No one else I’ve worked with has ever had a problem because I am a woman. Sometimes they are very nosy, to see if you can do your job. It’s special for me because I am a woman and I have this name: “Oh, she’s only here because she has that name, but can she really do something?” For me, it’s a very special case.
Tag: 08.15.07
Richard Serra Takes LA
“Until recently, when UCLA got its own torqued ellipse and the Orange County Performing Arts Center received its stunning, 66-foot-tall Connector, the L.A. area was weirdly bereft of Serras — weird because of the artist’s California roots. Maybe being raised in the Bay Area and schooled in part at UC Santa Barbara didn’t make him quite Southern California enough. Maybe there’s something about the work that seemed, in the past, antithetical to Los Angeles — too heavy, too earnest, too serious, too sculptural. No more.”
Silence Is Golden (And Increasingly Rare)
“Music is everywhere; we have more of it, available in more forms, more often, than at any time in human history.” But “for us to be able to enter the world that music creates for us, we need a silence within which to listen.”
Poe Fan Says He Created Mysterious Grave Visitor
“The legend was almost too good to be true. For decades, a mysterious figure dressed in black, his features cloaked by a wide-brimmed hat and scarf, crept into a churchyard to lay three roses and a bottle of cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. Now, a 92-year-old man who led the fight to preserve the historic site says the visitor was his creation.”
An Art Hedge Fund? Who Wants Safety In Art?
“The news that investors are seeking to speculate on the art market following the creation of a new art hedge fund, betting on an art movement or an individual artist’s rise in value without actually buying a painting, certainly appears to be an ominous idea. What exactly would it be they are planning to speculate on?”
What If We Took Away All The Ads In The City?
“Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of São Paulo, passed a law last year banning all advertising from the Brazilian city. The place is now being held up by activists worldwide as an example to us all: an image of an anti-Orwellian future, where The Man is no longer in control of our day to day choices. But does the planet’s first ‘clean city’ really live up to the hype?”
A Video Game May Rescue An Orphaned Instrument
Popular music has changed since the guitar’s heyday in the ’60s, and the instrument’s popularity isn’t helped by the decline of music education in the schools. But there is hope for the guitar, and it lies in a “technology launching rock stars across the land, one that most guitar players don’t even consider part of their world. I’m talking about ‘Guitar Hero,’ the ridiculously popular video game in which players use a plastic guitar-shaped controller to simulate rocking out.”
Via Online Lottery, $5 Tickets At Playwrights Horizons
As of yesterday, “playgoers seeking a deal at Playwrights Horizons can put their names in a lottery list for a chance at $5 tickets. There will be no more waiting in line for Playwrights Horizons’ ticket discount on the first day of previews. Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons is introducing a new online lottery ticket system that will give theatregoers access — from home — to low-price seats for the first preview performances of its productions.”
Mural Gets OK To Stay In Philly Historic District
A six-year battle over the fate of a mural on a 19th-century townhouse in a Philadelphia historic district has been decided in favor of the artist. “The Board of Licenses and Inspection Review took just eight minutes to decide that Dee Chhin’s The Death of Venus could remain on the wall where she painted it.” The mural was commissioned “in part to dissuade graffitists from tagging the building’s north wall.”
New Glimmerglass Regime: All Orpheus, All The Time
“Michael MacLeod is the epitome of the new broom that sweeps clean. His first season as both general and artistic director of Glimmerglass Opera has created a giant buzz in the music world. The four new opera productions and one concert opera are all based on the theme of Orpheus, and there is not one warhorse in the bunch.”