Category: today’s top story

“How many mediocre buildings can one city absorb? And what if these buildings are meant to affirm our highest values? Those questions come to mind as I ponder the Newseum, the latest reason to lament the state of contemporary architecture in this city. Rising on a prominent site along Pennsylvania Avenue, it joins a spate of new memorials and museums that have been reshaping the historic center of Washington….”

“After nearly seven years on the Strip, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the Venetian will close its doors May 11… With the closure — and Steve Wynn’s dismantling of his own fine arts gallery — the only remaining Strip art gallery is at the Bellagio, where the effort to bring fine art to the Las Vegas masses began in 1998.”

“As the Columbus Symphony limps from paycheck to paycheck, the accusations explode like cannons during the 1812 Overture. Much of the blame has landed at the feet of the symphony board… Broadly, critics blame the board for mismanagement. Specifically, they accuse trustees of insufficient fundraising, poor community advocacy and a lack of passion for the music.”

Maurice Ravel apparently had “a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia,” when he was composing “Bolero,” but non-artists stricken with FTD may lose other abilities even as they suddenly become gifted in the arts. “The disease apparently (alters) circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity.”

The children of artist Mark Rothko are petitioning the New York Supreme Court to allow their father’s remains to be moved from the Long Island cemetery where they have lain for 38 years to a Jewish cemetery in Westchester County, north of New York City. There will be plenty of resistance to the petition.

“On a freezing February night in 2006, an ailing Luciano Pavarotti rose from his wheelchair at the opening of the Turin Winter Olympics to give a resounding rendition of the aria Nessun Dorma, his final public performance before he died of cancer last September.” But “the opera singer was unsure of his weakening voice and faked the live appearance in front of a TV audience of millions, using video trickery, careful lipsynching and a compliant orchestra that pre-recorded its backing days earlier.”

“This is the new dawn chorus of Beijing – the peal of hit steel, the crump of the piston hammer, the high song of the drill… Right now, Beijing is probably the biggest building site on earth, with the possible exceptions of Shanghai and Dubai. Urban re-engineering has taken place on a greater scale, perhaps – Haussmann’s Paris, Lutyens’s New Delhi – but never so rapidly.”

“There are three times as many urbanites in America as country folk, yet you wouldn’t know it listening to the three main presidential candidates, or perusing their Web sites… You won’t hear much about aging cities on Earth fighting to keep their downtowns alive and their overcrowded commuter buses on the road. Cities just don’t figure in the political imagination anymore.”

“In what experts described as the largest private sale of art ever, the heirs of the legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend have parted with some $600 million worth of paintings and sculptures in two transactions to cover their estate taxes.”

“Filling the boards of arts companies with business appointees has been a dismal failure that has stifled creativity. That is the view of the international arts entrepreneur Justin Macdonnell, who wants a radical rethink of the way arts companies are run.”