When Seattle collectors Virginia and Bagley Wright unpacked their Jeff Koons piece “John the Baptist” for a show at their gallery, they discovered a large crack. “Produced in an edition of three with an artist’s proof, “Saint John” is one of the most prominent pieces from Koons’ celebrated 1988 “Banality” series of large-scale, ceramic sculptures. “Saint John” would be worth millions today were it not for the crack and might be worth millions in spite of it. That’s a serious appreciation, considering that Bagley and Virginia Wright purchased it in 1991 for $150,000.”
Month: April 2004
A Martha Graham Story
The Martha Graham Dance Company is in residence in New York once again. “The Graham legend, a mythology in its own right, contends that she combined the Puritan and the sensualist in her makeup; ostensibly this made her an authority of sorts on forbidden games. Today, forty years after the premiere of Circe, its would-be sexy parts seem dopey to the point of embarrassment.”
Aussie Arts – Flinging Open The Doors
Australia’s most venerable stuffy cultural institutions have found new life in the past decade. “Some call it “a renaissance”, others “a revolution”. Either way, many of our most august institutions have reinvented themselves. The walls that once protected their vast collections of artefacts and books from the ravages of the outside world have become porous. Why? In short, they have been rejuvenated by the internet.”
A Play About The Great Critic
Kenneth Tynan was one of the great theatre critics of the 20th Century. “Now Tynan, the brilliant writer who made his name on The Observer in the 1950s and helped to launch a new tradition of stagecraft in Britain, is about to become the subject of a Royal Shakespeare Company play.”
Getting Off On Off-Broadway
Where’s the interesting theatre in New York? “Everyone knows that 99 percent of the most interesting work is happening someplace other than on Broadway. Indeed, on any given night, more than 40,000 people are attending the theater somewhere in New York City, and about 14,000 of them are parked at one of New York’s nearly 300 off-Broadway playhouses.”
Old Culture War Fears Bedevil Arts Funding (Still)
The failure of a major initiative to fund arts in Cleveland came down to some very old issues left over from the culture wars of the 1990s: “The reluctance to approve government-administered money for the arts might be due to the two deep-rooted and opposing fears that the Mapplethorpe battle caused: Would the grants pay for art that the public finds incomprehensible, unattractive, obscene or blasphemous? And would the government place restrictions on artists’ freedom of expression as a direct or indirect condition of the grants?”
Cuban Connection – Cuban Artists Struggle In US
Boston Ballet shares something with the National Ballet of Cuba – two principal dancers. “Artists from Cuba are torn about returning or not, and the work they make in the US often addresses that inner conflict.”
Are Bad Movies Badder Than They Were?
AO Scott likes the best of today’s movies. “The good movies may be doing just fine — they may even be better than ever — but I can’t shake the gloomy feeling that the bad movies just aren’t as good as they used to be. Now, by bad I don’t mean actually incompetent or unpleasant to watch. Nor am I referring to movies that have become fodder for slumming, tongue-in-cheek, pseudo-camp enjoyment. What I mean is that a vital strain of American filmmaking — unpretentious, easily ignored by polite opinion, the opposite of respectable — may be in crisis, and that this malaise may be in danger of spreading upward and outward, robbing the best and the worst alike of intensity and conviction.”
DVD’s In Blazing Detail
A new DVD digital scan process promises to deliver movies that approach the quality of a 35 millimeter print. “The scenes look as brilliant as anything I’ve seen on a video disc — and better than any video of a color movie that was shot 35 to 40 years ago. Colors are saturated and natural. Gardens have dozens of shades of green. Flesh tones are uncannily lifelike. Shadows look like shadows, not gray blots. Motions are smooth, not jumpy.”
Makeover – Bombay Dreams Gets The Works Before Broadway
Though Bombay Dreams was a hit in London, it was not a big critical success. So before it comes to Broadway, the show has been extensively remade. “Though it is typical to tweak London imports like “Mamma Mia!” for Broadway, the “Bombay Dreams” revision is one of the most drastic in recent memory, along with the Broadway flop “Taboo” this season. Andrew Lloyd Webber, who produced the London production, has announced that the Broadway version is such an improvement that he will close the London version on June 13 and reopen it next year, in a different London theater, with the Broadway revisions in place.”