Tag: 06.19.00

ROYAL OPERA HOUSE DIRECTOR RESIGNS

Michael Kaiser, credited with revitalizing Covent Garden (home to both the Royal Opera and Royal Ballet), announced his resignation today after just 18 months on the job. ROH management now faces the dreaded task of trying to fill the ill-fated directorship; Kaiser was the fourth executive director in just two years. – BBC

ME, MYSELF, AND I

Gerald Barry is Ireland’s leading contemporary classical composer. A festival celebrating his work runs this week in Dublin. “Now 48, he retains traces of his long-lived student aura but, whether he is smiling or serious, there is no mistaking Barry’s deliberate innocence. He lives for music and for music alone. As an artist he seems to be in a hurry. Who is he writing for? “Myself.” – Irish Times

THEY USED TO CALL IT NEW YORK OF THE NORTH

Toronto is Canada’s flagship city. But the flagship is sinking. The symphony orchestra is deeply in debt, the museums are floundering, the opera company is too conservative for its own good, and the theatre scene is ill. There’s even a move to tear down the city’s largest performing arts center. People don’t go downtown any more, and the reasons are easy to see. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

THE LINE KING

Al Hirschfeld turns 97 on Wednesday, and he’s still going strong, regularly caricaturing the worlds of stage, dance, music, and film. “I’m enchanted with line, what makes it work, how it communicates recognition to the viewer,” roars the man they dubbed The Line King. “That sounds like a ridiculous, insane kind of thing to devote your life to, but that’s what I’ve done. I find it fascinating, and I’m closer to a definition of it than when I started.” – MSNBC

THE TATE IS A FRAUD?

Jed Perl is down on the new Tate. “People tell me that they love Tate Modern. When I ask for specifics, they don’t seem to be able to say why. The public has such an insatiable hunger for the best things in life – which, needless to say, include museum visits – that they would rather suspend judgment than go away disappointed. There are no more than four dozen paintings or sculptures of consequence dribbled through Tate Modern’s nearly endless galleries, yet somehow this does not matter. The museum has become a funhouse enclosed in a gigantic site-specific sculpture.” – The New Republic

CASUALTIES OF WAR

The art of Chechnya is being destroyed in that republic’s struggle with Russia. “Many of the republic’s archaeological and architectural sites are being destroyed since they are located at the centre of hostilities. War is war, and art and archaeology are caught in the crossfire.” – The Art Newspaper

SURGE OR SLUMP?

The well-publicized sums paid at auction last week for two Victorian-era paintings (£6.6 million by Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber for John William Waterhouse’s “Saint Cecilia” and £2.6 million by Australian collector John Schaeffer for Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Pandora”) may not tell the whole story about what’s really happening in the world of Victorian art sales. In fact, Sotheby’s failed to sell 40% of its British art on the block last week, while Phillips’ unsold lots (of mainly Victorian pictures) totaled 50 percent. – The Telegraph (UK)

ETHICAL URBANISM?

  • The theme of the seventh annual Venice Biennale of Architecture is “cities: less aesthetics, more ethics.” Not a bad goal, but “it’s a particularly tall order in Venice: the city has been in decline since the 18th century, and hasn’t been a real, workaday place since the great flood of November 1966, which marked the beginning of a major international effort to conserve [the city]. From then on Venice was pickled in aspic, becoming a tourist ghetto and a place known equally for its aesthetics and its lack of ethics when it came to dealing with the millions of visitors who flood into St Mark’s Square every year.” – The Guardian