Young Rebels Who Work From Inside? There was a time when young artists got their energy from opposing the establishment, being subversive. So what's happened? "Maybe today’s innovators have realised that there is little point in putting a lot of effort into being an embittered outsider youth rebel out to impress a few friends at some esoteric club." The Times (UK) 12/07/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 9:31 pm
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Turner Prizewinner Mussels His Way Into Canada Artist Simon Sterling, fresh off his Turner win, has announced plans for a new project in Toronto, and the he'll be employing the services of a much-hated invasive species to help him symbolize the original invasive species of North America- European colonizers. "The core proposal involves casting a replica of Henry Moore's Warrior with Shield, a 1954 bronze in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and sinking it into Lake Ontario for six months, where it will become encrusted with zebra mussels before being displayed as the centrepiece of an exhibition of Starling's work." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 6:14 am
Has The Turner Prize Become Too Safe? "Monday night's Turner Prize presentation was a confirmation, if any were needed, that that acceptance has now very much arrived. Watching three of the nominees talking about their work (painter Gillian Carnegie chose not to appear), you couldn't help feeling that modern art, more than ever before, has become safe, approachable… comfy." The Telegraph (UK) 12/08/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 9:26 pm
New Role For London's ICA? The new head of London's Institute for Contemporary Art says that "the institute's historic role as the place in Britain where fresh developments in modern American and European art could be witnessed - it was the first British gallery to show a Jackson Pollock - was no longer relevant, given the proliferation of galleries and museums such as Tate Modern. But its programmes of performance, film, music, art and talks should 'provoke and challenge, keep pushing the boundaries. Britain deserves a space that tries to ask the deep questions; where people can look at the complexity of the world around them'." The Guardian (UK) 12/07/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 8:12 pm
Needed - New Ethics On Artifacts "The latest troubles should cause Americans to ask questions about our ethics and practices. Do the Met, the Cleveland Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston - places that bring together cultures from around the world, act as safe houses for civilization and provide public access to millions of people - also have claims to the world's art, claims that legitimately compete with the nationalist goals of countries that cannot always provide the same care and access? Isn't it better for an ancient pot dug out of some farm in Sicily to end up at a museum like the Met, where it can be studied, widely seen and cared for, than to become booty in some billionaire's safe in Zurich, Shanghai or Tokyo? At the same time, does encouraging the movement of artifacts into museums stimulate looting and, in the process, impede the circulation of critical information about the provenance, or history, of these objects?" The New York Times 12/08/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 7:52 pm
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Grammy Nominee List Released The Grammy nominees have been announced, and conductor Mariss Jansons, pianist Martha Argerich, and the Emerson String Quartet lead the pack of nominees in the classical categories. In the contemporary music category, composer Osvaldo Golijov's 11-song cycle, "Ayre," competes with works by William Bolcom, Ned Rorem, Peter Boyer, and Carlos Franzetti. Grammy.com 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 6:43 am
Harding's La Scala Debut "A Triumph" Daniel Harding had a lot on his shoulders last night at La Scala, as seemingly the entire opera world waited to see whether the boyish conductor and his vision of Mozart's Idomeneo could make Milan forget all about Riccardo Muti and his dramatic exit last spring. Apparently, he did. "After two curtain calls, Harding joined the cast on stage for 12-minute ovation. Members of the audience praised him for his 'energy and verve'. The president of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who was present, said: 'I saw it with new eyes'." However, some Muti loyalists remain quite upset with what they see as La Scala's move away from serious, cutting-edge opera, and with the treatment accorded Muti, whom La Scala managers painted as a dictator. The Guardian (UK) 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 5:39 am
Orchestra Teams Up With Evangelical Mega-Church The Houston Symphony has an unusual new partner for its holiday concerts: Lakewood Church, arguably the world's most famous mega-church, seating 16,000, its services seen across the U.S. on television each week. "To Lakewood, the symphony offers cachet and a high-quality orchestra. To the symphony, Lakewood offers a large untapped audience and an extraordinary marketing machine... The church and the symphony readily admit that their usual audiences don't overlap much, [but] Lakewood has far more to offer the symphony than just an audience. Symphony management can also learn something from Lakewood about branding... And it's possible that further collaboration could provide a huge new outlet for the symphony's work. The two organizations are eyeing a long-term relationship." Houston Chronicle 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 5:30 am
Glimmerglass Makes Some Pragmatic Moves Bowing to the bottom line, Glimmerglass Opera has asked the creators of a new work coming next summer to take "whore" out of the title. The company says it is also scrapping a production of the 17th-century work "Giasone," by Francesco Cavalli, in favor of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance." The New York Times 12/08/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 8:00 pm
La Scala's Biggest Night? Thirty-year-old conductor Daniel Harding is fronting this year's opening night at La Scala. "Silvio Berlusconi's tottering government is threatening to cut subsidies by 30 percent in a rage of scorched-earth legislation ahead of next year's election. This could be La Scala's last glamour night for a while and the designer-suit claques won't let it pass without ructions. No pressure, but our boy - who posed beneath gleaming chandeliers in a Manchester United shirt for Gazzetto della Sport – will need to play a blinder if he is to avoid backlash from off-pitch dramas." La Scena Musicale 12/07/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 7:41 pm
ENO Staff Votes To Strike Staff at the English National Opera have voted unanimously to go on strike. "Union demands for a 5% pay increase and raised pension contributions were met with a pay offer by ENO of 2.77%. Staff at the opera company, based in central London, are unhappy about perceived low pay and unsatisfactory working conditions." BBC 12/07/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 7:02 pm
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Smithsonian's Shameless Cash Grab Did the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum sell its soul to the devil this week with the announcement that it would screen the latest Harry Potter flick in its IMAX theater? "The screening decision had nothing to do with education, or enlightenment, or any of the other grand ideals public museums have always been built around... no one is even pretending that this is about anything other than getting as much cash as possible, as quickly as possible." Washington Post 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 7:04 am
SPAC Starts To Dig Itself Out Upstate New York's Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), attempting to dig out from years of questionable management and a wave of awful publicity, has announced that it will eliminate its $3 million debt using funds from its endowment. The organization, which plays host to a popular summer festival featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet, also says that it will have a balanced budget for 2005, its first black ink in 15 years. SPAC came under heavy fire for its management practices earlier this year in an independent report that led to the resignation of the center's chief executive and much of its board. The Saratogian (NY) 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 5:21 am
Miami Reinvents As Capital Of Culture "After the money, the clubs, the drugs, the beaches, the models, the art deco, the swanky hotels and the TV series, Miami has got the culture. Last weekend, the city hosted Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), the largest art fair in the Americas, welcoming 195 galleries from all over the world, and following on the heels of the Miami International Book Fair, the largest in the US." The Guardian (UK) 12/07/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 8:16 pm
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The Once and Future King of Broadway? It's hard to get any more Broadway than Neil Simon - the celebrated playwright remains the only living writer to have a Broadway theater named after him, and this season, no fewer than three Simon revivals are playing New York's biggest stages. So it's easy to forget that it took Simon decades to achieve critical acclaim, and even longer to win the Pulitzer he so coveted. At 78, two years removed from a kidney transplant, Simon is still working, planning a sequel to The Sunshine Boys and turning his autobiography into a stage play. Miami Herald 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 6:32 am
C.S. Lewis: Floor Wax or Dessert Topping? The debate over C.S. Lewis and his children's books is nothing new, of course, and some of the combatants in the seemingly endless debate go well beyond mere literary argument. Is the Narnia series "a timeless fantasy about talking beavers, friendly fauns and a mystical lion named Aslan? Or insidious militaristic propaganda cunningly used to inoculate innocents with rigid Christian dogma penned by a pervy pipe-puffing Oxford prig who actually didn't very much like little children and might have slept with a woman old enough to be his mother? When he wasn't drinking. In pubs. With J.R.R. Tolkien." And in an age in which children's fantasy is a major literary sub-genre, scholars are just warming up their Lewis screeds. Washington Post 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 6:11 am
- Is Narnia Really A Land Of Evangelicals? There is no question that the Narnia books contain strong Christian imagery, but even religious scholars have never agreed on what point of view Lewis intended to endorse. "In one camp are evangelicals, whose churches regularly use Lewis's book Mere Christianity to introduce newcomers to orthodox understandings of Jesus Christ... Others, however, insist that Lewis cared chiefly about bringing the worldwide Christian family together. Since he helped advance a vibrant ecumenical movement in his day, he must not be reduced to a sectarian champion posthumously." The Christian Science Monitor 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 6:09 am
Whitman's Signature Work Turns 150 "Devotees and scholars of the writer Walt Whitman are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the original edition of his seminal work, Leaves of Grass, the concise volume of 12 poems that pushed the boundaries of social decency and of poetry itself. By rejecting the rigid structures of British metre, Whitman offered readers free-spirited bursts of consciousness that forever changed American poetry... Experts suspect only a few hundred copies of the original edition exist and are using the anniversary to try to count them." Maclean's (AP) 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 5:48 am
Pinter Blasts US In Nobel Speech In a speech peppered with the potent silences that are often called "Pinteresque", he accused the U.S. and its ally Britain of trading in death and employing "language to keep thought at bay." CBC 12/07/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 7:06 pm
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The National Goes Sunday London's National Theatre is considering adding Sunday performances. "The NT says the move reflects a growing recognition within the industry that audiences expect opening times to fit around work and family life." The Stage (UK) 12/07/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 10:10 pm
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The Curse Of The Writing Workshop "Writing workshops, for their ubiquity, are currently the most significant phenomenon influencing American literature. Enrollment into them has become de rigueur for people with a calling to write, and is assumed by increasing numbers (including publishers) to be as necessary a first step toward a writing life as college would be toward a professional life. But because the self-styled "best" of these workshops comprise such a poor lot of dull, mechanical stories, it becomes necessary to ask: What goes on in these programs, and how do they influence today's writers, for ill or for good?" New York Press 12/07/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 7:26 pm
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Gibson On The Holocaust? No Thanks. News leaked out this week that actor/filmmaker Mel Gibson, who ignited a firestorm last year with his bloody biopic, The Passion of the Christ, would be involved with a new ABC-TV project dramatizing the memoir of a Holocaust survivor. It didn't take long for Jewish groups nationwide to respond, accusing Gibson of "minimizing" the Holocaust in past statements, and demanding that he not be a part of the project. Philadelphia Inquirer 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 6:50 am
Hollywood Pushes NY To Toughen Piracy Penalties "As part of its worldwide campaign against piracy, the film industry is pushing for tougher penalties for smuggling a camcorder into a cinema in New York, which has the country's worst bootlegging problem and some of the weakest penalties. A bill pushed by the Motion Picture Association of America would make operating recording equipment inside a theater a criminal misdemeanor, raising the maximum punishment to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail." Minneapolis Star Tribune (AP) 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 6:38 am
Ballot Mishap Delays Start Of Hollywood's Self-Congratulation Season "The group that traditionally presents the first big awards of the Oscar season said Wednesday it had delayed announcing its winners after questions were raised about its voting process. A spokesman for the National Board of Review downplayed the flap, explaining that voters had mistakenly been sent a memo that was mislabeled as an 'eligibility list' and did not include all the 2005 films that qualified... The delay lends new clout to the Los Angeles Film Critics' Assn., which will be the first out of the gate this awards season with their picks for 2005 when they announce their choices on Saturday." Los Angeles Times 12/08/05
Posted: 12/08/2005 6:23 am
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A Messiah Done Modern "Only in recent years has Handel's piece — composed in 1741 and long associated with Christmas, though it was intended, one biographer wrote, 'as a timely thought-provoker for Lent and Easter' — been interpreted by choreographers. Schroeder points out that it has often been difficult for dance companies, including hers, to find willing collaborators among classical musicians, many of whom believe "Messiah" is strictly for voice and orchestra." Atlanta Journal-Constitution 12/08/05
Posted: 12/07/2005 10:30 pm
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