Tag: 09.26.07

Lazy Reporting Is A Threat To Great Art

“I think maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the conventions by which newspapers and online news outlets cover visual art stories. In fact, if you look at how visual art appears in the news over any length of time you will find essentially the same stories appear repeatedly. … Bad reporting along these generic lines distorts understanding and can destroy our pleasure in great art.”

Smithsonian’s Museum-To-Be Carves An Online Space

“Though its physical construction is years away, the National Museum of African American History and Culture today is inaugurating an online spot where visitors can help shape its content. One feature of the Web site, named after the museum, is a Memory Book, where people can submit a story, photograph or audio recording that tells something about themselves or a moment in African American history.”

Taking Up The Baton, Alsop Puts Her Plans In Motion

This week, Marin Alsop became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. “But smashing through gender barriers is only one of the ways Maestro Alsop is trying to rethink and rejuvenate the symphony orchestra in the 21st century. Her other plans are more radical. She aspires to make symphony halls welcoming places, not austere temples of culture where only the cognoscenti dare enter.”

Nureyev’s Calculated Celebrity

“Everything he did was designed for the public eye. Whether he was dancing, defecting, duetting with Margot Fonteyn, conducting orchestras when he could dance no more, cruising the boy bars and bath houses or dying of AIDS, Rudolf Nureyev understood as no performing artist had done before him the indivisibility of private and public persona and the ways in which one could be made to serve the other.”

The Hopper Landscape Isn’t In The Truro Dunes

As the debate rages over saving the Cape Cod landscape Edward Hopper painted, Verlyn Klinkenborg finds it all a little odd. “I believe in protecting open land on almost any pretext and surely the dunes of South Truro deserve to be protected because they are part of the larger ecosystem of the Cape Cod National Seashore. What puzzles me is the idea of the Hopper landscape. The landscape Hopper saw, as an artist, is already protected. It exists only in his paintings, nowhere else.”

Next Stop: Pericles Junction

“The ingenious idea of a Shakespeare tube map sponsored by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and advertising its activities on T-shirts, bags and mugs, has its dangers. I have horrible visions of Japanese visitors, the world their Oyster, taking it seriously and triumphantly working out that they have reached Tottenham Court Road when they see a sign for Hotspur, and Baker Street when they are at Titus Andronicus station. And wouldn’t they be puzzled not to find Lear or Antony at the end of a line?”

First A Rotting Shark, Now Some Leaky Cows

“Last year we revealed that Damien Hirst was to replace the rotting shark in his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living…. Now the British artist is to repair his Mother and Child, Divided (1993),an installation of a bisected cow and calf in four formaldehyde tanks, in the collection of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo. The work is leaking and has been sent to the artist’s studio in London for emergency repairs.”

Elton: You’ve All Seen The Photo. Why Fuss Now?

“Elton John said a photograph of two girls by Nan Goldin has been published around the world ‘without any objections of which we are aware’ and auctioned twice by Sotheby’s. The photo, ‘Klara and Edda Belly-Dancing,’ was seized by Northumbria police from the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, England, while on loan from the singer-songwriter….”