“The complaint by the Fine Arts Museums’ longtime chief financial officer, Michele Gutierrez, has landed both at City Hall and state Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office. It centers on $450,000 Wilsey ordered paid to an ailing staffer, and both the city and museum Board of Trustees have been looking into it, the sources say.”
Month: October 2015
Theatre: A Biological Imperative (For Some Of Us)?
“In fact, over the Foundation’s 90-plus-year history, the theatre artist study is the first in which a specific career group tended to have Foresight over any other aptitude. For theatre professionals, the aptitude for seeing possibilities is a defining characteristic.”
Philadelphia Musicians Sign A One-Year Contract
“The contract, which runs through Sept. 11, 2016, will keep the music going as the organization, which emerged from bankruptcy protection three years ago, charts its future.”
Time To Add Some Public Art To Harlem’s Parks?
“Lee sees this moment in Harlem’s development, as it becomes gentrified and the residential profile evolves, as a crucial time. She says, ‘When neighborhoods are changing, that’s the opportunity to make sure they change in a way that’s inclusive.'”
What’s Wrong With The Classical Concert Experience In The 21st Century? Maybe The Way We’re Mucking About With It
Philip Clark: “For decades, all the talk has been about how musicians dress; about the timing and duration of concerts; about the historical distance that audiences feel from classical music … Orchestras and ensembles have been experimenting with these strategies for years. … All this stuff – plunging string quartets into the dark, worrying about what shirts to wear or applauding between movements – speaks of a poverty of ideas. If you have nothing to say about content, talk instead about procedure.”
Classical Music Isn’t Exclusive Or ‘Elitist’ Unless We Make It That Way
Brigid Delaney: “Classical music is incredible. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t brought up with it, or don’t know how to pronounce the composers’ names … I wasn’t, I can’t, and it still lets me in … Experiencing this magic doesn’t ask much of you – just that you pay attention and surrender to it.”
The God-Hates-Renoir Movement Comes To The Met – And Meets Counter-Protesters
“One man who took severe offense at RSAP’s cause approached demonstrators, shouting at them, ‘You know who else tries to ban things they don’t like? Nazis! That’s what you are! Nazis!'” Renoir defenders’ signs read “You can take our Renoir when you pry them from our cold dead hands” and “Je suis Pierre-Auguste.”
California Launches A Cultural Districts Program
“Last week, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Assembly Bill 189 , a measure empowering the California Arts Council to designate areas as Cultural Districts in a competitive application process. … AB 189 charges the Council to formulate a plan to foster Art Districts throughout the state, thereby enhancing creativity, and in the process, reinventing the landscape of cities throughout the state.”
Is This Former Charlie Hebdo Cartoonist “The Arab Of The Future”?
With the first volume of his memoir – titled The Arab of the Future – Riad Sattouf “[has] emerged as France’s best-known graphic novelist … Not since Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Khomeini’s Iran, has a comic book achieved such crossover appeal in France. … [Yet] he claims to have forgotten the Arabic he learned in Syria, has no Arab friends, doesn’t follow the news from the Middle East, and knows no one in the Paris-based Syrian opposition.”
He’s All Around Us, Yet He’s Invisible: The Very Great Alexander Von Humboldt
“The Humboldt penguin, the Humboldt squid, and more than a hundred other animal species; Humboldt’s Lily, Humboldt’s Schomburgkia, and three hundred other plant species; … Humboldt Limestone, Humboldt Oolite, the Humboldt Formation, the Humboldt Current; … Humboldt Peak, and Humboldt ranges in China, South Africa, and Antarctica; … four Humboldt counties and thirteen Humboldt towns in North America alone, the Humboldt crater and Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.” So who was this man?