Scaring Ourselves To Death Whatever happened to America's old swagger, the visible confidence of a nation that could simultaneously project ultimate strength and ultimate benevolence? The national character these days seems to be pure, unadulterated fear, augmented by the violent rage that accompanies the experience of being trapped in a corner. "We are a population whose vulnerabilities and insecurities have become a central focus of our popular culture and our politics." From books to films to television and beyond, we have become a culture of terrified victims, lashing out not only at the dangerous world beyond our borders, but at each other. Hartford Courant 10/01/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 7:49 am
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Munch Investigation At A Dead End Despite a steady flow of tips, consultations with international art experts, and a continual media focus, police in Oslo say that they have made no progress in tracking down Edvard Munch's The Scream, which was stolen at gunpoint in late August. There are currently no suspects and no leads, and the thieves have made no attempt to ransom the painting. Aftenposten (Oslo) 10/01/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 9:15 am
As Opposed To How We Perceive Designers Now? James Dyson's resignation from the leadership of London's Design Museum may have seemed like little more than an internal debate over direction writ large, but to hear Dyson tell it, nothing less than the future of the design industry is at stake. "If design museums shy away from explaining the guts of design, he worries, the next generation will perceive the designer as 'little more than the creator of ineffectual ornaments.' And what's left of Western industrial manufacturing will spiral into decline." Washington Post 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:27 am
- Previously: Design Museum's Chairman Quits Vacuum cleaner magnate James Dyson has angrily resigned from his position as board chairman of London's Design Museum, declaring that the institution is "ruining its reputation" and "betraying its purpose". Dyson had been in a years-long feud with director Alice Rawsthorn over the true mission of the museum, and his resignation letter accuses her of allowing it to "become a style showcase [when it should be] upholding its mission to encourage serious design of the manufactured object." The Guardian (UK) 09/28/04
AGO Pushing Major Partnership The Art Gallery of Ontario has forged an unlikely partnership with Russia's Hermitage Museum in recent years, and the AGO's Matthew Teitelbaum is determined to take it to "'the curatorial level,' which, despite its formal-sounding nature, really means more of a hands-on deal between the Hermitage's art experts and his own. In short, he wants AGO people to start arranging what the Hermitage might send our way. But put this in some perspective. Since the entire AGO, with or without Frank Gehry touch-ups, probably would fit nicely into the Hermitage's cat-infested basement, Teitelbaum's approach can be seen as remarkably progressive, pushy, or somewhere in between." Toronto Star 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:18 am
Cleveland Museum Hires One Of Its Own The Cleveland Museum of Art has filled a key curatorial post from within its existing staff. "Anita Chung, formerly an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the museum, has been appointed associate curator of Chinese art. She is assuming responsibility for the Chinese collection, overseen for the past 6½ years by Ju-hsi Chou, who retired in June." The Mellon Foundation has made a challenge grant to permanently endow the position of curator of Chinese art, which has yet to be filled. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:03 am
Art That Travels "What do you buy just before you board a plane? Most frequent fliers take what they can get: tabloids, Godiva chocolates, $5 paperbacks, duty-free liquor and cigarettes. But the brand-new Airport Gift Shop at [New York's JFK Airport] has turned shopping into an art - literally. Designed and curated by New York artist Tobias Wong, the Airport Gift Shop is part of a just-opened art installation called Terminal 5 - which uses all the space in Eero Saarinen's landmark (and defunct) TWA Terminal 5." New York Post 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 7:58 am
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Sacramento Symphony Exec Quits, Charges Unethical Accounting The executive director of the organization that oversees the newly formed Sacramento Symphony has resigned, and is accusing the Metropolitan Music Center of mismanaging funds and playing fast and loose with business ethics. Rachel Lewis also insists that she never signed the musicians' checks which bounced following the orchestra's opening concert, and further claims that she tried to convince the MMC to cancel the concert due to a shortage of funds for payroll. The MMC's board of directors is vehemently denying all of Lewis's charges. Sacramento Bee 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:57 am
- Previously: Sacramento Symphony Bounces Checks To Musicians The newly formed Sacramento Symphony played its season premiere this past weekend, and issued paychecks to its musicians. Monday morning, the checks bounced. "Although the checks cleared on Wednesday, the situation raised questions about the financial position of the symphony and its parent organization, the Metropolitan Music Center." The MMC is reportedly operating in the red, and still owes money to a Los Angeles-based chamber orchestra from a concert in 2001. Still, the orchestra is insisting that the rubber checks were merely a banking error. Sacramento Bee 09/30/04
- An Organization Built On Lies? Questions about the ethics and business practices of the Sacramento Symphony and its parent organization were first raised two weeks ago, when a newspaper investigation concluded that the MMC was "falsely claiming association with several prominent artists and support from local businesses and organizations." Sacramento Bee 09/17/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:56 am
People Will Listen, If You Teach Them How The newly rekindled San Antonion Symphony held an outdoor concert last week aimed at the city's minority populations, and (almost) nobody came. Yes, it was a broiling-hot day, but Mike Greenberg suggests that the SAS may be trying to attract new audience members without making a real commitment to the most basic audience-building technique. "A Mexican American doesn't have to make any more of a cultural 'leap' to the symphony than does a German or Polish or Italian American... [But] to build an audience for the long term, the symphony needs to take a long-term view of its educational and outreach missions, and I don't think it's done that very well." San Antonio Express-News 10/03/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:46 am
Seriously Deep Music Shaft Chamber No. 41 is not a particularly glamorous name for a concert hall, but for the Donbass Symphony Orchestra, the cavernous shaft sunk 200 meters deep in a salt mine in eastern Ukraine made a fine space for its debut concert. "Instead of cocktail dresses and dinner jackets, most of the audience were dressed in winter coats. The temperature underground was a chilly 14 degrees Celsius." BBC 10/03/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:33 am
Another Day, Another Contract Extension Following the lead of the nation's major orchestras, the musicians and management of the Florida Orchestra have agreed to continue working towards a new collective bargaining agreement despite the expiration of the musicians' current deal. The orchestra's current base salary is roughly $24,000 for a 31-week season. St. Petersburg Times 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:06 am
Madison's New PAC Good Enough For Chicago Madison's new Overture Center for the Arts, designed by Cesar Pelli and built at a cost of $205 million (all of which was paid by a single donor,) has opened its main concert hall with a performance by the Chicago Symphony, and if musician reaction is any indication, the little university town in Wisconsin has constructed one of the country's great concert halls. "Several CSO players reported that they could hear themselves and each other with greater clarity than at perhaps any hall they have played... Pelli and Chicago-based acousticians Kirkegaard Associates have created a beautiful, bright and open auditorium with a feel of intimacy far exceeding that of the much smaller 1,500-seat Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Chicago's Millennium Park." Chicago Sun-Times 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 7:45 am
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Dave Eggers Wants You To Vote Ohio is widely considered to be one of the three or four most important states in any presidential election, and presidential candidates sink millions of advertising dollars into the state's television markets. And yet, voter turnout in the Buckeye State is no better than in any other part of the country. Enter Operation Ohio, a touring group of big-name authors holding get-out-the-vote efforts at colleges and universities across the state. The events are billed as non-partisan, but there is a distinct anti-Bush ring to the speeches. The New York Times 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 7:39 am
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Giving The People What They Want Ken Danby could be considered the Canadian answer to Thomas Kinkade - a stunningly prolific artist (650 original works in a 40-year career) who inspires revulsion in the art world for his nostalgic simplicity and his willingness to mass market his work, even to the extent of signing machine-made reproductions. Still, "Danby's clientele know what they like and they are legion. His 1998 show at the Carrier Gallery attracted, he says, 10,000 visitors and sold $1.25 million-worth of pictures." Toronto Star 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:13 am
Graham Greene's New Relevance Novelist Graham Greene, who would have turned 100 this weekend, will enjoy a posthumous resurgence this fall, thanks to a bevy of reissues put together for the occasion. The timing couldn't be better, as Greene's work seems to have a new relevance to modern events: "The Western world finds itself in international turmoil, in situations similar to those of Greene's slumming characters, where it's not always clear that one is doing the right thing. And we find ourselves trying to divvy up the world into categories of absolutes -- Good and Evil -- when our everyday existence, as echoed by Greene's protagonists, tells us that things are much more complicated than that." San Francisco Chronicle 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:08 am
Richard Avedon, 81 Noted portrait photographer Richard Avedon has died in Texas of complications from a brain hemorrhage. Avedon's pictures were sometimes controversial, sometimes difficult to look at, but they were always uniquely memorable, and his work "revolutionized the 20th-century art of fashion photography, imbuing it with touches of both gritty realism and outrageous fantasy and instilling it with a relentlessly experimental drive." The New York Times 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 7:11 am
- Stark Glamour, Ruthless Reality Avedon's legacy is one of unbending realism cloaked in the language of high fashion: he once described his work as a "series of no's leading to a yes.. I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us." His portraits were sophisticated but brutal, and over time, they became a barometer of social importance to those who posed. "An Avedon portrait brought an instant aura of importance and legitimacy to its subject; the picture said you matter now, because you're news, or because you're something people either like to stare at or talk about, but quietly so. If Avedon was taking your portrait, then you'd arrived. Even if you milked cows for a living." Washington Post 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 7:10 am
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Roth's Lindbergh Forcing Midwest Soul-Searching In Philip Roth's latest novel, aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR for the U.S. presidency, and a nightmare scenario of American anti-Semitism unfolds. It's fiction, of course, but the Lindbergh character is based on a very real human being, and the book is raising eyebrows in his home state of Minnesota. Lindbergh is held up as a local hero in Minnesota - the airport is even named after him - and many locals aren't keen to be reminded of the more sordid details of his life. But the book is providing an opportunity for the state to reexamine its own prejudices, and its devotion to a man who was not always what he seemed. Minneapolis Star Tribune 10/03/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 9:30 am
- Ducking Responsibility Philip Roth's decision to write a fable of American politics and hate was less about surface prejudice than it was about every human being's capacity to ignore the suffering of others. "The deepest reward in the writing and what lends the story its pathos wasn't the resurrection of my family circa 1941 but the invention of the family downstairs, of the tragic Wishnows, on whom the full brunt of the anti-Semitism falls - the invention particularly of the Wishnows' little boy, Seldon, that nice, lonely little kid in your class whom you run away from when you're yourself a kid because he demands to be befriended by you in ways that another child cannot stand. He's the responsibility that you can't get rid of." The New York Times Book Review 10/03/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 9:24 am
A House Divided "Lawyers for the estate of author John Steinbeck's widow are seeking to quash a lawsuit begun by his other relatives over royalties and copyright. Steinbeck's son, Thomas Steinbeck, and granddaughter Blake Smyle are suing the late Elaine Steinbeck's estate for at least $18 million. They are also seeking greater control of Steinbeck's classic novels." BBC 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 9:13 am
Hurston/Wright Awards Announced Art and literature are supposed to be color-blind, of course, but there's no escaping the fact that the vast majority of literary prizes are presented by white people to white people. Thus the necessity of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, which annually honor the best of black literature. This year's prizes were handed out last week: "In the debut fiction category, Purple Hibiscus, the story of a Nigerian teenager growing up in a rich and troubled family, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; in nonfiction, In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr. by Wil Haygood; and in the fiction category, Hunting in Harlem, the tale of three ex-cons in contemporary New York, by Mat Johnson." Washington Post 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 8:22 am
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Up Next, Valkyries Fired Out Of Cannons! Wagner's Ring cycle, as imagined by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, is a challenge in ways that go far beyond the musical complexities of the score. Some scenes, for instance, take place underwater, which many companies are content to leave as an implied setting, but which the Lyric has decided requires its Rhinemaidens to perform while suspended from bungee cords. The resulting midair dance is a wonderful sight to behold, but behind the scenes, it is one of the more complex staging endeavors ever mounted on the operatic stage, requiring not only split-second timing, but serious teamwork. The New York Times 10/02/04
Posted: 10/03/2004 7:31 am
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