The success of the Alvin Ailey company is one of the great ongoing stories in American dance. What explains it? A major part of the answer certainly lies in the company’s repertory cornerstone, the sure-fire Revelations, which inevitably anchors every season. This year it closed 26 of the company’s 39 New York programs, and I’m sure that every one of those performances was greeted with delirious enthusiasm.”
Tag: 01.08.03
Hilton Kramer Attacks Study of Visual Arts Critics
Hilton Kramer is in a huff about a new study of visual arts criticism published by Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program. He’s pleased to see that in a name-recognition poll, he rates highly among fellow critics – an 80! But a few sentences later he reveals that he only earns a 12 – can you believe it? – among other critics for his influence on the field. In conclusion? “The Visual Art Critic is in every respect a perfectly useless enterprise—perfect, above all, in its flawless incomprehension of the subject it addresses…” So there.
Forbes Unloading Victorian Collection As Money Woes Mount
The Forbes family has amassed a major collection of Victorian art. But “next month, the bulk of that collection, which rivals the Tate’s and the Victoria and Albert’s collections—not to mention composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s—will become the latest chunk of the Forbes’ art and antiquities holdings to be sold off as the publishers of Forbes magazine struggle against a brutal economic downturn.”
Report Criticizes Smithsonian Research Efforts
A special commission has issued a report complaining that the Smithsonian has let its research efforts become “unfocused and underfunded,” and calling on the organization to “concentrate its scientific work in specific areas and make a major effort to raise more money.”
Why Tolkien Would Have Hated This Movie
The smashing success of the first two installments of the filmed version of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy points up a fundamental irony in the story: the movies could not pack the emotional and visceral punch they do without the use of state-of-the-art digital technology, but Tolkien, a vehement Luddite, would undoubtedly have despised the computer-generated effects. “Tolkien’s hatred of technology was central to his conception of Middle Earth. The good hobbits are classic old English villagers, content to cultivate small plots of land and smoke their pipes… The evil wizard Saruman, by contrast, is a kind of demented Henry Ford, with a ‘mind of metal and wheels’.”
Dance Summit Of International Artistic Directors
Artistic directors of dance companies around the world are gathering this week to talk about the state of the art. “Figures from the Bolshoi, the Royal Ballet and companies from Chile to Portugal are taking part in the think-tank to address how to develop new “classics” alongside the tried and tested favourites audiences always want to see. The three-day symposium will ask whether the companies are losing their individuality as they all perform the same Swan Lakes, Nutcrackers and Coppelias.”
A Great Threat To Modern Culture
“The current artistic culture, which is replete with references, borrowings and parody, has collided with a corporate and legal culture that is bent on protecting intellectual property. If Andy Warhol were working today, he would be facing litigation from Campbell’s soup, Church & Dwight (the makers of Brillo pads) and every corporation whose logo he appropriated. ‘Virtually all art builds on previous work, either overtly or covertly’.”
New NYT Editor Cracks The Whip
Steven Erlanger is the New York Times’ new culture editor. And he’s jumped into the job with a memo to his troops exhorting them to do better: “I’ve been impressed and gratified by some of what we’ve published in the last weeks of the year. But I’ve also been dismayed by some of the flat, careless and inelegant writing I’ve seen, some of which has gotten into the paper. What we do in the section matters. I’m concentrating now on understanding how it works before deciding how to make it better.”
Frank Rich Rejoins NYT Culture Pages
Frank Rich, considered the most-feared theatre critic in New York during the 1980s when he was theatre critic at the New York Times, is moving back to the NYT culture pages. For the past eight years Rich has been writing an op-ed on the NYT editorial pages. “We plan for his column to be an anchor of the Arts & Leisure section. In addition, he will work closely with Steve Erlanger, our newly appointed cultural news editor, in planning coverage and the overall design of the culture pages.”
HipHop And The Academy
“A quarter century after its founding in New York’s South Bronx, the culture of beats, rhymes, and life is finding new devotees in classrooms, conferences, and faculty meetings coast-to-coast. Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, Yale, Harvard, New York University, and M.I.T. have each boasted courses examining some aspect of the culture, while the prestigious annual American Studies and Modern Language Association conferences have featured similar panels. Some snicker that as long as Princeton theologian Cornel West doesn’t record a follow-up to his 2001 album, Sketches of My Culture, the academy will continue unfettered in its engagement of the global, billion-dollar culture.”