Cost may Kill Berlin's Museum Island Restoration An ambitious plan to renovate Berlin's remarkable Museum Island is in danger. "A federal accounting office spokesman said the €130m (£93m) plan was too expensive. 'We have nothing against the architecture. It's simply a question of finance'." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 8:01 am
Stonehenge Under Attack (For 150 Years) Debate is roaring over a plan to redo the Stonehenge site to accomodate tourists. But photographs over the past 150 years show that successive generations have meddled with the site trying to make it more "user friendly." The Observer (UK) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 7:57 am
MoMA Opens To Long Lines And Cheers The new Museum of Modern Art reopened Saturday with a line of thousands that stretched around the block. "Many arrived hours before the 10 a.m. opening to be among the first to see the museum's collection of world-class modern and contemporary art. At 10 a.m. sharp, the doors swung open to cheers." Miami Herald (AP) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 8:30 pm
- MoMA - A New Way Of Looking At Art "The new Modern is not just beautiful, though Yoshio Taniguchi's building is that and then some. It offers a new way of looking at art, a new way of living with it and a bracing enthusiasm that has not been felt for years." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 7:19 pm
- Was New MoMA Worth It? "With the reopening yesterday, one naturally asks, was it worth it? Has the museum effected a corresponding improvement in its ability to coherently display and interpret its superb collections of painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, architecture, and design? On balance, no. In some ways, the reborn MoMA is exciting, almost a different museum. However, much of that feeling has to do with the architecture. In other ways, it's much less revolutionary than promised, and it sometimes seems confused about what it's trying to achieve." Philadelphia Inquirer 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 7:05 pm
- The Once And Future MoMA "The new MoMA is so different a place from any time in the museum's 75-year history that its original commitment has been pushed to a middle ground, from which it will continue to recede while the institution pursues related interests. This is not conjecture. The new building and how it is used send a message that had been sounded with increasing frequency since the last expansion." Chicago Tribune 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 5:46 pm
- MoMA's New Frame "The new Museum of Modern Art, which reopened to the public Saturday after a $425 million renovation and expansion, is that bracing shower: a work of architecture that is serene, urbane and blissfully understated." Chicago Tribune 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 5:43 pm
UK Sets Museum Standards The British government is launching a set of standards for museums. "The initiative will govern how museums look after their collections and the information their visitors should expect to receive. The scheme is expected to become a "kite-mark" of quality for the smallest to largest institutions." BBC 11/18/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 5:23 pm
Let's Save Taliesin (We Need It) What's America's best building? Robert Campbell suggests that Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin ought to be considered. But it's in bad repair. "Wright is arguably the greatest American artist in any field of the visual arts, and Taliesin is perhaps his masterpiece. If we don't save it, we have no claim to call ourselves a culture. The cost of restoration has been estimated at $60 million. The Big Dig is costing 250 times that." Boston Globe 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 5:19 pm
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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." The Guardian (UK) 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 8:05 am
The National Music (And Language) Why does some music sound specifically English or French or German? Researchers have discovered that "the music differs in just the same way as the languages. It is as if the music carries an imprint of the composer's language. The researchers say that consciously or not, composers may have used the rhythm and melody of their native language to influence their music, especially around the turn of the 20th century, a time of particular musical nationalism." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 8:23 pm
Inside The New La Scala The new La Scala is due to reopen December 7. "The new La Scala will be luxuriously - but much more scantily - clad. The red velvet of the theatre's seats has been renewed. Its boxes have been relined in crimson silk. But to get back its original acoustics, 11 coats of paint have been removed from the walls, the fitted carpets have been ripped out and the linoleum that covered the floors of the boxes has been stripped away to reveal terracotta tiles." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 8:17 pm
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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." The Guardian (UK) 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 7:51 am
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." The Star-Tribune (Mpls) 11/22/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 6:56 pm
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Inside Daniel Libeskind "An architect without a monstrous ego is like a building without a roof. It's part of the package. But Daniel Libeskind's memoir leaves the impression that he thinks of himself as some kind of mystical rabbi who divines the soul of a place and then, with a gentle touch of his hands upon drawing paper, allows a manifestation of that spirit to spring from the ether in the shape of a building." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 8:13 pm
Jonathan Miller Says Opera Career Over "Sir Jonathan Miller, Britain's best-known opera director, has said his career in opera is effectively over. Now 70, he told the Guardian that opera houses had turned their back on him and he was "bitter and angry" about it." The Guardian (UK) 11/20/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 5:26 pm
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The Public's New Top Man Oskar Eustis was not an obvious choice to be the new director of New York's Public Theatre. But "though the 46-year-old Eustis is not a high-profile New York director, the reaction by many in the theater community is that he has earned the right to the job." Hartford Courant 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 8:46 pm
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NBA - Payback For Stephen King? The National Book Awards went off last week. "The honors have been around since 1950 and were sponsored in part by publishers who still buy most of the $1,000-a-plate dinners at the ceremony. They were all smiles last year when rainmaker Stephen King accepted the foundation's honorary medal for distinguished contributions to American letters. They were frowning this year when the fiction finalists were announced. Only one of them had written a book that sold more than 2,000 copies. Was this payback from the literary community for King's recognition?" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 11/21/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 7:48 am
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." The New York Times 11/22/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 7:25 am
Canada's New Poet Laureate Pauline Marcil has been appointed Canada's new poet laureate. "Marcil, 60, wants to use her new job to bring "artists in contact with the political world." She also wants to revisit the idea of having events such as poetry and literature readings at the Parliament building." Toronto Star 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 9:13 pm
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FCC Rejects Pay-Only-For-What-You-Use Plan For Cable TV "Federal regulators rejected on Friday the idea that allowing cable TV subscribers to pay only for channels they want would lower high cable bills. Consumer groups said the analysis was flawed." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 11/20/04
Posted: 11/22/2004 8:09 am
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Pina Bausch - Getting Worse? Tobi Tobias has never much cared for Pina Bausch's work. But lately it seems to have gone from bad to worse. "I found most of the early work loathsome—hardly dancing, conceptually sophomoric, self-indulgent, and dull—but in retrospect I prefer it to Bausch’s mature-phase tactics." Seeing Things (AJBlogs) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 9:19 pm
Royal Ballet Goes Billy Elliot London's Royal Ballet School is launching a dance inclusion programme which will reach less affluent children in four new centres around Britain. "To prove things are changing, the prestigious school, featured in Billy Elliot, has already selected two children from the East End of London to take up coveted places on its training scheme." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/04
Posted: 11/21/2004 7:45 pm
