“Would English National Opera have commissioned a work like the benighted Gaddafi had not the woolly notion of opening up opera to the untapped younger audience seemed such a politically expedient idea to embrace? And would the Proms before the Blair years ever have dreamt of including an evening with Michael Ball in its season? Those are the negatives, driven by the wholly false idea that popular art must by definition be good art….”
Tag: 05.04.07
Learn To Act Online
“Online acting classes are emerging as an up-and-coming trend, spurred by the popularity of YouTube and MySpace and the wide availability of inexpensive digital video equipment.”
Half-Price Harry A Must
Waterstone’s says it’s important for the books chain to sacrifice profits and offer the new Harry Potter at half price. “Pre-orders for the seventh instalment were already close to the sixth Harry Potter book’s total number of sales via HMV’s businesses. For £8.99, customers will get the new Harry Potter for half price plus a free copy of Wizardology: A Guide to Wizards of the World. The offer would not lose money but nor would it bring in much. ‘At half price it’s pretty difficult to make money’.”
Dancing With Tony: An Uncertain Legacy
Under Tony Blair’s rule, UK dance has thrived in many ways. “After decades of being squeezed into small, grubby or unsuitable theatres, a cash-rich mix of lottery funding, Arts Council money and private sponsorship has allowed dance to be re-housed in an amazingly glamorous style… But there is one bleak note amid this bonanza. The problems of funding never go away – the lack of money, the inequities of its distribution – and the final months of the Blair decade have been particularly bad for dance.”
HK Conductor Driven Out By Pollution
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the importance of an orchestra’s music director living in the same city as his orchestra. So it can’t be welcome news for the Hong Kong Philharmonic that music director Edo deWaart is moving his family out of the city, and back to his wife’s family home in Wisconsin. The major reason for the move: Hong Kong’s notorious air pollution is sickening deWaart’s children.
Art Tracker – In Search Of Nazi-Looted Art
Bernard Taper, “a longtime writer for the New Yorker, one-time Chronicle reporter and retired UC Berkeley journalism professor, has become the poster child for the countless artworks stolen by Hitler and his Nazi henchmen from Jewish homes and art galleries, civic museums, private collections and churches across Europe — tens of thousands of them still missing — during the reign of the Third Reich.”
Sony Successfully Protects “Spidey”
At a time when major Hollywood movies are pirated and sold on street corners even before their theatre debut, Sony’s anti-piracy measures seem to have protected Spiderman 3.”Sony’s multimillion-dollar security plan seems to have worked. Although the studio admits that bootleg copies of ‘Spider-Man 3’ could be available for sale and download as early as this weekend, the studio appears to have blocked the release of any illegal copies before the film landed in theaters.”
A New Barnes – Unsafe At Any Speed?
“Certainly, more people will be able to see the Barnes collection in a new museum freed of the strict visitor limits (1,200 per week) that apply in Merion Station. But if they shuffle into the parkway building from a museum down the block — saving time for a trip through the nearby behemoth of the neighborhood, the Philadelphia Museum of Art — how meaningful is the experience likely to be?”
Taking The Measure Of Lincoln Kirstein
“Lincoln Kirstein — patron of the performing, visual, and literary arts; novelist; poet; critic and historian of dance, photography and painting — was one of nature’s titans. He looked the role. Nobody who saw or met him can easily have forgotten the imposing physical impression he made.”
Seattle Art Museum’s New Face
“Lie down with a bank, get up with pinstripes; but riffing off a bare-bones bank was not the only challenge. Venturi’s 1991 building is a faux art deco merger of a traditional Chinese palace and a McDonald’s drive-through, five stories of muted razzle-dazzle. Portland architect Cloepfil was charged with creating a plausible link between art and banking. What he came up with would be a handsome addition to any post-industrial urban core. It’s cleaner and more alluring than the bank but doesn’t attempt to compete with Venturi’s postmodern patchwork.”