Spending by philanthropies on arts and culture increased by 47 percent last year, reports the Journal of Philanthropy in its annual ranking of the Philanthropy 400. Philanthropic support for arts and culture organizations on the list totaled $1.15 billion last year. Overall charities took in 14 percent more last year than the year before. (table at the end of story) – Chronicle of Philanthropy 10/30/00
Month: October 2000
AIN’T THAT RICH
“By 1993, when he ended his thirteen years as the chief drama critic for the New York Times, Frank Rich had come to be known as ‘the Butcher of Broadway,’ but the Frank Rich that emerges in the pages of his new memoir is far more Dalmatian than Cruella De Vil.” – New York Magazine
MISSING JEWS
“Despite the work of Pinter, Arnold Wesker and Deborah Levy, Jewish writing is a neglected presence in British theatre. If you want to see an overtly Jewish character on the British stage, you usually have to wait for the ambivalent hero-villains in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, both written at a time when Jews were officially banished from the country.” – New Statesman
I COME TO PRAISE THE CITY
- “The modern city is a city of contradictions….it houses many ethnes, many cultures, many religions. [It] is too fragmentary, too full of contrast and strife; it must therefore have many faces, not one…. The lack of any coherent, explicit, image may therefore, in our circumstances, be a positive virtue, not a fault, or even a problem.” – The New Republic 10/30/00
NOT SO GREAT?
“‘A History of Britain with Simon Schama’, is this year’s big-budget blow-out to maintain the BBC’s stature as the carrier of High Knowledge. Now it’s time to come home, to let history put the Great back into Great Britain. Great, because every step of Schama’s grand tour of digs and cathedrals, battlefields and museums, is filled with self- congratulation. Self-congratulation for the historian, for the corporation and, above all, the ‘nation’.” But can we trust it? – New Statesman 10/30/00
LESS IS STILL MORE
Germany’s 80-year-old Bauhaus design movement, whose guiding principle of “less is more” was popularized in the ‘20s, is inspiring a whole new generation of designers ready Sto apply its tenets to enlivening urban architecture and creating affordable design choices for the average city dweller. “The idea here is not to reproduce the Bauhaus. The idea now is to try to pick up where it was before it suffered an unnatural death and apply it to today’s challenges presented by globalization.” – Los Angeles Times
GETTY MUSEUM BLOCKED
“The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has been blocked by a judge from building renovations and additions to its villa overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At issue is the $150 million project to modernise the Roman-style structure that opened in 1974 as the original J. Paul Getty Museum. The museum stands on what is officially classified agricultural land.” – The Art Newspaper
HOW DO YOU SAY ‘KA-CHING’ IN ITALIAN?
Twentieth-century Italian art made quite a showing at Sotheby’s recent London auctions, far outselling the work of other, more well-known European artists. “Although lacking heavyweight material by Modigliani or the Futurists, Sotheby’s realised £7.5 million for just 54 lots and set half a dozen new artists’ records in the process. Were it a football match, the result, on the basis of these figures, would have read Italy 4, Germany 2.” – The Telegraph (UK)
THE GRAVES BUSINESS
“In the 1980s, Graves became the darling of postmodernist architecture. Then he designed a tea kettle for Alessi, with a bird on the spout, that became an icon of sophisticated home design. Today, he is a self-proclaimed ‘old fogey’ who designs toasters for Target – and, by the way, more buildings than ever.” – The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
WHEN IN DOUBT, SEE THE ART TEACHER
“Watching my class of potential Rembrandts and Van Goghs in action last week, I reflected for a moment on how it was that I had become that ever-popular enigma: the ‘art teacher.’ You know who I mean. The teacher that is always just a little lost, a little dirty and can never quite seem to find anything. For the most part, we are popular with the students because we never seem to be very concerned with discipline and we remain close to the hearts of fellow colleagues who are always in a constant search for bristol board and construction paper.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)