Julian Spalding: “If you want a pickled shark in a tank, you don’t have to pay the $12m Steve Cohen paid for the one selected by Hirst. You only pay that much for the artistic content that Hirst has added to it. If there isn’t any, what are you buying? … Damien Hirst isn’t an artist. His works … have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Damien Hirst’s Artworks Are Excellent Investments, Replies Damien Hirst
“It’s like, you say ‘sell your Hirst’. I say ‘don’t sell your Hirsts, hang on to them.’ If you look at the numbers … [art is] the greatest currency in the world.”
Looking For New Ways To Remind The Audience To Turn Off Their Damned Cell Phones
“Once upon a time, stage actors worried about tomatoes. Now, they worry about T-Mobile. Thus, the ubiquitous reminder to listen up and power down. While some preshow messages are direct and unadorned, many directors and producers view the recording as an occasion for a bit of creativity, an opportunity both to set cellphones on silent and to set the tone for a production.”
Now This Is Making Classical Music Accessible: $5 A Month, Up To 100 Concerts A Year
“The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is raising the bar for lowering ticket prices through an innovative membership program. For $5 a month, members can get a ticket to each of the SPCO’s 100 concerts during the 2012-13 season.”
Rage Against The Machine: Peter Gelb On Robert Lepage’s Ring Cycle At The Met
“This backstage drama should not matter to the public,” but Gelb, “the Met’s general manager since 2006, has been living it, attending every stage rehearsal and ‘complaining bitterly,’ he said, about the persistent clankiness of the so-called machine, the 45-ton set of movable planks that dominate the production.”
How (Pay) Television Got To Be Better Than Movies
James Wolcott: “As I write this, the Academy Awards are a few days away, with The Artist the odds-on best-picture winner. Does anyone think The Artist is better than Mad Men?”
Freudian Slips Are Overrated
“But decades of research in psycholinguistics reveal that speech errors are rarely this incriminating. The vast majority of them come about simply because of the sheer mechanical complexity of the act of speaking. They’re less like Rorschach blot tests and more like mundane assembly-line mistakes that didn’t get caught by the mind’s inner quality control.”
Even Mark Rylance Piles On Shakespeare’s Globe Invitation To Habima Theatre
“Shakespeare’s Globe’s former artistic director Mark Rylance has become the latest figure to call on the London venue to withdraw its invitation to Israeli company Habima to perform as part of the London theatre’s Globe to Globe festival this summer.”
Eschenbach And DC’s National Symphony To Tour Latin America In June
“The Americas tour, June 12-27, comprises eight concerts in five countries: Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The two stops in Argentina include a performance at Buenos Aires’s storied Teatro Colón, one of the best halls in the world.”
Ireland’s Top Orchestra Cancels Its 2012 Domestic Touring
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra “had for many years toured twice a year. But cutbacks in 2009 saw a reduction to a single tour. That has now been dropped” due to funding cuts by the national broadcaster.