“The National Theatre dominated the new writing categories, with Coram Boy, its recent children’s play, Howard Brenton’s controversial drama Paul, and Simon Stephens’s On the Shore of the Wide Wild World receiving nominations.”
Tag: 01.18.06
Calatrava’s City Canvas
Architect Santiago Calatrava has been using Valencia, Spain as his canvas, building one of Europe’s biggest performing arts palaces. “It’s a flashy new culture palace all right, designed by one of the world’s premier league ‘starchitects’, Calatrava, and it could well do for Spain’s third city what Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim did for Bilbao. But there are some key differences. First and foremost, Valencia is Calatrava’s home town. He was born there, grew up there, studied there and even published a book on the city’s architecture. And although his office is based in Zurich, Calatrava has been building in Valencia for most of his career.”
Looking At Beck’s Art
What’s competing for this year’s Beck’s Futures prize? Here’s a gallery of the nominated work…
Britain’s Museum Crisis
“Since 1993, the acquisitions budgets of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum have dropped by 90 per cent. The Government says that museums can decide how much of their grant-in-aid they spend on purchases, but this is specious, because they are so cash-strapped that they cannot afford to allocate more to acquisitions.”
The Memoir Problem
“No one wants to read an 8,000-page memoir that pores over each waking moment. But now, the controversy surrounding James Frey’s bestselling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” is raising questions about how factual even the most carefully written memoirs are. The memoir is a strange kind of performance. It’s halfway between fiction and testimony. ‘Anybody in his right mind knows that a memoir is unreliable’.”