“In its new [Benjamin Franklin] Parkway location, the Barnes has met or exceeded virtually every revenue, fund-raising, and attendance projection made in 2010 before the move. More than 1.4 million visitors have made their way to the new Barnes, according to foundation officials. … ‘Membership,’ said Thomas Collins, executive director and president, ‘is off the charts.’ More than 17,000 memberships have been sold since the opening in 2012.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
200 More Women Accuse Director James Toback Of Sexual Abuse
In the two days after the Los Angeles Times reported that 38 women had come forward to allege that Toback had propositioned or harassed them, “more than 200 additional women contacted The Times and, in emails and phone calls, recalled encounters with Toback similar to those detailed in the story.”
Leon Wieseltier’s New Magazine Is Cancelled After He Acknowledges Advances On Female Colleagues
“Leon Wieseltier, a prominent editor at The New Republic for three decades who was preparing to unveil a new magazine next week, apologized on Tuesday for ‘offenses against some of my colleagues in the past’ after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances. As those allegations came to light, Laurene Powell Jobs, a leading philanthropist whose for-profit organization, Emerson Collective, was backing Mr. Wieseltier’s endeavor, decided to pull the plug on it.”
American National Ballet Drops 23 Dancers And Loses Big-Name Talent As It Tries To Get Off The Ground
The still-gestating Charleston-based company, which announced ambitious plans to “reinvent and diversify” the art form earlier this year, asked its members last Friday to sign nondisclosure agreements. Then, on Monday, “23 dancers … were told they were demoted or fired. It was part of an effort to address financial realities.” Three choreographers and coaches, including Rasta Thomas and Octavio Martin, left the company in August; its leading principal dancer, Sara Murawski, resigned this week. (ANB says that 24 dancers remain on its roster.)
Berkshire Museum Cuts List Of Works It’s Planning To Sell In Half
“Carol Bosco Baumann, a spokeswoman for the museum, said that only 19 of the original 40 works will be offered for sale in auctions stretching out into March. ‘Plans for the balance of the deaccessioned works will be shared in due course by Sotheby’s,’ she said in an email to The Eagle.” (The Norman Rockwell paintings whose sale his children have sued to block were not among the works cut.)
In Praise Of The Impersonal Essay (Because Essays Don’t *Have* To Be Personal Confessions)
Laura Miller: “The ‘personal essays’ that have proliferated across the internet on topics ranging from freakish hygiene gaffes to incestuous relationships are often not really essays at all, but short memoirs, confessional narratives whose chief interest lies in the unusually awful or awfully unusual stories they tell, and only secondarily in how those stories are told. … It doesn’t have to be this way! In its less sensational (and, let’s face it, less profitable) form, the essay collection presents its reader with the opportunity to hitch herself to an original mind as it pursues a course plotted by its own idiosyncratic, free-range curiosity.” (For example, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Cynthia Ozick, Francis Spufford.)
Finally, Columbus Symphony Can Afford An Executive Director Again
“In a sign of health for the city’s arts community, the Columbus Symphony has hired an executive director for the first time since budget cuts forced the elimination of the position in 2012. Denise Rehg – vice president of development for the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts, which had been managing the business side of the symphony – was appointed to the symphony position on Monday.”
London’s Last Scene-Painting Workshop Is About To Close (The Condos Are Coming)
“Purpose-built by scenic painter Joseph Harker in 1904 to accommodate 40ft backdrops for West End theatres, Harkers [Studio] originally provided art for Henry Irving’s West End theatres – including the Lyceum and Drury Lane. It is … facing closure amid plans to convert the space into luxury flats.”
Big Plans For Sydney Dance Company As It Heads Toward 50th Anniversary
Rafael Bonachela, who took the reins of the company from Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon in 2009, “wants to create a Sydney Dance Company 2, a sibling company of eight young dancers to tour regional theatres throughout Australia. … [He] also wants Sydney to have its own ‘dance house’ – a dedicated theatre just for dance performances such as Sadler’s Wells or The Place in London – and an annual international dance festival.”
In Tehran, Architects Design A Modernist Mosque Without Minarets, And Conservatives Freak Out
The site for the mosque is next to the City Theater, one of Tehran’s landmarks of modern architecture, and authorities were very concerned that the new building not overshadow its neighbor. So the architects designed a spare, low-rise building that sweeps up from the ground toward the focal point of worship. Now religious hardliners are refusing to recognize it as a mosque at all.