“The architectural design [of the Barnes Foundation’s new home] can’t be evaluated in the usual terms because it is so much more than the latest contender for the title of the world’s most glamorous art palace. The architecture also must succeed as an exoneration of the foundation’s alleged crimes against the memory of its founder, the mercurial, vengeful Albert C. Barnes.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
In Convoluted Design, Barnes Architects Strain For Serenity
“For any architect taking on the challenge of the new [Barnes Foundation] space, the tangle of ethical and design questions might seem overwhelming. … The answers found in the drawings of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the New York architects who took the commission, are not reassuring.”
Bethesda Theatre Abandons Producing For Rentals
The Maryland theatre’s former executive director “says the theater has not yet recovered from the financial hit it took in April 2008, when it had to cancel its own new production of ‘Smokey Joe’s Cafe’ after the theater sustained damage from a burst water pipe,” prompting an insurance claim that has yet to be paid.
Parsing The Politics Of The White House’s New Art
“Working with curators at the White House and at the local museums that made loans, the First Couple selected some works whose politics are explicit, and mild. They seem to redress past imbalances in the nation’s sense of its own art.”
Barnes, Gardner Struggle To Honor Founders’ Wishes
“Both the Gardner and the Barnes are domestic in scale and appealing relics: the antithesis of today’s giant museums with endless white galleries. … We need museums that don’t toe the art-world party line, but idiosyncrasy can go too far.”
Why Americans Rarely Win The Nobel Prize In Literature
“The prize,” to be announced tomorrow, “has a political edge, so will the academy throw a bone to Barack Obama by giving it to an American for the first time in 16 years? Could be, though recent precedent suggests that U.S. writers don’t stand a chance.”
Documentarians Nervously Eye Supreme Court Case
As the Supreme Court hears arguments in a First Amendment case, filmmakers worry “that a ruling for the government could make it harder for the Michael Moores of the world to take on controversial subjects.” The government is asking the court to “treat depictions of cruelty to animals the same as child pornography.”
Maggie Smith Says Cancer May End Her Stage Career
“I’m not sure I could go back to theatre work, although film work is more tiring,” says a weary-looking Maggie Smith, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. “I’m frightened to work in theatre now. I feel very uncertain.”
Ignorance Of Science, Math Is Culturati’s Badge Of Shame
Why do “we still meet people who would think it shaming to admit difficulty in reading but who boast (sometimes untruthfully) about their incompetence at basic mathematics? How come the phrase ‘computer nerd’ runs off the tongue more easily than ‘painting nerd’?”
Survey: Pay Cuts For One Third Of Art Museum Directors
“A survey of more than 60 major art museums in the US shows that the directors of more than one third have recently taken pay cuts, many of them substantial, and senior staff at most of those institutions have also had their compensation trimmed. … But directors of large institutions are still among the highest paid in the culture sector….”