“When peddling Provençal sea salt — or deterring crime, or boosting efficiency in a hospital’s operating room — classical music seems to be played as much for its psychological properties as for the art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic of the concert hall.”
Tag: 08.15.06
E-Book Demand Is High After All
“More than 30 million books were downloaded in the past month as part of the World eBook Fair, a giveaway of books in electronic form. Originally intended to run July 4 to Aug. 4, the project was extended for a week because unexpected demand at the start temporarily overwhelmed computer servers.”
In New York, Expert Eyes Peeled For Stolen Art
“New York is often the destination for art that is silently whisked from museums and personal collections, but as the center of the art world, the city has more than its share of cautious eyes watching for suspicious sales, missing links, and unusually rare offerings for relatively inexpensive prices. With the disclosures in the past week that hundreds of pieces of art have been stolen from two prominent Russian museums, New Yorkers in the art business and the law enforcement officials who investigate art crime have been watching to see if any of the pieces make their way through this major throughway for the multibillion-dollar art industry.”
At Bolshoi, Swan No Longer Requires Resurrection
London audiences at the Bolshoi’s “Swan Lake” will witness a departure from the company’s Soviet past in that “the swan actually dies. The balletomanes among you may snort indignantly that of course the swan dies, that Odette’s death is integral to the story and that it is, in essence, the pivotal point of the plot. But you are not reckoning with the thought police of the old Soviet Union, or the mind processes of its Ministry of Culture, and you clearly did not see the Bolshoi production designed by the famous Yuri Grigorovich in 1969 and performed by the company until the collapse of the old order.”
What Took Günter Grass So Long? (And Why Now?)
“Nobel prize-winning author Günter Grass’s surprise admission that he served in the Waffen SS as a teenager has been met with sympathy from some German writers but drew harsh criticism from other prominent figures who asked why he had waited so long to own up. Some argued that, as a prominent moral voice that urged Germany to face up to the Nazi past, the 78-year-old’s authority had been undermined by his silence about his months in Adolf Hitler’s notorious paramilitary combat force.”
Tardy Denver Museum Loses Out On Funding
Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art has lost out on money from the city’s major funder. “After receiving the museum’s audit on June 8 – two days late – the district’s board decided to remove the museum from it’s Tier II category of funding.”
When Process Really Is The Achievement
“By bringing major artists from a number of countries and disciplines together for a summer of shared projects on the UCLA campus, the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange, which began in 1995 and concluded its latest edition over the weekend, can develop potent new fusions of international music or dance. But the final two showcase programs of APPEX 2006 demonstrated one peculiarity of this blueprint. They suggested that the process leading to a performance could be richer and more memorable than the performance itself.”
“The Death Of The Culture Of Criticism”
“All in all, it’s been a rotten tomato of a summer for America’s embattled film critics. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’ broke box-office records left and right, despite a yowling chorus of negative reviews. M. Night Shyamalan cast Bob Balaban as a persnickety film critic in ‘Lady in the Water,’ then gleefully killed him off, allowing a snarling jackal-like creature to do the dirty deed. … To add insult to injury, studios have released a record number of films this year without any press screenings….” But the demotion of the critic is simply a reflection of the era, Patrick Goldstein writes.
Painter Julio Galán, 46
“Julio Galán, a provocative Neo-Expressionist Mexican painter, died on Aug. 4 en route back to his home in Monterrey, Mexico. He was 46. … Throughout an astoundingly varied, often uneven range of images, he laced references to his childhood and his sexual identity with allusions to Catholicism, the Mexican Baroque, pre-Columbian cultures, retablos and folk art. The result was a kind of postmodern Symbolism: overripe, often perverse, yet mesmerizing.”
Documentary’s Treatment Of Nazi Era Alienates Salzburg Festival
Not all is well this summer between the American Friends of the Salzburg Festival and the festival itself. “Festival officials are miffed with the Friends over that group’s decision to present ‘The Salzburg Festival: A Short History,’ a new documentary by the British filmmaker Tony Palmer. The festival has disavowed the film, partly because of what festival directors consider Mr. Palmer’s overemphasized and sometimes inaccurate account of the festival’s intertwined relationship with the Nazis.”