“Seventy-five years after Arthur Fielder took over the Boston Pops and turned it into the most famous and influential series of its kind, pops concerts are very different. Increasingly, in Boston and elsewhere, pops means Rockapella, medleys of TV themes, Doc Severinsen, celebrity crooners doing music from last year’s blockbuster movie. It means what Richard Dyer, the Boston Globe’s classical music critic since 1975, calls ‘the hits of 25 or 30 years ago — the favorites of the target audience, when young’.”
Tag: 06.19.05
Pop Grows Up
“Pop got its start by making fun of the platitudes that second- and third-generation Abstract Expressionism had settled into, mocking the increasingly popular movement’s increasingly shrill insistence on gestural spontaneity, existential anxiety and psychological authenticity.” But Pop Art has grown up. “Pop and connoisseurship are no longer opposed. Sophistication is not limited to highbrow cultivation but encompasses enthusiasms that cut across classes, arising wherever passion has room to pursue its own ends, on its own terms.”
In Chicago – Dueling Contemporaries
The Chicago Art Institute is building an enormous addition that will result in the largest museum of contemporary art in Chicago. So where does that leave the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art?
Brit Returns Nazi-Looted Sculpture To Greece
A British citizen has returned an ancient statue to the government of Greece. “Following the fate of so many antiquities during the Nazi occupation, the kouros is believed to have been looted when the Germans bombarded the island in November 1943. After winding up in the possession of a private collector in Switzerland, James Ede’s antiquities firm acquired it earlier this year.”
Scottish Arts Warn Government Against Control
The Scottish Arts Council warns that Scotland’s culture will be harmed if the Scottish executive extends control over the arts. “In a strongly-worded letter to the commission, the SAC insists the arts will only continue to flourish if control remains separate from government. The letter – signed by more than 30 arts organisations across Scotland – makes it clear that any move to extend the Executive’s power within the arts will harm cultural expression.”