Placido Domingo has been awarded an honorary music degree from Oxford University. Oxford chancellor Chris Patten said to Domingo, in Latin: “You are the darling of audiences, a champion of music, the Orpheus of the age.”
Tag: 06.25.03
The New Italian (American) Film City
In the 1950s in the era of La Dolce Vita, Cinecitta Studios outside of Rome was a center of cinema, home to Federico Fellini. Inevitably, over the years the studio fell into disrepair. Now it’s undergoing a rebirth, led by a wave of American films. “The studio, built in 1937 by Mussolini as a propaganda instrument, is too often seen as a relic, fettered to Fellini and his peers: ‘It should be seen as a current place, full of people who will be in the cinema tomorrow, not decades ago. Now the most important are the Americans.’Many American productions have used the studio recently.”
Free At Last – Winthrop’s Collection Is Liberated
Grenville L Winthrop was “arguably the most discriminating and independent-minded of all 20th-century American collectors. Yet his collection of 4,000 paintings, drawings and objects is far less well-known than theirs.” He left his collection to Harvard’s Fogg Museum with instructions the art was not to be loaned. “Then, about five years ago, the director of the Fogg looked again at the fine print in Winthrop’s will. The document stipulated that, if the museum ever lent a work from the bequest, it would be obliged to pay to the Foundlings Hospital in New York City the sum of $100,000 – a fortune in 1937 when the will was drawn up, but not such a big deal in the late 1990s. In a coup so outrageous I smile every time I think about it, the director simply sent a cheque to the happy orphans, and, hey presto, the magic spell had been broken. The museum was free to lend any of the pictures anywhere, any time, and to anyone who asked. Art that had been immured in an ivory tower went global.”
Venice – Just Looking At Art
Many people have worries about contemporary art, and the Venice Biennale can make those worries rear up at you. But “you don’t have to like it all in order to embrace it. You’re allowed to make distinctions and your distinctions are as likely to be right as anyone else’s. Only a certain percentage of what is in fashion now will stand the test of time. In this way, contemporary art is not so very different from the art of the past.”