— has been injured in a helicopter crash in the Sudan while making a film of her life. – CBC
Month: March 2000
RETOOLED “AIDA”
The Chicago critics weren’t particularly kind to Elton John’s Disneyfied “Aida” musical fantasy. Nevertheless, the production is set to open on Broadway later this month after a makeover. – Backstage
CRITIC-PROOF
- After studying the life of critic Clement Greenberg, an amateur artist declares his manifesto: “In my private universe the act of creativity is always just in its beginning, formative, emergent stages, before it becomes crystallized into the known, predictable, and dismissible. Art has not yet been hijacked by anyone to be critiqued, theorized, and deconstructed; subverted into something unintended, opposite and unforeseen; used against itself in the cause of one tyranny after another.” – *spark-online
RETURN TO OWNERS
Germany and Russia finally come to terms on returning some of the art they looted from one another during the Second World War. – ARTNews
NEW LOOK AT HIP HOP
Christiane Crawford belongs to the first generation that grew up on hip-hop and saw its progression from urban freestyle to suburban entertainment, and she is offering successive generations an outlet she never had. Last summer, Crawford and DJ Jessie Singer developed Body, a semi-monthly event merging urban, social, and performance dance into a kind of live update on the TV dance show “Soul Train.” – Dance Magazine
ARTLISTING
Publication of a list of 350 artworks in Britain with questionable provenance during Nazi years, had British museum organization on the defensive Tuesday. “in Britain some museum directors after the war had not been ‘fastidious’ about checking whether paintings they bought or were given might have had a Nazi connection. But the organization believes many of the gaps in history are innocent but cannot yet be explained because papers have been lost, owners have died or dealers and auction houses are unwilling to release documents.” – The Telegraph (UK)
- List “far less sensational” than headlines suggest. – The Telegraph (UK)
- Proving ownership difficult. – The Telegraph (UK)
- “No factual evidence that any of the works had been stolen by the Nazis” – New York Times
ME TOO
Three weeks after rival Christie’s lowers its sales commissions, Sotheby’s follows suit. Did you talk to each other about the new fees, guys? Nah…. “We did this in light of the competitive environment we’re in,” said William F. Ruprecht, Sotheby’s new president and chief executive. – New York Times
THE ART OF POLITICS
Artists’ reaction to Austrian politics is problematic. “It is generally accepted in Western societies that the arts are a democratic safety valve, articulating ideals around which public sentiment can refocus. Artistic freedom has become as sacrosanct, in principle, as freedom of the press. All agree that it is abhorrent for politicians to interfere with the arts. At what point, however, does it become unacceptable for the arts to meddle in politics?” – The Telegraph (UK)
PROTECT THIS
“There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you’ve written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision.” – Reason
NOT QUITE YET
Every American composer seems to be writing opera these days. But despite some high-profile conservative efforts (“Gatsby,” “A View from The Bridge”) American opera hasn’t yet come into its own. Don’t despair though – “Prior to World War II, it was widely felt that British work was dead beyond hope of revival; the last opera by an English-born composer to enter the standard repertoire had been Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, composed in 1689.” Then in 1945, Benjamin Britten wrote “Peter Grimes” and a new era in British opera commenced. – Commentary