By all accounts, James Levine is thrilled to be working at his new job in Boston, writes Alex Ross. “Levine is preëminent among American conductors, yet he remains a curiously contested figure.”
Tag: 11.22.04
Is The Recording Industry Business Stabilizing?
Recording company EMI says that the decline in the music recording business has been halted. “The world’s third-largest music company said the global music market declined 1.3% over the six months to the end of September, compared with a 10% drop in the same period last year. EMI said a return to growth in the US, Japan and south-east Asia offset a flat performance in Britain and a continued decline in Germany.”
Iraqi Art’s Coming Out
Artists worked in Iraq during the Saddam years, but the art being made in Iraq now is different. “Artists are emerging from the atrophied, censorious Saddam years, from the distortions of taste provoked by state patronage and control and the horizons foreshortened by sanctions, and are beginning to document what is around them.”
Could Computers Replace Writers?
“Occasionally you hear of a Luddite novelist who shuns computers, but the truth is that most of us would be lost without them. If I rail and curse at mine, it is partly out of resentment at our miserable co-dependence. Imagine, then, the blow to my scribbler’s vanity when I discovered a while back that computers might get along just fine without writers.”
MoMA: A Building That Disappears (That’s Good)
AJ blogger John Perrault is impressed with the new Museum of Modern Art. “I was surprised that the complex is as successful as it is. It’s all a 3-D grid, fittingly so, given the midtown street grid. If the truth be known, neither façade is much to look at. But once inside, except for the atrium, the building disappears. This is an artist’s and an art-lovers dream.”
Carmel Says Stop! No More Galleries!
“With 120 art galleries in a town of 4,058 people, or one gallery for every 34 residents, the city council of Carmel-by-the-Sea voted last month to limit the number of new galleries moving into town. Carmel’s leaders decided that the city, which earns no sales-tax revenue when out-of-state tourists snap up a watercolor, has reached aesthetic overkill.”
Operatic “Angels” As An Opera
Angels in America was a hit play and an acclaimed TV event. But “what possessed Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos to make an opera out of this already operatic play? ‘The dream scenes, the hallucinations, ghosts, heaven … these are fantastic for music. It’s much harder to make an opera out of real life. And the situation with Aids creates great drama – the characters are touched by the knowledge that their life might be cut short at any moment’.”
Colorizing The Classics (Like They Were Meant)
“It has long been known that classical statues were painted. Indeed, their creators sometimes chose different kinds of stone for different parts of their statues according to the way they reacted to paint and wax, using types that could be highly polished for the fleshy parts and coarser varieties that would absorb paint for the drapery. Some art history books have included coloured photographs to give an idea of how the statues of the Greeks and Romans would have looked to contemporaries. But I Colori del Bianco (The Colours of White) is the first show to confront us with three-dimensional copies created with the help of meticulous scientific investigation.”
Arts Outlook: Funding After The Election
What’s the arts funding outlook after recent US elections? “In a country divided on nearly everything else, funding for the arts is inching toward bipartisan support. That has some arts leaders feeling cautiously optimistic. Others in the art world wonder whether risky, boundary-pushing art is itself at risk.”
Raphael As A Product Of His Environment(s)
A new exhibit of the work of Raphael, as well as the work of those who influenced him, is a new way of looking at an artist whose impact on the art world is immeasurable. “‘Influence’ scarcely covers the relation to Raphael’s work not only of Michelangelo and the other titan of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, but also of Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi; Perugino, who may have been his teacher; Pinturicchio; and Fra Bartolommeo. The show, which incorporates works by most of those elders, demonstrates that the prodigy from the Marches extracted the formal essence of each man’s art to feed a synthetic style that would become a beau ideal of Western painting for the next four centuries.”