English National Opera has chosen Sean Doran – currently heading the Perth Arts Festival in Australia – as the beleaguered company’s new artistic director. It will be a tough job. “By the time he arrives in April, the result of the strike ballot among the 68 members of the chorus, faced with one in three redundancies to reduce the company’s deficit, will be known, and the Musicians’ Union will have decided whether to initiate grievance procedures over the treatment of the orchestra.”
Tag: 02.08.03
Manchester And Liverpool Pull Ahead On Museum Spending
After a decade of big spending on museum spending in London, last year the northwest pulled ahead. “Manchester and Liverpool profited to the tune of £100m with the money spent on two new culture palaces, one extension and one revamp, in a year when just £33.7m was spent on new or updated buildings in the capital.”
A Writing Life On Screen?
A new series of movies about writers raises the question: “Can famous writers work as fictional characters without the fictional characters getting in the way of their work? Dramas about authors are encouraged by the high sales of biographies and tend to concentrate on their lives rather than their writing. But this isn’t just because of a cultural preference for gossip over substance, fact above fiction. The process of turning thoughts into prose is passive and private, and the metaphors for it – balled-up foolscap, scrunched-up brows – have rightly become derided movie cliches.”
Painting Confirmed As Van Gogh Sells For $500,000
A painting thought to be anonymous, but revealed to have been by Van Gogh has sold for $500,000. A Japanese auction company was “planning to auction off the small portrait of a peasant woman for between 10,000 and 20,000 yen ($83 to $167) after struggling to establish the identity of the artist. But a last-minute fax from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam confirmed that the picture was an early work by the Dutch impressionist master.”