In Arizona, landmark status lasts only three years. If the developers who bought it can’t sell it, says one of them, “I’ll move in, invite everybody to come in and take their pictures, and I’m going to wait three years. Then I’m going to knock it down to recoup my losses. … [For] me to carry the cross for Frank Lloyd Wright, that’s not fair.”
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World’s Oldest Voice Recording Can Now Be Heard
“It’s scratchy, lasts only 78 seconds and features the world’s first recorded blooper. The modern masses can now listen to what experts say is the oldest playable recording of an American voice and the first-ever capturing of a musical performance, thanks to digital advances that allowed the sound to be transferred from flimsy tinfoil to computer.” (Audio here)
Meet Saturday Night Live‘s Cue-Card Guy (Yes, They Still Use One)
“For 22 years [Wally] Feresten has been perched next to the live-telecast’s camera, in a wide-legged athletic stance, holding at shoulder height white 14-x-22-inch poster-board cards hand-printed with lines for the performers. Attuned to the rhythms of each actor, Mr. Feresten lifts the cards and drops them into the hands of an assistant. He never looks away from the performer.”
Benjamin Millepied Wants To Kick Up Dust In L.A.
“Mr. Millepied, 35, moved to Los Angeles – where his new wife, Natalie Portman, resides – and started his own company. Sorry: ‘curatorial collective.’ He says he will create new dances, revive seminal works and generally kick up dust by collaborating in unusual ways with various arts organizations here.”
Thirty Years Of Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet
“It took King years to find the right balance of stylistic elements, but there is little doubt that he is redefining ballet for a generation that wouldn’t find itself within a mile of Swan Lake. And, as a kind of apotheosis, Jennifer Homans, the notoriously demanding dance critic of The New Republic, has pronounced King one of dance’s great hopes for the future.”
How To Save A Chicago Brutalist Landmark
“A familiar sort of preservation battle has been stewing for months here over the fate of the old Prentice Women’s Hospital, a concrete, cloverleaf structure from 1975 by Bertrand Goldberg, the Chicago architect.” The owner, Northwestern University, wants to demolish it, but the city’s newest starchitect, Jeanne Gang, has a rescue plan.
Picasso, Monets, More Stolen From Rotterdam’s Kunsthal
“With impeccable timing and taste, thieves in the wee hours of Tuesday morning plundered an art museum in the Netherlands that was celebrating its 20th birthday and made away with seven borrowed paintings, including valuable works by Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Lucian Freud.”
Landmark Frank Lloyd Wright House In Phoenix Faces Demolition
“It’s hard to say which is more startling. That a developer in Phoenix could threaten – by Thursday, no less – to knock down a 1952 house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Or that the house has until now slipped under the radar, escaping the attention of most architectural historians, even though it is one of Wright’s great works, a spiral home for his son David.”
Revisiting Eric Staller’s Light Graffiti
In the 1970s and ’80s, the American photographer pioneered the use of fireworks and long exposure times to create patterns of light seared onto twilit cityscapes.
The Temporary Light Sculpture That Kosovo Doesn’t Want To Give Up
It’s some seven-meter-tall scaffolding with “A PLACE BEYOND BELIEF”, and it sits in Pristina, “between the new government education offices, the Kosovo Art Gallery, and the half-built, half-ruined Orthodox church raised by Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s.” Nathan Coley’s piece has surprising resonance with Kosovars.