“Resolving the inherent tension between the museum’s traditional role – collecting, conserving and exhibiting top-quality aesthetic objects – and the need to show museum-goers a good time has become the most difficult aspect of contemporary museumship.” Directors “do whatever seems reasonable to make museums less intimidating and more visitor-friendly. Yet for the most part, this attempt to be all things to most people hasn’t succeeded: Permanent collections continue to be starved for attention.”
Tag: 08.12.07
Kahlo’s Letters, Sealed By Rivera, Reveal Her Anguish
“She was always one of the most painfully personal of artists…. But finally the one part of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s life that has remained secret – at the orders of her former husband, fellow painter Diego Rivera – has been revealed in a new book published in Mexico. It tells the contents of a series of letters that Kahlo exchanged with her physician, and confidant, after she suffered a miscarriage in 1932, describing the devastation she felt when she realised that she could never have Rivera’s child.”
A Burgeoning Dance Form Has Battle Call At Its Heart
“South Korea is at the forefront of the new wave of break-dance, or b-boy, artistry, but dancers from France to China are also incorporating elements of jazz, capoeira, acrobatics and martial arts into longer choreographed works that are intended for a mainstream audience and the legitimacy of a proscenium stage. Though still largely unknown, this new generation has reinvented a movement style that in many ways had been exploited and dismissed.”
German Mosque’s Architecture Is A Red-Herring Issue
In Cologne, Germany, some locals are irked “that some actual Muslims want to build an actual mosque with a dome and minarets. The residents complain that the minarets would clash with the towering spires of the city’s celebrated 13th Century cathedral.” Designed by Paul Boehm, son of Pritzker Prize winner Gottfried Boehm, the $20 million mosque “blends elements of Ottoman classicism with cutting-edge modernity.” Of course, architecture isn’t the real issue….
Sarah Ruhl, Outfitted By Grandmother’s Closet
Playwright Sarah Ruhl “has a closet full of her grandmother’s clothes, many of which she has had for more than 15 years. … The longest lasting of these garments are six or seven well-made winter coats from the 1950s and ’60s. Her favorite is a nubby pink wool, which she has worn steadily since she filched it, as a defiantly Midwestern student amid the fashionably black-clad masses at Brown University, and all through her career as a playwright. ‘I like the color pink,’ she said. ‘I am tired of the color black.'”
Black Authors Seek An Audience Through L.A. Expo
“Three-quarters of the writers” at Saturday’s third annual Los Angeles Black Book Expo “were self-published, said Charles Chatmon, the festival’s executive director. ‘Rather than deal with the horrors of mainstream publishing, they prefer to control the finances and the content,’ said Chatmon, a proofreader for an Irvine biomedical firm who has self-published two poetry books. ‘And it’s the only way many African Americans can get their works out there.'”
Israel Museum Revamp Respects Architecture, Visitor
“The Israel Museum is one of the finest in the Middle East — if you can figure out how to get in and find the art.” Museum director James S. Snyder sees an $80 million expansion and renovation project, due to be completed in 2009, “as the solution to deep irritation over how the Israel Museum’s rich and varied collections … seem almost to be hidden in a maze of different entryways. Yet the original architecture is itself an admired work of art that no one wanted to mar.”
The Legacy Of “Tommy”: Rock Opera Thrives (Sort Of)
“Rock opera has had a spotty history, but by now the barriers between high and low art, between classical and pop music, have been so thoroughly demolished that something was bound to have happened. And, in fact, rockers are welcomed into the opera house and concert hall like never before. Meanwhile, classical composers appropriate from the pop world like crazy. … The only problem with all this is that very little rock opera is opera, and very, very little of it is any good.”
Woody Allen On Ingmar Bergman
“To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: ‘Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?'”
Joachim, 100 Years Dead But Showing Signs Of Life
“Joseph Joachim, who died 100 years ago this Wednesday … personified an era that understood Great Music as religion. Yet people liked as well as venerated him,” and this friend of Brahms and the Schumanns was one of the 19th century’s greatest violinists. “White, male European and dead, Joachim might look today like a strong candidate for Most Famous Violinist Nobody Under 60 Has Ever Heard Of. Yet a few vital signs can still be detected by anyone inclined to look and listen for them.”