Alexei Ratmansky, the outgoing director of the Bolshoi Ballet, has been appointed artist in residence at American Ballet Theater. Observers hope that the innovative Russian choreographer will shake up the ABT’s “largely stale” offerings of recent years.
Author: sbergman
SF Opera To Receive Record-Setting $40m Gift
“The San Francisco Opera has received a commitment from board Chairman John A. Gunn and his wife, Cynthia Fry Gunn, for a gift of $40 million. It is the largest single gift by individual donors in the company’s history, and is believed to be the largest ever made to any American opera company.”
Canadian PM Defends Arts Cuts
“In his first detailed defence of $45-million in controversial cuts to arts and culture funding, [Canadian Prime Minister] Stephen Harper called his party’s decisions good governance and said the government must walk ‘a fine line’ between providing financial stability and ‘funding things that people actually don’t want.'”
Getty Curator Jumping To Huntington
“Catherine Hess, the curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum who organized its current, critically acclaimed exhibition ‘Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture,’ has been appointed curator of European art at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.”
Philly Museum Begins Search For New Leadership
“The Philadelphia Museum of Art has assembled a search committee to… find a successor to Anne d’Harnoncourt, the longtime director who died unexpectedly June 1.” There is no timetable for the search, and the museum’s board chair says that the interim arrangement of splitting the artistic and business sides of the leadership is likely to remain in place after a new director is hired.
Warhol Director Tapped To Head Troubled Arts Fest
“Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and the advisory board of the Three Rivers Arts Festival have appointed Colleen Russell Criste acting director of the arts organization, four days after the Carnegie took over the festival, citing a concern over its ‘financial health,’ and eliminated its executive director and associate director.”
TIFF’s New Home Taking Shape
Five years into its campaign for a new home, the Toronto International Film Festival still needs to raise CAN$49m to hit its CAN$196m goal. But the new venue is already rising: “What’s intoxicating is the way the innovative architect Bruce Kuwabara has designed the cinemas as cubic sculptures suspended transparently within the five-storey Lightbox podium, almost… like apples hanging from a tree.”
Toronto FilmFest Having A Stomach-Churning Year
“What gives with all the gross-outs? I know festival films are supposed to stretch boundaries and challenge audiences, but I can’t remember a year when so many TIFF titles should have included barf bags with the ticket purchase.”
Novelist Gregory McDonald, 71
Crime novelist Gregory McDonald, creator of the snarky reporter/detective Fletch, has died of cancer at his Tennessee home. “A former reporter and editor for The Boston Globe, Mr. Mcdonald was considered a master of the comic-mystery genre.”
Campbell’s Challenge
Thomas Campbell may not have been the chattering classes’ idea of an exciting choice to head the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he says he’s up to the task, and has a clear idea of where he wants to take the institution. “In this age of communication and the Internet our local and international audiences are actually very sophisticated. So the big challenge is how to deliver different levels of information to different audiences.”