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Weekend, February 25-26




Ideas

A Complex World, Reduced To A Buzzword In much the same way that conventional wisdom in the Arab world tends to view "America" as a monolithic place speaking with a single, domineering voice, Westerners have begun to discuss "the Islamic world" as if such a thing could really be reduced to a simple set of ideas and actions. By extension, "Islamic art" is often seen as monolithic and single-minded, when the truth is far more complex. "It's a political story, an ancient and universal one, about how an image, and almost any image will do, once it is fused to cultural identity — Islam, in this case — can end up being used as a weapon." The New York Times 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 11:51 am

The Devil, The Teacher, & The Very Small Town The residents of the tiny town of Bennett, Colorado, have no desire to be held up as a national example of religious extremism and ignorance. But ever since an elementary school teacher in the town was suspended for showing a video version of the opera Faust to her class, the backlash against the town has been swift and severe. "Tensions can be found in many of Colorado's smaller communities as development pressures and population growth cause friction between longtime residents and newcomers, who often have differing backgrounds and values. These differences sometimes explode in cultural clashes." Denver Post 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 9:46 am

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Visual Arts

History vs. Innovation in SoCal Pasadena, California, is on the verge of a building boom, and fans of daring architecture will likely be pleased by what is to come. "But what's avant-garde to some could be an assault to others... It's either a step into the future, or the early stages of an aesthetic identity crisis." Los Angeles Times 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 10:17 pm

Michelangelo's Lost Fresco? That the residents of the Italian town of Marcialla have long believed that a fresco in their local church was painted by a young Michelangelo would come as no surprise to many scholars in the art world. That the villagers may be right, however, is a shock of the highest order. "At the end of last year, a stone slab forming part of the altar was heaved aside to reveal the first visible evidence for the claim: a monogram with the letters M, B and F intertwined." The Guardian (UK) 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 10:06 am

Brazilian Museum Robbed Of Four Masterpieces "Gunmen overpowered security guards and stole paintings by Picasso, Dali, Matisse and Monet from a Rio museum Friday, using the cover of a Carnival crowd to make their getaway, Brazilian authorities said. The thieves entered the Chacara do Ceu museum as a samba band performed on the street outside and stole Pablo Picasso's The Dance, Salvador Dali's The Two Balconies, Henri Matisse's Luxemburg Garden and Claude Monet's Marine. The paintings were considered the most valuable pieces at the museum." The Globe & Mail (AP) 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 10:00 am

Museums Strike Back On Antiquities "Over the last decade the benign image of the antiquities collector has given way to a far more sinister one. Once cast as generous lenders and donors — the lifeblood of American museums — such collectors are now seen as central cogs in a conspiracy to move artifacts looted from foreign soil into museum display cases... Museum officials argue that the public has forgotten why collectors are so important and, by implication, what museums are all about. To make their position clear, they have drawn up new ethical guidelines for loans of antiquities that vigorously defend the museum-collector relationship." The New York Times 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 9:11 am

  • Nothing's Changed, Except That You Got Caught Museums are falling all over themselves to tell the world that, while they may have been taken by surprise when the rules surrounding antiquities acquistion changed recently, they are more than willing to adapt. The truth, says Guy Dammann, is that the rules haven't changed at all. "What has changed [is] the willingness of the museum to follow them." Culture Vulture (The Guardian) 02/26/06
    Posted: 02/26/2006 9:00 am

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Music

Training Leaders, One At A Time Being a concertmaster is a very different job than being a rank-and-file orchestra musician. In most orchestras, the concertmaster must play a double role in the life of the ensemble, consulting with conductors and commanding respect while simultaneously maintaining a collegial connection with the other players, who are unlikely to respond well to dictatorial tactics. It is also a job for which there has never been an official way to train, until now. "The Concertmaster Academy [at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music] is intended to groom a person for the specific leadership demands of the job. Unlike performance programs, which one might argue are glutting the marketplace with players, this program has an intentionally tiny enrollment: one per year." Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio) 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 11:34 am

Philly Breaks New Ground In The Low Brass The Philadelphia Orchestra has hired a new tuba player. Who is twenty years old. And female. And if you think that's not a major departure from the orchestral norm, you clearly haven't spent much time scanning the low brass rosters of prominent ensembles. Still, "if brass players have a reputation for macho banter and a certain amount of antics, Carol Jantsch should have no trouble keeping up. She once won a tuba-throwing contest at a tuba conference in Finland, casting an old instrument into a lake, landing first prize in the women's division." Philadelphia Inquirer 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 11:15 am

Look Alive, Dammit! Why do American orchestral musicians always look so unhappy onstage? Are they actually that cynical? Is it merely a desire not to show up one's fellow musicians? Are the players exhausted from what is admittedly a tough schedule of rehearsals and concerts? Or is the music really so difficult that looking happy to be playing it becomes a physical impossibility? "Classical music, it seems, is the only genre that abides and encourages such affectlessness... Well-intentioned though it may be, this stoic style does nothing to bridge the communication chasm between orchestras and audiences." Chicago Sun-Times 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 11:07 am

Other People's Money An ongoing dispute between the Edmonton Symphony and the family of one of the orchestra's biggest supporters has taken the form of an ugly public battle over an $800,000 bequest. "Stuart Davis, Edmonton's philanthropist of the year in 2003, didn't like lawyers and accountants. He didn't use their services when he wrote a will giving his millions to local charities and six family members. Charities ended up getting 80 per cent of his $13-million estate." But the lack of legal advice means that parts of the will are unclear, and Davis's son says that he cannot afford to be as generous with the symphony as his father might have been. Edmonton Journal 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 11:02 am

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Arts Issues

The Getty Villa: Back And Weirder Than Ever "In the late 1960s, [J. Paul Getty] hired architects, classicists and Hollywood set designers to re-create the Villa dei Papiri, at Herculaneum, which was smothered under a hundred feet of lava when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. Now, after nine years and $275 million, after lawsuits and delays and amid ongoing scandals and the prosecution of its former curator (currently defending herself against charges in Italy of trafficking in stolen antiquities), Getty's over-the-top vision is restored, reopened and wow. Hail, Caesar by the seashore -- this place is a trip." Washington Post 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 10:55 am

Too Many Cooks...? Launching big public initiatives has never been easy in Minneapolis, where a weak mayor-strong council system forces every new idea to be subjected to the will of dozens of elected officials and bureaucrats before becoming reality. The gridlock has particularly affected the arts, since nearly every bold proposal eventually falls victim to the endless bickering of the committee process. The city's current mayor is hoping to galvanize support for any number of public design projects to complement an ongoing downtown boom, but wary of the failures of past administrations, even his pitches are vague and seemingly designed to accomodate the nitpicking that is certain to follow. Minneapolis Star Tribune 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 10:29 am

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Row over Israeli tolerance museum BBC News 2/17/2006
The Cartoon Crisis GothamGazette.com 02/06
The Washington Post Freelancer's Guide to Not Getting Fired Washington City Paper 2/16/06
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People

Don't Hate Me Because I'm Enjoying Myself David Mamet can be a hard playwright to love, especially for those who have met him. But despite the difficulty of some of his plays, and his notoriously prickly persona, Mamet has become a bona fide icon. Still, he can't resist playing the victim: "I think basically people hate artists," he says. "They observe or they intuit that the artist is having a great time, that the artist doesn't have to work, that the artist gets the girls, the boys, the adulation, the money. And it's true. Once a studio executive or a journalist does that math, they are, of course, enraged." Chicago Tribune 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 12:02 pm

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Theatre

Making Art, Making Money Success and profitability are quite different things in the cutthroat world of New York theatre, and achieving one is no guarantee of making headway towards the other. "What exactly makes the business so tough? Well, expenses, which keep growing, and audiences, which don't." The New York Times 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 11:55 am

New York's Unsettlingly Profane Season "Sweet are the uses of perversity in the theater. Throw a kink, a curve, a warping twist into a time-honored dramatic formula and tried-and-true suddenly looks eye-poppingly new and unsettling. The spring season in New York is, happily and atypically, plump with demonstrations of such genre bending, with entrancingly wicked shows that extract the profane from the sacred and the rot from the pillars of society." The New York Times 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 11:49 am

Making Billy Less British The stage version of Billy Elliot has been raking in the cash for over a year in the UK, and the show is now preparing for its first international tour. But there's something very British about the Elliott story, and producers are scrambling to insure that the message doesn't get lost in translation. The Guardian (UK) 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 10:11 am

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Publishing

UK Plagiarism Case Heads To The High Court "On Monday, the High Court in London will hear a lawsuit which will either make publishing history or be dismissed as a storm in a teacup. The reason for the fuss is that it relates to one of the most successful novels of modern times and the lifting of "the whole architecture" of a body of research, a largely intangible entity which, not without reason, has caused paranoia throughout the literary world. Plagiarism is not a grounds for litigation in the UK, so instead the plaintiffs are alleging copyright infringement, which, of course, amounts to much the same thing. What makes the situation all the more titillating, and bizarre, however, is that they are suing their own publisher." The Scotsman (UK) 02/26/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 12:27 pm

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Media

Fargin' Shite: The Seven (Thousand) Words You Can Say On TV These days, there aren't many words you can't say on television. But the policies of broadcasters determined to keep the small screen "family friendly" have led to a bizarre expansion of the language for purposes of on-screen cursing that won't get anyone fired. No one in real life would ever blurt out "frik," or "frinx," or "fup" in a moment of anger, but for TV characters, the made-up curse words have become second nature, and are bordering on becoming a new dialect. Toronto Star 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 10:53 am

Liberal Activism or Artistic Utility? Ever since Brokeback Mountain became a bona fide cultural phenomenon, conservative commentators have been alleging that Hollywood is deliberately shoving homosexuality down the throats of "normal" Americans who have no interest in it. But Colin Covert says that while Hollywood may well have an agenda, it likely isn't of the gay variety: "It might be more a question of sheer artistic utility. What gay themes offer in this day and age is the essential element for drama: conflict. And while there are few subjects as intrinsically charged as forbidden love, there's always a need for a novel, culturally relevant angle as social mores change." Minneapolis Star Tribune 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 10:14 am

How To Insert Your Network Into A Race War America's Armenian immigrant community was thrilled last month when PBS announced that it would air a documentary detailing the Armenian genocide of World War I. But since scheduling the showing, PBS has bowed to pressure from the Turkish government, which has always denied the genocide, agreeing to follow the documentary with a "panel discussion including people who dispute that genocide occurred." The New York Times 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 9:29 am

Courting The Studio Exec When Paramount Pictures acquired DreamWorks Studios recently, it found itself in need of a new executive to run the company, and went straight to Stacey Snider, head of Universal Pictures. Ordinarily, this is the type of thing that might be kept hush-hush. But this is Hollywood, where rumors are stock in trade, and the Snider sweepstakes are now officially on. The New York Times 02/25/06
Posted: 02/26/2006 9:19 am

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