“I think that what they did with the theater is simply vandalism. … Nikita Shangin is an unfortunate architect who created the plan of the Bolshoi Theater, I feel very sorry for him. He just does not understand what he has done. He does not even know what a crime he had committed, that he will be cursed by more than one generation.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘The Lascaux Of Punk’: Thrilled Archaeologists Find Johnny Rotten Graffiti
“Graffiti daubed on the walls of a flat by the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten could be as important as the discovery of early Beatles recordings – or even the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings,” according to a scholar from the University of York.
A Visit To John Waters’s Lovely Baltimore Home
“Bookshelves line the walls but they are not enough. The coffee table, desk and side tables are heaped with books, as is the replica electric chair in the hall. They range from Taschen art tomes such as The Big Butt Book to Jean Genet paperbacks and a Hungarian translation of Tennessee Williams with a pulp fiction cover.”
Benjamin Millepied Founds New Dance Company In Los Angeles
“The Music Center is giving birth to a splashy, blue-chip contemporary ballet company devoted to artistic experimentation, with a Hollywood pedigree, to boot. L.A. Dance Project, founded and directed by Benjamin Millepied, is being launched with a commission, expected to last two years, from Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center.”
Tel Aviv’s Historic Habima Theatre, Now Renovated, Reopens
“Massive renovations were needed for the Habima building designed by Oscar Kaufman and dedicated in 1936 … not only because the building was outdated and neglected,” but to change the theatre’s auditoriums – especially the overly large, overly deep main hall, whose limitations hobbled Habima’s programming.
Playwright Shelagh Delaney Dead At 71
“The feisty Salford-born writer, who drew on the gritty reality of working-class life, was one of the pioneers of the ‘kitchen sink’ realism movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. She was just 19 when A Taste of Honey premiered in 1958 and became an instant success.”
Arianna Huffington, New-Media-Mogul-Meets-Hugging-Guru
“For Huffington, who, on the one hand, serves as a glittery Earth Mother and, on the other, is the world’s best bullshit artist, with stagehands and pulleys at work in conversation (although, oddly, she remains intensely enjoyable to be around), AOL is in some respects a ‘magical land’.”
Choreographers Have Always Borrowed (So Quit Hatin’ On Beyoncé)
Alastair Macaulay observes that countless Nutcrackers make far bigger unacknowledged borrowings from Lev Ivanov and George Balanchine than Beyoncé did from Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker – and that Balanchine himself, who borrowed freely from Petipa, said, “God creates – I assemble.”
The Identical Twins Who Paint Modern Mughal Miniatures (Only Bigger)
“It seems an unlikely success story: identical twins of Indian origin, born in Britain, become famous artists for depicting their home city of Liverpool and other more controversial scenes in the style of Mughal miniature paintings. Yet this is the case of the Singh Twins, Amrit and Rabindra, now in their 40s.”
Marina Abramovic: From Art-World Provocateur To Crossover Media Star
“Hardly anything Ms. Abramovic says offhand is publishable in this newspaper, any more than are photographs from the performances she has presented over the decades, during which, often naked, she has cut or burned or whipped herself, or put herself in situations the plausible outcomes of which included death.”