- The Milwaukee Art Museum is building a new landmark bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava designed to boost the museum’s profile. With a length of 231 feet, topped by a 192-foot tower, the free-floating span is said to be an engineering feat of immense proportions. – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Month: January 2000
FOR THE SOUL OF A CITY
“Joining a debate as old as the reunification of Germany itself, the President of the Berlin Chamber of Architects, has called on the city to abandon “reactionary” plans to rebuild the Emperors’ Palace on Unter den Linden and instead build a future-oriented and community-friendly structure. Rebuilding the Stadtschloss, the Hohenzollern palace blown up by the East German government in 1950, would, he said, produce a fake Disney-esque facade that might become a tourist destination but would leave a hollow heart in the city.” – Die Welt
LIFE AS A FLAMBOYANT POSEUR
Was Salvador Dali a great surrealist painter and draftsman or merely a buffoonish public charlatan and poseur? A new 60-painting show at Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum begs the question. – Hartford Courant
LITERARY SCORN
No country is more haunted by the spirit of its dead writers than Russia. Yet the Russian image of the novelist is no longer that of reverent seer or even heroic dissident. If anyone embodies the new image of the writer in Russia it is the 38-year-old Victor Pelevin, a laconic semi-recluse with a shaved head, a fashionable interest in Zen meditation and an eccentric attachment to dark glasses. Pelevin has emerged as that unusual thing: a genuinely popular serious writer. – New York Times Magazine
BROADWAY ON TOUR
Touring Broadway shows make more money than even a record year on the Great White Way itself. But what are patrons of the road shows really getting for their money? Some of these shows are Broadway Lite. – San Francisco Chronicle
CONTRIBUTING TO THE SAUSAGE
New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater needs a new theater. The city’s mayor thinks it would be swell to locate it downtown to help rebuild the area. But there’s this big new mall coming near the present site… – Hartford Courant
PLAY INCUBATOR
Some of the UK’s best playwrights flock to London’s National Theatre Studio, next door to the Old Vic, to workshop their plays. – The Telegraph (UK)
EMI AND TIME WARNER TO MERGE
Music giant and multi-media behemoth to combine in latest media consolidation. – BBC 01/23/00
- Merger will create world’s largest record company. – Sydney Morning Herald 01/24/00
- Global music powerhouse – Wired 01/24/00
HISTORICAL SHOCK
New PBS series looks at the culture of shock in art. But, writes one critic, in choosing to focus on controversies from the past rather than recent issues, the show plays it safe – “safe in its choices of art to illustrate the never-ending conflict between artists and society, between freedom of expression and censorship, between what is conventional and what might lie ahead.” – New York Times 01/23/00
DREAD OF CLASSICS
The best novelists have read all the classics, right? Uh, uh. Here’s a survey of some of Britain’s top contemporary writers and their confessions about what parts of the literary canon they have skipped over. – The Telegraph (UK)