Visual Arts

The New Walker, Brought To You By... "There are a lot of good things you can say about the [Minneapolis-based Walker Art Center's] reopening--not the least of which is that it has reopened. This past Walker-less winter was a reminder of just how much a world-class arts institution adds to the life of our little metropolis; without it, Minneapolis might as well be Houston. And it's worth mentioning that, with a price tag of a mere $70 million... the Walker's new addition was a relative steal. [But] everything in this new wing seems to be sponsored by some corporation or another. You walk from the General Mills Lounge to the Best Buy Arcade to the U.S. Bank Orientation Lounge. In its proliferation of corporate sponsorship, the Walker is less MoMA than [Mall Of America]." City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 6:32 am

Getty Trust Gets Stark Sculptures "The late Hollywood power broker and producer Ray Stark and his wife have donated 28 masterpiece sculptures to the J. Paul Getty Trust to establish a sculpture garden at the Getty Center. The 20th-century sculptures include the works of Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Aristide Maillol, Joan Miro, Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi." Baltimore Sun (AP) 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 5:41 am

Moscow Treasure Reopens After Fire A major architectural treasure has reopened a year after a damaging fire. "Built in just six months in 1817 under the orders of Czar Alexander I for the fifth anniversary of Russia's victory over Napoleon, Manege was considered architecturally unique from the start. Its recognizable neo-classical yellow facades and majestic white pillars were designed by the Russian architect Ossip Bovet, while its 150-foot-wide interior and triangular wooden roof were created by the French engineer Augustin Bétancourt. This hall could hold a regiment of 2,000 in addition to visitors and audiences. It was said to be the largest uncolumned interior space in the world." The New York Times 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 8:25 pm

An Artist Pension Fund Plan Made Of Art A pension scheme for artists was unveiled in London Monday. Money for the fund would be generated by artists contributing artworks. "The UK trust would aim to cover 250 working artists, vetted by experts before they join the scheme. They would contribute 20 artworks over 20 years, to be sold when prices are judged to be right." The Scotsman 04/18/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 6:19 pm

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Music

Orchestras Can Switch Cities? It's a heck of a way to leave town: the departing principal conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra made waves this week wen he suggested that the RSNO should move from Glasgow to Edinburgh, so as to take advantage of what he called "the best venue in Scotland." As a national orchestra, the RSNO performs regularly in both cities, but has always been officially based in Glasgow. Orchestra management says it has no plans to move. The Herald (Glasgow) 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 5:33 am

A Too-Polished Orchestra? A documentary showing the notoriously fractured Philadelphia Orchestra from the inside ought to be one of the most exciting and controversial entries in the city's film festival. But the documentary you want to get made isn't always the one that gets made, and Music From The Inside Out, which purports to be such an insider's look at one of the country's great orchestras, is in fact nothing more than a big wet sloppy public relations kiss. "This is the Philadelphia Orchestra's polished but not slick valentine to itself. Not that what's on screen is false - it's just a very narrow view of the personalities concerned. And for close observers of the orchestra, that specificity is painful to watch, because you want reality to be entirely this way." Philadelphia Inquirer 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 5:22 am

Conlon On Detroit's Radar Screen American conductor James Conlon, who made his reputation in Europe and has recently become a big name in the U.S. as well, may be near the top of the Detroit Symphony's music director wish list to succeed the outgoing Neeme Jarvi. Unfortunately, Conlon is so busy that he won't have time to conduct in Detroit until June 2006, and he is also about to start two new jobs in America (as director of the Los Angeles Opera and of the Chicago Symphony's summer festival at Ravinia.) Still, the DSO has invited Conlon to conduct its 2005-06 season finale. Detroit Free Press 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 5:13 am

Muti Not On Chicago's Shortlist The Chicago Symphony says that it has not offered Riccardo Muti the position of music director, despite cryptic statements from the conductor published in the Italian press this week. Muti said he was "considering an offer" from the CSO, but would not elaborate. The orchestra says that it has invited Muti to guest conduct for the first time in a quarter-century, but that is all. Chicago Tribune 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 5:02 am

• Or Is He? "Deborah Card, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, confirmed that she and others from the CSO met with Muti last weekend in New York while he was conducting the New York Philharmonic... Card declined to say whether she had extended a firm offer to Muti to become CSO music director when Barenboim steps down at the end of the 2005-06 season." Chicago Sun-Times 04/20/05
  Posted: 04/20/2005 5:00 am

Bryn Terfel Leads Nominations For Classical Brits Terfel's album Silent Noon - with Malcolm Martineau - has received nods in the album of the year and Ensemble/ Orchestral album of the year groups. He is also nominated for Male Artist of the Year, where he faces competition from Sir Colin Davis and Aled Jones." BBC 04/18/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 6:16 pm

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Arts Issues

Will Toronto Arts Be On The Chopping Block For Conservatives? Canada's ruling Liberal government is in trouble, hanging on to power by a thread and likely to be forced into new elections by year's end. And while Prime Minister Paul Martin and company might have many residents of Canada's largest city exasperated, Martin Knelman warns that an electoral victory for the Conservative party and its leader, Alberta's Stephen Harper, would be a death knell for Toronto's arts scene. "Alberta's well-known resentment of Toronto's presumed cultural superiority could find expression in a big chill for local arts funding." Toronto Star 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 6:22 am

The Great Wall From Space (After All) "China's schoolchildren have long been taught that the ancient fortification is one of the only man-made structures that can be picked out from orbit. However, last year, China's first man in space disappointed the nation when he said he had failed to spot it." Now a new photograph from space confirms the Wall is visible. BBC 04/18/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 6:26 pm

Israeli Report: Holocaust Cost To Jewish People Was $230 Billion "An unprecedented report published yesterday by the Israeli government estimates the material damage caused to the Jewish people during the Holocaust at $230 billion to $320 billion. This estimate does not include reparations for the suffering of survivors, or for the murder of 6 million Jews. The report's authors call on the government to remove obstacles to the process of restoring Jewish property, not only in Europe but in the U.S. and Israel as well." Ha'aretz 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 6:13 pm

World Trade Center Dream Dies Any hope for a good project to rise on the site of the World Trade Center is now dead, writes Ada Louise Huxtable. "The death of the dream has come slowly, in bits and pieces, not as a sudden cataclysmic event. It has not been a casualty of the more obvious debate over whether the replacement of the lost 10 million square feet of commercial space demanded by the developer is an economic necessity or the defilement of the land where so many died. This has been a subtler, more insidious sabotage, through the progressive downgrading and evisceration of the cultural components of Daniel Libeskind's competition-winning design." OpinionJournal.com 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 5:50 pm

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People

Nashville Sym Conductor Dies Conductor Kenneth Schermerhorn, who led the Nashville Symphony for 22 years and became a local icon of the cultural scene, has died at 75 after a brief battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Schermerhorn is credited with helping to boost the orchestra out of bankruptcy years ago, and with driving it to new professional heights, including major recording contracts and an appearance at New York's Carnegie Hall. The NSO's new $120 million concert hall, now under construction in downtown Nashville, will be named for Schermerhorn. The Tennessean (Nashville) 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 4:49 am

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Theatre

The Ushering Game How can you see all the theatre you want without spending a cent? Just show a few people to their seats, stuff a few Playbills, and wait for the lights to go down. Welcome to the world of New York's Off-Broadway volunteer ushers, a strange and wacky collection of eccentrics, elderly fans on a budget, and hypercompetitive prima donnas. The New York Times 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 6:11 am

Tony Unlikely To Reward Denzel "As the Tony Award races start to come into focus, it looks as if the biggest star on Broadway this spring may find himself shut out of the nominees' circle. Critics and theater insiders have greeted Denzel Washington's turn as 'Brutus' in the wrong-headed revival of Julius Caesar at the Belasco with, at best, indifference and, at worst, disappointment... [Still,] the competition for the five slots for Best Actor in a Play is fierce — and there is no shortage of big names to spice up the category." New York Post 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 5:56 am

Brook: Stripping Back To Simplicity Director Peter Brook has stripped away a lot for his new production. But it took him a long time to do it. "I tell young people: 'At the age of 80, I have discarded many, many things to find that my taste is for simplicity. Don't take that as a formula when you're at an age when you should be plunging into every sort of experience, as I was doing.' " The New York Times 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 8:16 pm

A New Time Demands A New Kind Of Plays Last week critic Michael Billington compained that the new generation of 90-minute plays was creatively challenged. Ian Rickson begs to disagree: "New cultural and political eras demand new forms. There is a scepticism towards big ideas among the young - but that does not mean they are not engaged with or disturbed by contemporary society. We live in a time when there is a disappointment with unifying ideology and a greater consciousness of contradiction. The old forms in which the writer diagnoses and hypothesises no longer speak to today's playwrights. In dramatising a more complex, atomised culture, playwrights may seek vivid, suggestive fragments as a better form." The Guardian (UK) 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 7:56 pm

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Publishing

A Da Vinci Code Parody (On Publishing) "The Da Vinci Code is obviously not a normal novel. It is enormously long and very badly written ("Everyone in the reception area gaped in wonderment at the half-naked albino offering forth a bleeding clergyman"). It is simultaneously bombastic and bafflingly banal, full of uncontrolled, wrong-headed prose, tin-eared dialogue and crazy errors of fact. The characters are drips. And yet I stayed up half the night reading it. So what is the secret?" The Telegraph (UK) 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 8:06 pm

Bloggers Band Together To Promote Old-Fashioned Lit "Marking a departure from the solitary life of reading and writing, about 20 independent literary bloggers announced last week that they will begin working together in hopes of drawing readers to books they feel deserve more attention, while seeking to generate more and deeper public discussions of literature. Calling themselves the Litblog Co-Op, the effort includes the sites the Elegant Variation, Moorishgirl, Rake's Progress and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, all of which will continue to operate separately, the bloggers say." Chicago Tribune (LA Times) 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 5:47 am

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Media

Can 9/11 Ever Be Sold As Entertainment? It has been more than 3-1/2 years since the 9/11 attacks, which apparently is long enough for Hollywood to start making movies about one of the worst tragedies in American history. "Are Americans ready yet to watch, let alone pay to watch, a re-enactment of some of the most searing events in their lives? When will enough time have passed? How do you make use of the stories of the victims and survivors without being seen as exploiting them? Then there is perhaps the most basic creative dilemma: Do you show the airplanes crashing into the twin towers? On this, there is unanimous reluctance." The New York Times 04/20/05
Posted: 04/20/2005 6:00 am

A Cannes Full Of Favorites "There are no obvious hot-button films in this year's lineup, which stacks up as a classic Cannes selection packed with critical favorites and sprinkled with both potential comeback kids like Atom Egoyan, and hot directors, including, notably, Mexico's Carlos Reygadas and Italy's Marco Tullio Giordana. The New York Times 04/19/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 8:11 pm

Congress Protects Those Who Alter Movies The US Congress has passed a bill that would allow companies to strip out scenes from movies they find objectionable. "The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act would assure manufacturers of DVD players and other devices using such technology they would not be violating copyrights of the Hollywood producers of movies. The House passed it Tuesday on a voice vote. The Senate passed it in February." Yahoo! (AP) 04/18/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 7:17 pm

TV Turnoff Week It's time to turn off the TV. "That's the idea behind TV-Turnoff Week, which for the 11th year is inviting everyone to "Turn off TV, turn on life." From Monday (April 25) through May 1, you can join as many as eight million other viewers in pulling the plug on TV, the Internet and video games." Back Stage (AP) 04/18/05
Posted: 04/19/2005 6:42 pm

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