“The organizers of the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair have invited the South American country to showcase its artistic heritage. But the custodians of Argentina’s national art collection are unable to comply with the German curator’s request because of the country’s ban on overseas art loans aimed at preventing litigant creditors from seizing government-owned assets.”
Tag: 02.27.09
Doctor Atomic, Not Quite So Much
John Adams’s opera is having its UK premiere at ENO, and the London critics, like many of their American colleagues, find fault with Peter Sellars’s libretto. Rupert Christiansen puts it most starkly: “[It] makes for a peculiarly inert plot, with all the corny ‘countdown’ tension of a rotten episode of Star Trek… and dramatis personae who remain flat figures, lumbered with unshaped words that they seem to recite rather than embody.” Not all critics agree on how much this problem matters, though, and they mostly like Adams’s score.
Hirshhorn Finally Gets A Director
After a search of more than a year, the Smithsonian has chosen Richard Koshalek to be the next director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Koshalek presided over extraordinary growth in his 17 years (1983-99) at MOCA in Los Angeles; last year he was forced out as president of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design in a conflict over tuition and a $50 million library designed by Frank Gehry.
Strapped CBC May Need To Sell Assets
The corporation’s president says that the network, hit hard by an advertising downturn and faced with an unsympathetic Conservative government, may need “to monetize some of our assets.” Such a monetization “could mean anything from unloading Radio 3 to putting a website up for sale.”
Asheville Lyric Opera, Bucking Trend, Decides Not To Cancel Season
“The opera’s board of directors voted unanimously Thursday night to proceed with Rigoletto March 27-28… The company was pinched by a decline in contributions and box office revenue, and needed to raise $24,000 to produce the opera.”