“You don’t meet Bill Murray. You spend some time in his presence, and then try to figure him out when he’s gone.” For instance, he “has no agent or publicist and is contactable only through friends or a freephone answering service. … [And] an entire genus of movie gossip has sprung up around his supposedly cruel behaviour on sets.”
Tag: 10.16.09
How An Apartheid Setting Alters Porgy And Bess
“In the decades since Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway … it’s become fashionable in some quarters to criticise” the George Gershwin piece “as reductive, even patronising. But transplanted” by Cape Town Opera “to a place and an era when state-sanctioned oppression and segregation was a part of life,” it “has recovered its edge.”
Brooke Shields Portrait Flap Puts Tate Catalogue In Limbo
The Tate’s “publications arm, Tate Publishing, faces having to dump up to 12,000 catalogues that have been printed for the Pop Life exhibition at Tate Modern, which contain the offending image of a 10-year-old Shields.” For now, some are on sale “with a sticker placed ‘on legal advice’ over the nude image of Shields.”
Donations To Most Nonprofits Down From ’08
“A recent poll of 665 nonprofits found that 51% had seen a drop in fundraising this year, while 27% said they were on par with last year. … In some cases, the losses are coming from a decline in the amount of money being given by each donor, not by a lack of donors.”
How Centuries Of Unnamed Artworks Got Their Monikers
“[A]s markets developed and a culture of criticism arose, people needed a shorthand way to refer to Renaissance pieces. The more frequently a particular work was discussed, the more likely that critics and historians would reach an informal agreement over what to call the piece.”
How’s The Sound In Dallas’s New Opera House? So Far, So Good
“Acoustically, the 2,200-seat auditorium passed its first tests with top grades. Both solo voices and chorus carried powerfully from the stage, filling every nook and cranny of the hall. But there was warmth, too, and agreeable ‘ring’.” And the sound is consistent “in virtually every corner of the building’s five levels.”
Berlin’s Neues Museum Reopens For First Time Since WWII
“Closed for 70 years following heavy bomb damage during World War II, Berlin’s ‘Neues Museum’ throws open its doors again on Friday, with 3,400-year-old Egyptian beauty Queen Nefertiti star of the show.”
The Placebo Effect, Caught In The Act
“The placebo effect is not only real; its ability to deaden pain has been pinpointed to cells in the spinal cord. That raises hopes for new ways of treating conditions such as chronic pain.”
Is Conceptual Art Jumping The Embalmed Shark?
“The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art … depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons.”
For Newcomers To Dance, A Cheat Sheet
“Tribune reporter Christopher Borrelli, a devotee of cinema and other pop arts, is dating a woman who’s a passionate dance fan,” whereas he has a laundry list of questions about the art form. A dance critic answers them with this primer.