Australian orchestras are mounting a major push for increased government support in the face of overwhelming deficits and draconian budget cuts, but so far, their efforts are finding few sympathetic ears. A new report commissioned by the government may help in the long run, but the situation for many orchestras is growing worse by the day.
Tag: 09.22.04
Better To Write It Than Live It
A 34-year-old creative writing teacher has captured Australia’s $20,000 Vogel Prize for a “gritty tale of drugs, despair and teenage runaways is set in a truck stop in the Central West of [the Australian state of New South Wales] where the teenage protagonist fries chips, fills the Coke fridge and pie-warmer and hides from the law.” Julienne van Loon lives in Perth these days, but grew up in the bush town where her story, which took nearly a decade to write, is set.
Slightly Bonkers?
London’s Serpentine Gallery has garnered some attention in recent years with a series of pavilions constructed and deconstructed in less than a year’s time. But this year, the gallery is upping the ante, hiring a Dutch firm to encase the entire building in a grassy mountain which will tower over Kensington Gardens. “It is a wild, thrilling, slightly bonkers idea that promises to make the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion one of the most exciting architectural events of 2005.”
Woodfine Wins The Jerwood
The £5,000 Jerwood Prize, which in recent years has come under attack for stretching the definition of the word “drawing” in passing out its awards, was handed out this week to Sarah Woodfine. Ms. Woodfine’s winning entry is likely to please the Jerwood’s critics – it’s a pencil and paper drawing – but the judges insist that they intend to continue accepting entries in multiple mediums.
Collecting Great Art With Blood Money
“A spectacular exhibition of contemporary art opened in Berlin yesterday, amid a picket by Jewish protesters, with its billionaire owner accused of exploiting art to redeem his family’s Nazi past.” The quality of the works in the collection is not in question, but the motivations of their owner, Christian Friedrich Flick, are being picked over by press and public alike. The Flick family fortune, which made the art collection possible, was built on slave labor in the explosives factories of the Third Reich.
Painting The Gulag From The Inside Out
The name Nikolai Getman probably doesn’t ring a lot of bells in the Western art world, and in fact, when the octogenarian survivor of Stalin’s infamous Siberian Gulag died quietly in Russia last month, his passing didn’t make the obituary page of a single American newspaper. But Getman’s body of work represents the most complete and vivid visual record of life in the Gulag that the world has ever seen, and the horrors he recorded on canvas are a reminder of one of the great man-made tragedies of the last century.