After a year of cratering endowments and slashed budgets, “a mood of cautious optimism prevails among those at the helm of America’s leading art museums.”
Tag: 01.28.10
There’s No Right To Dance At The Jefferson Memorial
“A federal judge has ruled against a woman who was arrested for dancing with a group of 17 others at the memorial dedicated to President Jefferson.”
Northern Ireland Creates A National Opera Company
“The Arts Council has allocated £374,000 to fund the first year of the new company, whose brief will be to ‘provide new ways for local people to engage with opera, raising the standards of local performances as well as providing a platform to showcase the very best international artists’.”
Making Drama Out Of Suicide Chat Rooms
“This is not group suicide, or mass death via cult. Instead, these are discussion groups where people in despair come to ask questions about ending it all, where they talk about their intentions. … Those who linger become experts in the workings of the group, and a social hierarchy emerges.”
Christie’s Sales Slumped 24 Percent In 2009
“‘These figures were much better than we expected,’ Edward Dolman, Christie’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. ‘The art market is vulnerable and we thought we’d be down 50 percent, as we were in the last recession in 1991.'”
Seattle Symphony Musicians And Management Reach Tentative Agreement
“The 23-month, three-season contract – which could be extended for an additional eight months – would immediately cut musicians’ pay by 5 percent until the end of this season … Symphony management and players have been negotiating a new contract for nine months to replace the one that expired at the end of last year.”
Watching Maya Deren’s Footage Of Haitian Ritual Dance
“Despite the choppy footage throughout the roughly 30 minutes of unedited film, there is something sacred about the way in which the dancers, both men and women, ride a wave of soundless rhythm. The movement is simple; it’s how deeply the dancers travel inside of the easy steps that matters the most.”
Seiji Ozawa To Curate Carnegie Hall Japan Festival In 2010-11
The festival “will feature dance, Noh theater, taiko drumming, art exhibitions, manga and jazz, as well as performances by orchestras partly founded by Mr. Ozawa: the Saito Kinen Orchestra and the Seiji Ozawa Ongaku-juku.” Much of the programming will also play at the Orange County PAC in California.
Louis Auchincloss, 92, Chronicler Of New York’s Old-Money Society
“Although he also wrote distinguished short stories, criticism and social history, … [he] was mainly regarded as one of America’s pre-eminent novelists of manners and a portraitist of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper crust.” Observed Gore Vidal, “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.”
Remembering Moscow’s Crusading Preservationist
“Wedged behind an ornate desk cluttered with Soviet-era souvenirs, architectural tchotchkes and ashtrays, [David Sarkisyan] was constantly fulminating against the decrepit state of that city’s landmarks, … making introductions among the architects, historians and socialites who constantly wandered in and out, or pleading over the phone with the few journalists and government officials he felt he could trust.”