“On Day 2 of the fall auction season, a Russian masterpiece expected to sell for up to $3 million did not find a buyer yesterday, further underscoring the impact of the global financial crisis on the art market… Many other works sold at or below their presale estimates; others did not sell at all.”
Tag: 11.06.08
The Value Of Midwestern Humor
American TV shows seem always to be based in either New York, Chicago, or LA, and they tend to be full of implications that only an idiot or a redneck would live anywhere else. But in Canada, the top-rated comedies of the moment all seem to take place on the wide-open prairie. “When things are not pushed and rushed as they can be in the city, just as a lifestyle, funnier stuff can percolate.”
Thinking Between Words And Pictures
Celebrated cartoonist Art Spiegelman has a new book out, “and what Spiegelman the cartoonist wants to show us — in this installment of a lifelong self-examination on the page — is what it’s like ‘to think between words and pictures, and have the feelings come out someplace between the two.'”
US Election As The Ultimate TV Event
“The election wasn’t just a historic milestone, it turned out to be a television event as thrilling and uncharted as the first lunar landing: For many long, nerve-racking hours, attention was focused on the clock and a tangle of numbers and technological details, then suddenly, and almost shockingly, a feat long awaited, but never fully expected, came to be.”
How To Act Out Pure Evil Without Losing Your Soul
“It is the most violent five minutes of New York theater in memory: A soldier rapes the main character of ‘Blasted,’ then sucks out his eyeballs and eats them in nearly plain sight of audiences — which, night after night for weeks, have been watching in shock.” It’s an awful thing to watch, but it’s even more difficult for the actors who must enact the scene every night.
Michael Crichton’s World
“As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.”
What’s In A Name?
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the title of a piece of music is as important to its success as what it sounds like. So why do composers seem to be so uncomfortable with the titling their works? “Perhaps the notion of giving a work a title makes composers feel awkward.”
Vienna, Berlin, New York… Beijing?
“The idea of China as the gravitational center of a globalized world is something most countries have gotten used to. But classical music hadn’t seemed like it would be part of that mix, if only because Western opera and the Eastern world never made a natural fit.” But that’s been changing fast, and China is experiencing a classical boom that may yet make it a global center of the art form.
A Symbol Of Hope To Be Heard Again
“It survived, broken but not destroyed, a remnant of a World War II Nazi concentration camp. Then, for more than 60 years, the violin emblazoned with a Star of David was silenced… On Tuesday, this violin, one of 16 ‘klezmer’ violins that [have been] painstakingly restored, will be heard for the first time in the United States and for one of the first times since the war.”
Scheduling Against Yourself
The Toronto Symphony will be in Ottawa next week, playing Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes. Problem is, a local orchestra is scheduled to play the same piece at the same venue four days later. “It’s the second time in recent years that the [National Arts Centre] failed to cross-reference the programs of the Ottawa Symphony and a touring orchestra.”