The New Orleans Ballet Association has got up and running again. “NOBA lost most of its season and its chief venue, the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, to Hurricane Katrina. It also was forced to suspend its educational outreach efforts temporarily with thousands of area youth. Help has poured in from patrons, volunteers and artists, including the New York-based Parsons company, which waived fees for its Wednesday and Thursday performances.”
Tag: 05.14.06
The NEA At 40
The National Endowment for the Arts celebrates the milestone. An exhibition gives some idea how far. “We’ve come a long way. Parallel to the art of engagement has been a politics of disengagement, at least when it comes to arts funding. The only reason the NEA could meet in the midst of this exhibition without a firestorm is that, politically, the NEA has disengaged not just from funding this kind of art, but from the people, artists, curators and audiences who are interested in it.”
All The Books In The World In One Place
That’s the dream of armies of copiers, working to digitize the world’s libraries. “The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world…”
The Kimmel’s New Organ
Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center unveils its new organ. “If the Philadelphia Orchestra has done well all this time without a proper in-residence pipe organ (as opposed to the Academy of Music’s movable organ), is this really something we need? Given the organ’s flashy range and magnitude of sound, will it usher in an era of effects more than music? Will it be some sort of Frankenstein’s monster, strangling all subtlety in its path?”
Daniel Barenboim On Top Of The World?
“Barenboim’s appointment at La Scala, like the CSO’s recent appointment of Bernard Haitink as principal conductor and Pierre Boulez as conductor emeritus, buys the respective institutions time to fill two high-profile posts without rushing to make choices they might regret. Barenboim’s prominent role in La Scala’s future opens the door to a possible ascendancy to Muti’s former post somewhere down the line. A couple of major successes there could cinch it for him.”
Morgan Library Gets Game
“As the Morgan’s longer name indicates, the library’s $106 million transformation is intended to make it more appealing to museum-goers and cultural tourists in a city where the competition from such powerhouse institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art is all but overwhelming.”
Sorting Out What The Louvre Is
“The Louvre is so immense — both in literal space and in image — that it can be hard to fathom that it has struggled to keep pace with the other great museums of the world — and of Paris — that have become hotspots for cultural tourism, bringing people back for more and different art experiences by repackaging and marketing their collections to make them more compelling.”
Great Music – Some Basic Questions
“We need to wake up to the fact that people are now asking basic questions. Why are we musical? Why did people write symphonies? Why do we have the string quartet? They seem child-like, these questions, but they’re there to provide us with the opportunity to enthuse and explain and demonstrate the answers we first stumbled upon in our musical journey and which encouraged us to make that journey in the first place. Figure out our answers to those questions, and it will help us tackle some more simple, yet more terrifying, questions: why should the state spend money on the arts, why do we have opera and why is it so expensive, why should we have so many orchestras in London?”
Sizing Up James levine’s First Season At The Boston Symphony
“The orchestra generally played gloriously for Levine, who has given the guest conductors a new point of departure for their own adventures. The orchestra’s collective technique and sound have changed under Levine: There is more blend, more contrast, better balances, infinitely more refinement, and even more power.”
The Chicago Art Institute Code
“Like most museums in the United States, the Art Institute of Chicago owns nothing by Leonardo, but that doesn’t mean its permanent collection isn’t studded with artworks that harbor secrets of their own. In some cases — particularly in works from the Renaissance, the golden age of “coded” art — the images originally were meant to be mysterious. To demonstrate their erudition, the artists packed their paintings with so many symbols, allegories and allusions that viewers were forced to resort to reference books in which the most popular emblems of the day were unpacked and explicated.”