“Pure art, which inevitably requires philanthropic support, remains a part of the Kimmel mission. But commercial acts are gaining an edge, fattening the Kimmel’s earned-revenue column. ‘We have 8,000 seats per night to entertain our community,’ says Kimmel president Anne Ewers.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Canadian Opera Company Keeps Alexander Neef For Eight More Years
“His method is to build shows as carefully as possible, let no detail slip by unconsidered, and miss no opportunity for what he calls ‘the transformational project,’ the endeavour that changes the company, ratchets up its level of achievement and – very importantly – alters people’s perceptions about what it can do. If it takes years to pull that off, he and his company are willing to work and wait.”
Children’s Author Margaret Mahy, 76
“Winner of many of the world’s major children’s prizes, including the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen medal, … [her] first picture book, A Lion in the Meadow, was published in 1969, and Mahy went on to expand her repertoire to encompass fiction for younger children and then for teenagers. In 1980 she became a full-time writer, with more than 100 books to her name today.”
Lost Katherine Mansfield Short Stories Discovered
“A young student has just struck literary gold, discovering four previously unknown stories written more than a century ago by Katherine Mansfield.”
Can The Barnes Foundation And The Rodin Museum Achieve Synergy?
“Having the Barnes collection next door should benefit Rodin, which has coordinated its opening hours with those of its neighbor. However, the Barnes is such an overwhelming experience, especially for first-time visitors, that doing Rodin on the same day might strike even committed aesthetes as a too-formidable challenge. Certainly the two collections demand different mind-sets.”
Let’s Stop Funding Shakespeare For A While, Says Lyn Gardner
“[It’s] hard to dispute the fact that the dominance of Shakespeare does crowd out new writing and other forms of theatre in Britain. So what to do? My suggestion is not that we should stop producing Shakespeare, but that we should have a brief – perhaps two-year – moratorium on funding his work.”
Has Participatory Art, Once Revolutionary, Become The Oppressor?
“[Tino Sehgal’s] pieces, like so much other participatory art under neoliberalism, serve a double agenda: offering a popular art of and for the people, while at the same time, reminding us that today we all experience a constant pressure to perform and, moreover, this is one in which we have no choice but to participate.”
Britain’s Guardian Launches A ‘Great American Novelist’ Tournament
Correspondent Matthew Spencer has (after much argument from readers) created a list of 32 finalists – seeded and bracketed, just like in tennis – for the title. His key rule: “I’m looking for an American, writing within the last 100 years who went back to the well again and again and continued to find it wet with novelistic inspiration” – that is, candidates must have written four great novels.
Singer Leaves Bayreuth Festival Over Swastika Tattoo He No Longer Has
Evgeny Nikitin, who was singing the lead in this season’s only new production (The Flying Dutchman), was forced to withdraw after a German tabloid ran a photo of a bare-chested Nikitin, during his younger days as a heavy-metal drummer, with a swastika tattoo. (That symbol has since been inked over.)
Palestinian Grocer Settles $115M Slander Suit Against Sacha Baron Cohen
“In the movie [Brüno], Ayman Abu Aita, a Christian peace activist, escorted Cohen’s alter-ego Brüno, a gay fashion journalist trying to make peace in the Middle East, to a Lebanese refugee camp. Abu Aita was identified in a caption as ‘Terrorist group leader, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade’.”