and other traditional asset classes." Boston Globe 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 7:27 am
$104 Million - One Painting, OR... James Russell is having difficulty getting his head around paying $104 million for a painting. "Here’s how the Picasso auction sale fits in terms I understand: 2.6 “Boy With a Pipe” paintings will buy you one Disney Concert Hall. 1.2 will get you the Santiago Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum. About 8 “Boys” will buy you the Museum of Modern Art’s addition/renovation by the renowned architect Yoshio Taniguchi that will open later this year. MoMA would probably only have to deaccession the Picasso once to complete their fundraising." Sticks & Stones (AJBlogs) 05/10/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 11:11 pm
The $104 Million Question - Art As Commodity What makes one painting worth $104 million and another only a few thousand dollars? It's certainly not for how looks hanging on the wall. Here's a primer on the valuation of art and who plays the art acquisition game. BusinessWeek 05/11/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 11:01 pm
The Beaverbrook Art - Gift Or Loan? The former premier of New Brunswick weighs in on the claim by descendents of Lord Beaverbrook that paintings in possession of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery were loans and should be returned. "I knew the man very well, and when he gave something he didn't lend it, he gave it. Lord Beaverbrook gave the building and its contents in perpetuity to the province and its people. It's not a loan that he made." CBC 05/10/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 10:54 pm
The Barcelona Makeover "On Saturday, Forum Barcelona 2004 opened. It is a kind of four-month-long Expo with ambitious geopolitical themes, or, as it bills itself, a vast "meeting point for citizens of the world". At its heart is the Forum building, a cinematic tour de force designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. The building is also the fulcrum of an entirely new quarter of Barcelona on the coast north-east of Barceloneta and Port Olympic, the first remodelled, the second created, to coincide with the 1992 Olympics. When Forum Barcelona 2004 closes at the end of September, the city will inherit impressive new parks, yet another cleaned-up port and beach, concert and congress halls, public walkways, a new railway station dedicated to high-speed trains, clusters of new apartment blocks, an "e-city" of shiny office buildings dedicated to dotcoms and other forms of electronic enterprise, and yet another boost to its international prestige." The Guardian (UK) 05/11/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 9:46 pm
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Degrading Experience - CD's Rotting Some consumers are finding that older CD's in their collection are degrading, suffering from "CD rot," a gradual deterioration of the data-carrying layer. It's not known for sure how common the blight is, but it's just one of a number of reasons that optical discs, including DVDs, may be a lot less long-lived than first thought. 'We were all told that CDs were well-nigh indestructible when they were introduced in the mid-'80s. Companies used that in part to justify the higher price of CDs as well." Washington Post 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 9:34 am
Dohnanyi's Cleveland Deficit Conductor Christophe von Dohnanyi has a busy international schedule. But curiously, his schedule conspiculously does not include Cleveland, where he was the orchestra's music director for 18 years. "Oddly, the Dohnanyi situation is a chilling case of Cleveland deja vu. For reasons sometimes clear and often not, the Cleveland Orchestra has a terrible record of bringing former music directors back to town." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 9:21 am
Last-Minute At The Met "You can spend a decade singing minor roles in residence at a major opera house. And another 10 years in the hinterlands, perfecting major roles with minor opera companies. And by the time your ducks are lined up, you're lucky to have a few years of good singing left, since opera stars, like professional athletes, have careers circumscribed by age and time. Too much too soon can kill a young voice. But too little too late can waste a singer's prime." So when a singer gets an opportunity to step in on short notice to sing at the Met... Philadelphia Inquirer 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 9:16 am
Disney's Unconventional Organ Disney Hall is an unconventional concert hall. So the organ designed for the hall should be unconventional too. Its builders "had to adjust the size, sound and volume of each of its 6,134 pipes to suit the acoustics of the four-tiered, 2,265-seat hall. They had to engineer a way to make huge display pipes in bizarre shapes, anchor them securely into the rest of the structure, and yet allow them to sound normally. And since earthquake faults run beneath downtown Los Angeles, they had to make the organ quakeproof." The New York Times 05/11/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 10:37 pm
Student Composers - Looking For Heroes "Composers grow up with the idea that music is a game of heroes. In history books, they read that their forebears dazzled kings, electrified crowds, forged nations. Sooner or later, they come up against the disappointing realization that modern American culture has no space for a composer hero. That disappointment easily metastasizes into profound resentment, which no amount of success can dislodge. Indeed, the most famous composers are often the unhappiest." The New Yorker 05/10/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 8:24 pm
Angry Arts Workers Threaten Cannes French officials plan to meet with angry arts workers, who are planning to protest at the Cannes Film Festival and could disrupt France's summer arts festivals again this summer. "The event's organizers are due today to meet unions representing 60,000 to 100,000 part-time actors and technicians who plan protests against cuts in their welfare benefits." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 8:05 am
Massachusetts' Billion Dollar Culture Crisis A new report says that Massachusetts cultural groups pump more than a billion dollars a year into the economy. But the "cultural sector is losing its luster as a tourist destination, and it is in danger of losing ground as a cultural hub as well. Theaters and historic homes are crumbling, and vital museums and arts centers are struggling to pay for basic repairs, maintenance, and expansion planned, the report found. Yet Massachusetts is one of the few culture-rich regions of the country that provides no steady support for capital improvements." Boston Globe 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 7:23 am
Innovation Sure, But What About Inventing In The Arts? "You could argue that the massive growth in arts and cultural activity in the United States over the past 50 years has been about innovation and diffusion, rather than true invention. Building and blending creative forms invented centuries ago (theater, opera, orchestral performance, and such), creative people have found new innovations in how to bundle and present these forms to wider and more diverse audiences, while funders, nonprofits, universities, and others have built a new infrastructure to distribute them across the country." But how do we get to be more "inventive" with the arts? The Artful Manager (AJBlogs) 05/10/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 11:23 pm
Scotland Spends More On Arts "Arts spending in Scotland accounts for less than half of 1 per cent of all public expenditure in the country, a major University of Glasgow survey has found. But spending per head is sharply higher in Scotland than in other parts of the UK." The Scotsman 05/11/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 11:04 pm
Muscle-Control Disorder Ends Oboe Career Oboist Alex Klein is retiring from the Chicago Symphony because of a muscle-control disorder. "I just couldn't understand why my fingers were not going the way I wanted. So I practiced harder, which only made it worse. I acquired a lot of secondary problems, including muscle tension. The more I played, the more my fingers would curl away from the oboe and the more effort I'd have to make to straighten them." Chicago Tribune 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 7:53 am
- Previously: Oboist With An Involuntary Reflex Alex Klein is one of the world's best oboists. He's principal of the Chicago Symphony. But three years ago he was diagnosed with "focal dystonia, a neurological disorder in which the brain, for unknown reasons, sends messages through the nerves that cause muscles in a certain part of the body to contract and curl up involuntarily. The disease is usually painless, and the contractions occur only during specific tasks. For instance, the third and fourth fingers on Klein's left hand might fail him in a Mozart concerto, but they work perfectly when he ties his shoes or uses his left hand for other fine motor tasks." After going through 30 doctors, Klein is resigning from the CSO. Chicago Sun-Times 05/02/04
NYT Editor: The Tonys Are A Sham! Why does anyone pay attention to the Tony Awards, asks Michael Okrent? They are, he says "an artistically meaningless, blatantly commercial, shamefully exclusionary and culturally corrosive award competition. The awards are a real estate promotion, restricted as they are to shows put on in the 31 houses owned or controlled by the Shuberts, the Nederlanders and Jujamcyn, plus another nine thrown in by accident of geography or affinity to the idea of the Big Musical. Like the theaters, the voters themselves are to a large degree controlled by the Big Three and the touring company operators." The New York Times 05/09/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 10:49 pm
Wicked Gets 10 Tony Noms "Wicked," a quirky and fantasy-filled musical about those folks who live along the Yellow Brick Road, picked up 10 Tony Award nominations Monday. "Assassins," the controversial Stephen Sondheim musical, followed with seven and four shows tied with six nominations apiece: "Caroline, or Change," "Fiddler on the Roof," "Avenue Q" and the Lincoln Center revival of "Henry IV." Backstage (AP) 05/10/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 7:37 am
Are Big Publishers Bribing Bookstoress For Better Shelf Placement? "Major publishers are spending thousands of pounds every month on 'sweetener' trips for the retail chains on our high streets, in a bid to influence retail buying strategy. The entertainment budgets involved, which can be as much as £40,000 per trip, are aimed at ensuring increased orders for their books." Smaller independent publishers are protesting. The Observer (UK) 05/09/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 10:14 pm
The Soccer Bard Jonny Hurst is the newly-chosen Bard of the Boots, or soccer "chants laureate." Hurst beat 1,500 entrants for the post, more than 100 times as many as applied for Andrew Motion's job (as British Poet Laureate) last time it fell vacant. Most of them, like him, not only sing chants but write them and try to get football crowds to adopt them. His brief is less onerous than that of the poet laureate, who is expected to produce poems about big public events, whether or not these are interesting. The chants laureate has to watch matches and compose a selection of chants reflecting key moments throughout the 2004-05 season." The Guardian (UK) 05/11/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 9:54 pm
Petrarch Was A Woman (Or At Least His Bones Were) The remains of what was supposed to be the poet Petrarch are instead someone else. "Analysis of a tooth and one of the ribs exhumed from Petrarch's tomb in Arquá Petrarca, the village near Padua where the poet died in 1374, showed that they belonged to a man and a woman." Discovery 05/10/04
Posted: 05/10/2004 8:18 pm
ABT Renames School After Kennedy American Ballet Theatre has named its school after Jacqueline Kennedy. "Her daughter, Caroline, who is currently an ABT trustee, beamed from the stage at Lincoln Center as the announcement was made during last night's spring gala, which officially kicked off the new season." New York Post 05/11/04
Posted: 05/11/2004 6:57 am
