“With the completion of the Brooklyn Museum’s new entrance pavilion, the city has gained one of the most attractive public spaces to be found anywhere in town. It will be fascinating to watch as the neighborhood discovers how to use it.”
Month: April 2004
Open House Brooklyn
“After a protracted identity crisis, the Brooklyn Museum has decided that local, not global, is the direction it should take. Rather than struggling in vain to put itself on the map for a Manhattan audience, it is joining the campaign to make a gentrified Brooklyn the place to be. The museum points to its new front entrance on Eastern Parkway as evidence of this grassroots connection. So, too, is “Open House,” which, in its casual way, posits Brooklyn-ness as a cultural ethnicity.”
Down On The People’s Opera
“It is not surprising that the latest venture from Raymond Gubbay, the man who brought opera to the Albert Hall, has attracted the sneers of the experts. Savoy opera, intended to offer (relatively) cheap, accessible productions of the classics in the West End, has been accused of undermining London’s other opera companies by skimming off the easy stuff and offering less than perfect performances, with cheap labour in the form of young, largely unknown singers. It is the antithesis of what the purists, regardless of the viability of the product, appear to believe opera ought to be.”
The Last Regent
One of the last grand hotels in central London is in danger of being torn down. “The 89-year-old, French baroque Regent Palace – built and still run as a “people’s palace” hotel only 30 seconds’ walk from Piccadilly Circus – would be replaced by a modern block of offices and shops under a £400m scheme put forward by the crown estate.”
The First Rock Record…
Who made the first rock ‘n roll record? Think you know? Really? “It’s one of those debates that’s going to go on forever. It’s one of those questions that there’s no answer for. It would be nice for me to tell you that the first rock’n’ roll record ever made was by Fred Bloggs, but it’s an impossible thing to do. You’re never going to get a definitive answer.”
Kara Walker Wins Smithsonian Art Prize
“The Smithsonian American Art Museum will announce today that New Yorker Kara Walker has won its annual Lucelia Artist Award, worth $25,000. Walker, one of the country’s most prominent African American artists, is best known for taking the genteel medium of the Enlightenment silhouette and enlarging it to wall size, then using it to convey surreal images of the antebellum South.” The result is frequently shocking and controversial imagery conveyed in the normally soothing medium of silhouette, making Walker’s art a fascinating reflection of America’s shadowy history of race relations.
Progress vs. Public
In France, the peculiar type of civic modernization often referred to as “progress” by politicians is frequently met with anything from skepticism to outright hostility, and the construction of a huge new bridge over the Tarn River is the latest battleground. “The project is paradoxical. Nobody can dispute that it is going to be one of the most beautiful bridges in the world… But the bridge will do much more than lop two hours off the journey from Paris to the southwest coast. It is proof that in one of the most centralized countries in Europe, a bureaucrat in Paris can draw a line on a map and, at a stroke, bypass any local objections.”
Shaking Up Canada’s Canonical Publisher
“Venerable Canadian publishing company McClelland & Stewart is shaking off its dust jackets with the announcement that Doug Pepper will replace Douglas Gibson as the company’s new publisher and president, effective May 31. Gibson, who became publisher of M&S in 1988 and president in 2000 will continue to work at M&S, returning to oversee the imprint Douglas Gibson Books, which he founded in 1986, on a full-time basis… Founded in 1906, M&S’s catalogue is often viewed as the canon of Canadian literature with a list of authors that includes Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro and Guy Vanderhaeghe, many of whom came to international prominence during Gibson’s tenure.”
Banff TV Fund Files For Bankruptcy
One of Canada’s most venerable arts institutions is in an unexpected financial crisis. The Banff Television Foundation yesterday “confirmed that the 33-person operation, cash-strapped and burdened with debt, sought protection yesterday from its creditors in a Calgary court. The organization mounts cultural events such as the 25-year-old Banff Television Festival.” Officially, the foundation is blaming the SARS epidemic and the war in Iraq for much of its fiscal decline, but sources inside the organization are whispering that a pattern of mismanagement is the real culprit.
The Real Underground Art Movement
Most people wouldn’t think of a subway car as artistic inspiration, but apparently, there are more than a few individuals who do. “It turns out that New York’s subways have long been associated with art, and have themselves even been considered art, ever since the first IRT train rolled down the tracks in 1904.” From the subway’s original turnstiles to long-forgotten ads exhorting the public to use the service, to the stations themselves (no, not all of them,) art is everywhere in the New York underground, if you can just see through the grime.