Tag: 08.17.00

HAVE MONEY WILL TRAVEL

The Phillips Collection will “lend 26 major paintings and sculptures from its collection for a six-month show at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts, the hotel’s state-of-the-art gallery built by former owner and famed art collector Steve Wynn. Billed as “Masterworks From the Phillips Collection at Bellagio,” the show will include major works by Monet, Degas, Bonnard, van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and El Greco.” Why do it? The museum hopes to collect $1 million from the deal. – Washington Post

THE MEANING OF ART

“With a typically enigmatic installation that won high honors at the most recent Venice Biennale, the expatriate Conceptual artist Cai Guo-Qiang has unexpectedly achieved every artist’s dream: he has provoked a debate, long overdue, in his officially stifled native country about the meaning of art, originality and the avant-garde.” – New York Times

THE ALLURE OF THE MUNDANE

Britart/”Sensation” photographer Richard Billingham has had a rapid rise to fame; one minute he was taking pictures of his speed-addled brother playing video games and his mum smoking fags – the next minute, his work was being collected by Saatchi, Rockefeller and New York’s Metropolitan Museum. He and his family are a bit bemused: “has no one seen a dog licking the floor before?” – Irish Times

THE NEW THEATRE

“The Edinburgh Festival is doing all it can to accelerate the death of world culture. Director’s Theatre is In; and most things worth caring for in spoken theatre are Out. The festival’s new production of Valle-Inclan’s ‘Barbaric Comedies’ is already something of a local scandal, but there is a danger that the scandal is about the wrong thing.” – Financial Times

HOW’RE WE DOING?

“The current state of play in the theatre is actually decidedly encouraging on many fronts. I would hazard a guess that the recent drive towards cheap TV programming and its dumbing down have driven ranks of citizens out of their living rooms in search of better arts and entertainment in public venues. I’m also not convinced the net is going to produce future generations of stay-at-home IT and virtual-reality addicts.” – The Independent (UK)

A DEFENSE

“Who says the theater has reached a dead end? The current London season is filled with confirmations of how protean the discipline remains, as variable and potentially surprising as human beings themselves. Local observers may lament the Americanization of the London stage, with its adaptations of Hollywood movies and reliance on brand-name celebrities. But if you look past pandering hits like “The Graduate,” you’ll discover an abiding, very British penchant for playing with plays, a delight in demonstrating what theater can do that other forms cannot.” – New York Times

STRAY CATS STRUT

A former clown in the Bolshoi Circus and founder of the only “cat theater in the world” has taken his group of feisty felines on a world tour – their repertoire includes the “Nutcracker”, “Swan Lake” and “Cats From Outer Space”. While his cats are capable of executing “pawstands” and walking tightropes, the director attests that his performers do have wills of their own. “It is impossible to train cats in the true sense. I play with cats, and they play with me.” – Daily Yomiuri (Japan)

ORCHESTRA WEB

Tonight Itzhak Perlman and the Philadelphia Orchestra play the first-ever pay-per-listen orchestral concert over the internet, launching the new Classical Music Internet Agreement, the deal in which 65 leading ensembles worked out an agreement with the on-line network and the American Federation of Musicians. “In this era of dwindling CD sales and the lack of recording contracts by most prominent American orchestras (including the Philadelphians), this initiative may well be the prelude to a new future for musical organizations.” – Philadelphia Daily News