Tibor Fischer slogs his way through 126 novels that, “as a judge for this year’s Man Booker Prize, I was required to read, because it’s clear most publishers don’t have a clue what they’re doing. Taste: there’s no escape. Nevertheless, there are books that I don’t like, but I can see they are proficiently written and that others might enjoy them. Yet some entries were so execrable I reckoned they must have been submitted as a joke…”
Tag: 08.19.04
Libeskind, Post-Cool
It wasn’t long ago that architect Daniel Libeskind was cool. “But a string of large projects – and wide popular acclaim – have dampened the enthusiasm with which some architects view him. Is there a tinge of jealousy? Or after the high-mindedness of his conceptual projects and the buzz of the Jewish Museum, is there disappointment about discovering that Libeskind is an ordinary architect after all? Could it be, some murmur, that he is just a form maker? A showman? Is there something just a little bit kitsch about his work?”
Filling The American Indian Museum
Native Americans have had a big role in deciding what will go in the new National Museum of the American Indian, due to open in Washington DC next month. “What they did not want, museum officials found, was the static display of 10,000 years of tribal life and culture. Their ideal museum would celebrate the glories of the past, to be sure, but they also wanted their artifacts and their contemporary culture to be accessible. ‘This is an important opportunity to show tribal people as participants in a living culture, not something in museums or in history books.”
A Bilbao Effect For Churches?
In Italy, big-time architects are being hired to design churches (like in the old days, remember?). “It is premature to say that Renzo Piano’s spidery dome or Richard Meier’s three sweeping concrete sails and glass facade will push Roman Catholic architecture into a period comparable to the glory days when churches were stylistic showcases for masters like Francesco Borromini and Lorenzo Bernini. But some church officials are hoping that a return to architectural splendor will help put people in the pews.”
High Sax (130 Times)
Salvatore Sciarrino is premiering a piece for 130 saxophones in Edinburgh. Sciarrino, 57, is “Italy’s most prominent contemporary composer, a man obsessed with the limits of sound, with creating pieces in a mysterious region where music, silence, and noise meet. He’s written works that transform instrumental ensembles into gigantic aviaries by making flutes and violins sound like nightingales and swans, and piano pieces that are so quiet they would be drowned out by the merest foot-shuffle in the audience. It sounds like a world of avant-garde extremism, but there’s a sensuality to Sciarrino’s music that makes it uniquely seductive.”