“An anonymous donor has given the Phillips Collection a $1 million gift to cover repairs needed at its original building, which houses the work of some of the world’s best-known artists. … The most pressing problems are roof replacement, upgrading heating and air-conditioning systems and repairing the exterior red brick. Few private museums have extra money to cover such maintenance expenses, and donors usually are reluctant to underwrite the nuts-and-bolts repairs.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Blocking Acropolis View, Athens Homes May Be Razed
“It’s a hot day in Athens and a builder working on the new $178 million Acropolis Museum pauses to wipe his brow and stare up at the 2,500-year-old Parthenon. At the same time, Elly Kouremenos looks out of the apartment she’s lived in for 72 years and wonders why the view from the museum means her home must be razed. … The future of her block, once declared a work of art by the Greek Ministry of Culture, and its neoclassical neighbor … has caused a furore, pitting architects against archaeologists.”
West End Theatres Are Full, With Reality TV To Thank
“Just how much reality can the theater bear? If you’re talking West End musicals, as much as possible: reality TV increasingly seems the only way to have a sold out show.”
Orange Co. PAC Sues Pelli, Builder Over Flaws, Cost
“The Orange County Performing Arts Center sued star architect Cesar Pelli and construction giant Fluor Corp., blaming them and subcontractors for more than $30 million in cost overruns and irremediable design flaws in the new Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa.” Filed Friday, the suit “questions costs that ballooned from a planned $200 million to an estimated $240 million, and design flaws that resulted in obstructed sight lines, cramped quarters and a lack of legroom in certain seats.”
Art & Auction’s Bruce Wolmer Dies At 59
“Bruce Wolmer, the longtime editor and publisher of Art & Auction magazine and an expert on the heavily moneyed byways of the international art world, died in New York on Saturday.”
Great Sheet Music. Can We Hear The Songs? No.
“(I)n a strange booklet of sheet music that was mailed out last week to more than 1,000 people by the Daniel Reich Gallery in Chelsea,” Dionne Warwick and Philip K. Dick “take the stage together in a kind of forced virtual duet, somewhere in the ether between a real and an imagined past,” with the sci-fi writer’s words set to a Warwick hit. The gallery called artist Sean Dack’s project “a ‘non event’ or a mail exhibition.”
Via Online Lottery, $5 Tickets At Playwrights Horizons
As of yesterday, “playgoers seeking a deal at Playwrights Horizons can put their names in a lottery list for a chance at $5 tickets. There will be no more waiting in line for Playwrights Horizons’ ticket discount on the first day of previews. Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons is introducing a new online lottery ticket system that will give theatregoers access — from home — to low-price seats for the first preview performances of its productions.”
Hillary Play Is A Dramatic Addition To The Iconography
A play about Hillary Clinton at the New York International Fringe Festival is “the latest provocative entry in the Hillary Canon, the continuing mapping of Mrs. Clinton across the cultural landscape, from her ludicrous depiction in a recent ‘South Park’ episode to her cameo in Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’ to her dissection in a steady stream of biographies.”
To Londoners, Revitalized Bolshoi Is Off The Charts
“The Bolshoi Ballet’s current season here, the third in four years, is such a success that it has inspired standing, shouting ovations from audiences and superlatives from sometimes finicky critics, including one who deemed a performance worthy of six stars out of five. The overboard reception has noted not just the astonishing individual dancing … but also the overall look, speed and spirit of this revitalized company under Alexei Ratmansky, now in his third year as artistic director.”
Mural Gets OK To Stay In Philly Historic District
A six-year battle over the fate of a mural on a 19th-century townhouse in a Philadelphia historic district has been decided in favor of the artist. “The Board of Licenses and Inspection Review took just eight minutes to decide that Dee Chhin’s The Death of Venus could remain on the wall where she painted it.” The mural was commissioned “in part to dissuade graffitists from tagging the building’s north wall.”