More than 255,000 people attended SLSO concerts at Powell Hall. Also, more than 8,000 attended performances in California and Nebraska this year. SLSO sold out 20 of the more than 300 total concerts during the season.
Tag: 10.22.18
Why Are We Only Now Seeing Orson Welles’s Last Film? Because The Process Of Making It Was Utterly Insane
Six years of shooting in dozens of locations, famous film auteurs playing versions of themselves, the cast and crew posing as film students to get a cheap rental rate for the MGM backlot (they smuggled Welles in a van), half a dozen or so different kinds of film stock — and that’s only the beginning of the story.
Museum Of The Bible Pulls Dead Sea Scroll Fragments Found To Be Fakes
“The five fragments now believed to have ‘characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin’ have been displayed at the Museum of the Bible since it opened in November. Labels on the exhibit since it opened have warned guests that some scholars were skeptical of the fragments’ authenticity.”
Under Julie Kent, Washington Ballet Has Prestige, High Performance, Empty Seats, And $3 Million In Debt
Two years after she took the helm, “it appears that Kent’s fame has not attracted enough ticket buyers and donors to fund the new vision of the Washington Ballet, with more and better dancers performing the ‘Great Books’ of ballet. It’s a big risk, because the transformation will be costly and take years. And then there are the questions no one seems to have asked in the planning stages: Does the public want this kind of company, and will enough donors fund it?”
Britain’s Regional Theatre Is In Real Danger, Even As It Does Terrific Work
Lyn Gardner, who sees more plays in more places around the country than just about anyone, will swear by the high quality of the UK’s regional companies. Yet, she writes, with every effort they make to bring in more revenue, more funding cuts just set them further back.
Wen C. Fong, 88, Curator Who Helped Build Met’s Asian Art Collections
“A leading figure in the history of Chinese art, Professor Fong taught for 40 years at Princeton University, where in the 1950s he established the nation’s first doctoral degree program in Chinese art and archaeology. Beginning in the early 1970s he was a driving force behind the Met’s ambitious effort to expand its collection of Asian art, including masterworks from China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and India, and add space in which to display it.”
Nigeria To Open Museum For Looted Benin Bronzes
“Major museums across Europe have agreed to loan important artifacts back to Nigeria for a new museum the country plans to open in 2021. The African nation’s Royal Museum will house a rotating display of artifacts, including the Benin bronzes that were looted during the Benin Expedition of 1897. The agreement marks a significant step after years of negotiations among European institutions and Nigerian authorities.”
An Alternative History Of The Mythologies Of Silicon Valley
It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.
Opera Philadelphia’s Bet On The Future Of Opera (And What’s Fueling It)
A costly experiment? Surely, since box office revenue in these spaces is small relative to cost of production. Without philanthropic support, the project would be untenable. What Opera Philadelphia is discovering is that there are donors particularly anxious to invest in the future
Puncturing Bunkum: The Subtext of Banksy’s Subversive “Director’s Cut” – Part IV
Banksy’s stealth video of the bidding on Girl with Balloon at Sotheby’s and the sales job that preceded it adds yet another layer of satire to a subversive intervention that has a more serious subtext — a critique of self-sabotaging auction houses that have damaged their credibility as a transparent public marketplace where buyers can feel reasonably confident that they are paying fair market value, equitably arrived at, on a level playing field.