“Poems – words – have power in Burma, and the military authorities realise it. International PEN, the global writer’s association, has a Writers in Prison Committee, led by Sara Whyatt, which is currently campaigning for the release of nine writers serving sentences ranging from seven to 21 years.”
Tag: 10.13.07
Coloring The Guggenheim
“The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is getting a new coat of paint, but this is no ordinary decorating dilemma. Not when the appearancee of one of America’s most distinctive structures and the legacy of one of its most esteemed architects is at stake.”
That Seat Better Be Comfortable
“Tickets for a six-performance run of Shakespeare’s King Lear, starring British actor Ian McKellen, at UCLA in Los Angeles are fetching as much as $1,700 online.”
What Gore (The Movie) Did For Gore (The Man)
An Inconvenient Truth didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize – Al Gore did. But the former veep’s smash-hit documentary certainly played a large role in bringing global attention to climate change, and many credit it with helping to effectively end the debate over the existence of the problem. So how did a low-budget film concept based on a speech Gore had been giving since the 1980s evolve into a global warning?
Squirming Where Once We Laughed
Plays and musicals focusing on gay culture have been a part of the theatre world for decades. But the very nature of the subject matter means that such plays tend to be products of a specific era, and even a few years on, they can seem unfamiliar and dated. “A farce set in a gay bathhouse where the hero is hiding from a trash-talking Mafioso was probably a lot funnier before… AIDS and The Sopranos.”
Assessing This Year’s Frieze
London’s Frieze has only been around for five years, but it has rapidly become the UK’s largest and most influential art fair. “Some 151 galleries from 28 countries were chosen to take part this year, drawn from 450 applicants; each has a booth displaying its best pieces — or at least pieces it hoped would sell or provoke… To the extent there is a buzz at Frieze this year, it has centered on the booth run by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a New York gallery, which has been turned into a flea market organized by the artist Rob Pruitt.”
Hollywood Writers’ Strike Looming As Talks Flounder
“Some 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West are widely expected to give their leaders authority to call a strike at any time after the Oct. 31 expiration of their contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Meanwhile, both sides — with back-channel help from lawyers, agents and other players who want to keep Hollywood working — are struggling to reboot a bargaining dynamic gone awry.”
Audience Participation Comes To The Art Gallery
“Since Rudolf Stingel’s sleek midcareer survey opened at the Whitney Museum of American art in June, hundreds of visitors have been allowed to depart radically from traditional museum protocol (hands off) and have a go at the walls in the exhibition’s first gallery, using anything they happen to have with them: pens, money, credit cards, cellphones… Over the intervening months New York’s art-viewing public rose to the occasion: The room’s lower half is now equally dense with a kind of populist, manic, talking-in-tongues wallpaper.”
TV Transitioning On Transgenders
“Even within the inhibited boundaries of mainstream culture, transgender characters have long drawn fascination. They’ve figured in guest turns on medical dramas and legal shows, or wound their way into network casts in ways that strained credulity… Transgenders are becoming even more visible. But not so three-dimensional.”
Art Begetting Art
A Benedictine monk whose ceramics sell for more than $60,000 apiece is being memorialized through a new foundation in Boston. “The Newbury Street gallery that owns the largest collection of [Brother Thomas Bezanson’s] work – $15 million worth – is joining with the Boston Foundation, which distributes millions of dollars in grants each year, to use proceeds from the sale of his ceramics to create a fund that would support struggling artists in Boston.”