“It may have taken a bit longer than it did in the U.S., but the legit industry in Canada has begun to show signs of vulnerability to the current economic downturn. Theaters have begun canceling shows, reducing seating capacities and slashing prices in an attempt to survive a situation whose full extent probably hasn’t yet been felt.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
What’s Missing Casts A Shadow On Met’s ’09-’10 Season
“The Metropolitan Opera, contending with biting economic woes, laid out a 2009-10 season on Tuesday that includes eight new productions but is also notable for scaled-back ambitions.”
An Oscar For The Reader Would Be A Disgrace
“If I hadn’t used the locution so recently, I would be certain to call The Reader ‘The Worst Holocaust Film Ever Made.’ … This is a film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution. The fact that it was recently nominated for a best picture Oscar offers stunning proof that Hollywood seems to believe that if it’s a ‘Holocaust film,’ it must be worthy of approbation, end of story.”
Fusing Arab And Israeli Music On A European Walkabout
On the Philadelphia Orchestra’s European tour, cellist Udi Bar-David is making time for extracurriculars, but not of the self-indulgent variety. His focus instead is a program called Intercultural Journeys, an endeavor that “seems quixotic, on some days even impossible: Arab-Jewish musical fusion.”
Updike’s Final Poems, Stories Set For Release
“The final works of John Updike, who died in January at the age of 76, will be published later this year. Poems written in the run up to the writer’s death will be released in April, entitled Endpoint and Other Poems, says the author’s US publisher. The collection, composed over the course of eight years, includes the poem Requiem which speculates on the public reaction to the author’s death.”
Might The Kindle Really Take Off This Time?
“Seldom has a new product that isn’t really new created such excitement as Amazon.com’s Kindle 2… It isn’t the device itself that is causing the stir, it seems – the Kindle 2 is an improved version of Kindle 1 – but the fact that people actually will be able to get one.”
In Fairey’s Arrest, Questions Of Art And Crime Intersect
“In the days leading up to Friday night’s [Institute of Contemporary Art] opening, Boston Detective Bill Kelley said, he was getting more and more complaints from residents of the Back Bay, the North End, and Mission Hill, furious that a man who admitted to spreading graffiti – even bragged about it – was being treated like a celebrity instead of a criminal.” The subsequent arrest of the suddenly ubiquitous Shepard Fairey “has left two unanswered questions: What is crime and what is art?”
Abstract Nipples Are Too Sexy For A Long Beach Art Show
“A battle over what constitutes ‘overtly sexual’ art unfolded on Long Beach’s trendy main thoroughfare on Monday, with an artist demanding that two of her abstract nudes be put back up on the walls of a public exhibition organized by a program that deemed them offensive. … The two paintings in question show women’s breasts, which the exhibition sponsors said went too far.”
Anti-Arts Senator Coburn Has An Opera-Singer Daughter
If having a professional soprano for a daughter weren’t enough, there’s another reason ignorance of the arts can’t explain Sen. Tom Coburn’s attack on arts funding in the stimulus bill. “‘The senator comes to the opera a lot,’ reports Mark Weinstein, executive director of Washington National Opera….”
National Museum of African Art Names New Director
“The Smithsonian Institution yesterday named Johnnetta Cole, an anthropologist and former college president, as the new director of the National Museum of African Art. Cole, 72, made national headlines in 1987 when she became the first African American woman to lead Atlanta’s Spelman College, the country’s oldest historically black women’s university.”