Tag: 05.05.00

BROADWAY HAS RECORD WEEK

Broadway set an attendance record during  the week of April 17-23, when some 308,000 people saw the 36 plays and musicals currently playing Broadway houses. The League of American Theaters and Producers says the number “challenges both Shea and Yankee stadiums’ weekly in-season draws.” Gross receipts for the week were reported at $17 million, an increase of more than 25 percent over last year’s figure of $13.4 million. – Backstage

“PART OF A DECEPTION?”

Two men say they were hired by Georgia O’Keeffe to do chores for her. “John Poling, a philosophy professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and Jacobo ‘Jackie’ Suazo, a retired state employee in Santa Fe, each recall being welcomed by O’Keeffe at her Albuquerque home, doing chores and, ultimately, being allowed to paint with her.” What became of the paintings is part of a tangled legacy. – CNN

THE VISION THING

How could New York not build itself Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim in Lower Manhattan? It will have to be considered the most important new piece of architecture to be added to the cityscape since Frank Lloyd Wright’s original spiral. “The Guggenheim spiral is crotchety architecture that has generated a sentimental allegiance. But the Guggenheim plan for lower Manhattan induces dazed admiration, and a shuddering recognition of how much is still possible in today’s architecture. This is the key concept: possibility. If New York is the new Rome, it too needs its follies and risk-takers, its architecture of vision and vulgarity. If we don’t build this museum now, we’ll never forgive ourselves. And a hundred years hence, neither will anyone else.” – Feed

A MATTER OF INTELLIGENCE

Just why do so many movies seem to be so anti-intellectual?  “Apart from the extreme theory that many movies are made by, and designed for, the brain dead, there is considerable evidence that the American film industry has long had a problem conceptualizing intelligence and prefers, instead, to glorify stupidity.” – Ottawa Citizen (CP) 05/05/00

TAKING ON THE TATE

Among the building excitement about this week’s opening of the new Tate Modern in London, not all the critics are enthusiastic. “Tate Modern is a graceless, gimmicky name for a building that is Britain’s best example of fascist architecture, speaking in its modern abstract classicism of Hitler, Mussolini and Atatürk rather than the timid aspirations of Attlee in 1947, the year of its foundation.” – London Evening Standard

MOVING ON UP

Though it attracts a million visitors a year, London’s National Portrait Gallery has always been upstaged by its more prominent neighbor, the National Gallery. But a new makeover courtesy of an £11.9 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and another £4 million from private donations, has transformed the gallery into something much, much more. – The Times (UK)

DISCERNING TASTE

  • Noted architecture critic Donald Trump has come out against the Guggenheim Museum’s proposal to build a new Frank Gehry-designed branch in Lower Manhattan. “This building could potentially destroy the skyline of lower Manhattan. There are some people that equate [the design] to a junkyard,” says The Donald. – New York Post