“The painting will be one of the highlights of Christie’s post-war and contemporary evening sale on 14 October.Bacon rented a studio from the college for eight months in 1969 after a fire destroyed his own work space. He gave the work to the college in lieu of rent nearly 40 years ago.”
Tag: 10.11.07
Where A Hollywood Scriptwriters’ Strike Will Show
“Audiences would see the effects of a lengthy strike on television first because of tighter production timetables. Even then, they probably wouldn’t notice the absence of prime-time favorites before early 2008.”
Artist Implants Ear In Arm
A performance artist has had a human ear impanted in his arm. “The Cypriot-born eccentric Stelios Arcadious spent 10 years searching for a surgeon willing to perform the controversial operation.”
Unlocking The Kimmel Acoustic
The acoustics in Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, have been criticized ever since the center opened in 2002. The main concert hall was designed to be as acoustically adjustable as possible, but the orchestra still hasn’t managed to find the right combination to create a full, warm sound throughout the hall. Still, Philly Pops, a separate orchestra from the Philadelphia, has been tinkering as well, and they may have uncovered some important methods for improving the Kimmel acoustic.
LA Pins Cultural Hopes On New Theatre
“Next Thursday, the Nokia Theatre, a 7,100-seat venue billed as one of the most acoustically sophisticated spaces anywhere, will open” in downtown Los Angeles. “The Nokia is a centerpiece of the deliriously ambitious project called L.A. Live, which is nothing less than an attempt to tilt the city’s skyline to the south.” But can a single new venue, no matter how ambitious, really help to transform a city?
Saying Good-Bye To A Hyphen-Obsessed Past
“The new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has done away with about 16,000 hyphens. The editors of the dictionary have decided, in an awesome display of ruthless language modification, that the conventions of hyphenation were arbitrary and needed simplification… There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly. The other is, of course, the slow elimination of punctuation that the digital age is necessitating.”
Seeing The Light
What is it that makes a landscape by JMW Turner so unmistakable, so recognizable? Most scholars would say that it was Turner’s “devotion to the idea of the central light source at the heart of the canvas, often shining over water, an idea he is thought to have originally derived from the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain.”
Fall Film Bonanza
Why has October become such a prime month for the release of great independent films? “Studio specialty divisions like Sony Pictures Classics, Miramax, Fox Searchlight and Paramount Vantage are in full stride this time of year, having used the bounce of film festivals in Toronto and New York to begin positioning their films for the Oscars.”
Latest On The Broadway Stagehands’ Talks
A lockout may be days or even hours away, but officially, the League of American Theaters & Producers is still talking to the union representing Broadway stagehands. Meetings are scheduled for this afternoon, even though an impasse appeared to have been reached Tuesday night.
Carnegie Hall Accused Of Nepotism
Carnegie Hall has tapped an architecture firm run by the son-in-law of its chairman, Sanford Weill, to design its $150m expansion. “Carnegie officials said they were impressed by a previous project by his firm: the design of the well-regarded new home of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where the chairwoman is Mr. Bibliowicz’s mother-in-law, Joan H. Weill.” Ethical questions abound, and Carnegie Hall is being forced to defend its decision publicly.