Gordon Davis, on taking the top job running Lincoln Center: “If you go to Lincoln Center in all its different facets, there is already a wide diversity of audiences, which is wonderful. What some people don’t understand is that you don’t try to reach more diverse audiences because it’s somehow “The Right Thing To Do.’ You do it because that is where creativity ultimately comes from-broadening and invigorating the arts. It’s in our self-interest to reach the broadest audience.” – Backstage
Tag: 11.03.00
MAYBE THE BRIBE’S NOT BIG ENOUGH?
There’s a federal election going on in Canada, and the Liberal party, in power for a number of years now, is offering a bribe to the arts – $600 million in new arts spending, if the government is re-elected. Artists aren’t impressed, though. The government’s made promises before, but hasn’t come through. – CBC 11/03/00
PAINTING PEOPLE
“Portraits have in the past been marginalised from accounts of 20th-century art.” But a new show at London’s National Portrait Gallery makes one realise quickly “the extent to which great painters throughout the century have wanted to explore the challenge of representation even when it was unfashionable.” – The Telegraph (UK)
DIA’S PUSH TO GROW
New York’s Dia Center gets $50 million to help build a new facility, maintain its large-scale artwork and develop a national presence concentrating on art from the 1960s and ’70s. – New York Times
SCOTTISH BOOST
Scotland’s arts groups, languishing for funding in recent years, got a pick-me-up this week, in the form of the “largest-ever increase in funding for the arts in Scotland. The £27 million package was revealed at the opening of the hastily rescheduled debate on the National Arts Strategy and its substance caught its beneficiaries, as well as its detractors, on the hop.” – The Herald (Scotland) 11/03/00
OKAY, SO MAYBE SOME OF IT ISN’T REAL, BUT…
Earlier this year Canada’s National Gallery was offered a $100 million gift of 1,800 Chinese and neolithic antiquities from a collector, but the proposed gift was withdrawn after experts questioned the authenticity of some of the art. Now Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum has stepped up to accept the stash, despite the experts’ concerns. – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
- BUT WHAT’S REAL IS CHOICE: “It is the largest single donation to a cultural institution in Canadian history. The collection features work dating from the Neolithic period of 3000 BC through to the T’ang Dynasty of 900 AD. The 1,800 pieces will be packed up in Ottawa and shipped to the ROM next week. The museum plans to mount an exhibition by next spring.” – Ottawa Citizen
TIME CAPSULE
A wooden ship — perhaps 1,500 years old — has been found in the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey. The cold water it has sat in has kept it “remarkably preserved. – Discovery
STRAIGHTEN UP
A year ago critics were wringing their hands about the absence of new straight plays on Broadway and the fear that musicals might have taken over completely. The fears were unfounded. This fall tells a very different story. – Variety
PICASSO & MARTIN TO THE BIG SCREEN
Hollywood to make a movie out of Steve Martin’s play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” “The play, which preemed at the Steppenwolf Studio Theater in Chicago in 1993 before moving to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, is a comedy about a night in 1904 when Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein meet by chance in a bar.” – Variety
THE RIPPLES OF BIGNESS
Think consolidation of the publishing industry won’t affect what you read? “Science and technical journals have become a case study in the publishing industry’s growing consolidation. Until the 1960’s, scores of smaller companies and nonprofit organizations published the vast majority of journals. Since then, a handful of companies led by Reed Elsevier have acquired the bulk of them and have aggressively raised subscription prices. The average price of a subscription to a scholarly journal has more than tripled in the last 14 years. To keep up, libraries now buy fewer new books than they did a decade ago, diminishing the market for books of all kinds and frustrating professors desperate to publish.” – New York Times