“The whole idea of some kind of more fundamental ‘Americanness,’ seeping into all our art the way the landscape of Bordeaux seeps into its wines, falls apart as soon as you start testing it. What if it turned out, for instance, that all of Jackson Pollock’s pictures were actually painted by a Frenchman — a certain Jacques Saint-Paul Oc — who got a hard-drinking young American to flog them for him? Someone would be bound to insist that only a Frenchman could have managed all that insouciant paint-dripping, with its Gallic joie de vivre and a soupcon of panache.”
Blog
Indiana Orchestra Rejects Donor For Board
A major donor to the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Philharmonic wanted to join the board. The orchestra is having attendance and money problems. But the orchestra’s board refused to have him join them. Why? “I’m very controversial to some people, because I want to make things better. Board members think it’s their orchestra.”
Is TV The Road To Talent In The Theatre?
A British TV show is a search for theatrical talent. “Is it possible, the series asks, not only to select a credible winner from a pool of inchoate works in progress, but also to muscle it into shape — rewrite it, cast it, design it, stage it — in the space of a few months, so that it can open in the West End? And perhaps even more to the point, can it ever make money?”
Video, Video, Everywhere…
“Concurrent with the migration to the Web of professional video – ‘Desperate Housewives’ on iTunes and the like – there has been a nuclear explosion in the field of amateur video. The gatekeeper used to be “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and it tended to let in mostly footage of people doubled over in sudden comic pain, but now the gates are wide open. YouTube, the leader in an increasingly crowded genre, claims 50,000 videos are uploaded to its site daily, a number that seems awesome until you think about some other numbers.”
Theatre Exists Outside New York (Really)
“Why aren’t our finest regional [theatre] companies as well known as, say, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Orchestra? Ask any publicist and the first thing you’ll hear is that the media don’t take regional theater seriously. Each year it grows more difficult to persuade the arts editors of major newspapers and magazines — even those that pay fairly close attention to theater in New York — to send their drama critics to other cities, save for an occasional trip to London. As for TV, forget about it. I can’t remember the last time PBS aired an out-of-town production. Regional theater, it seems, just isn’t glamorous enough to make the journalistic cut.”
Why Jazz Doesn’t Always Sound Good In Great Concert Halls
Carnegie Hall is, of course, one of the world’s great concert halls, just so long as you’re talking about symphonic music. But throw the best jazz band in the world on the Carnegie main stage, and you’ve got a major acoustical problem on your hands. The problem has to do with electronics – halls built to showcase the raw sound of an orchestra just aren’t built to deal with the high-octane amplification systems used by jazz and pop musicians. The problem can be overcome without too much trouble if the guy running the sound board knows how to do it, but a large percentage of board operators just aren’t used to working in such an environment.
The New Politics – A Flood Of Books
Bookstores are filling up with new books on political themes. “Ten years ago, political books didn’t sell very well. Now, in the last three or four years, the sales are off the charts. Look at the last election with the Al Frankens, Michael Moores, Bill O’Reillys. The publishers know this and they’re responding.”
Emmy Looks To Broaden Its Horizons
“The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the overseer of the annual Emmy Awards for prime-time television, has revamped its procedures in an attempt to spread the wealth of Emmy nominations — if not the actual awards — to a broader array of actors, actresses and shows. That could result in some overlooked and new titles making the list of nominees in the top Emmy categories for the first time when this year’s nominations are announced on July 6.”
Guthrie’s Gamble
As Minneapolis’s huge new Guthrie Theater opens for business this weekend, there’s no question that the company has succeeded in building serious national buzz about its new home. But some observers wonder whether local audiences used to the old Guthrie’s intimate surroundings will be put off by the grand scale of the new complex. And it’s not as if theatregoers don’t have other choices. “Guthrie’s challenge in 1963 was to educate a market with only one Equity house, a few short-lived professional companies and a dozen community theaters. [Today, the company] is facing a mature — some would argue saturated — market in which he hopes to sell 140,000 more tickets each year.”
A Kansas City Museum’s New Display Idea
Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum is rearranging its collection. “Typically, there are rooms for paintings, for sculpture, for silverwork, for ceramics, for furniture, etc., and never do the various media meet. That, however, has changed in Kansas City. ‘It is a new museum concept. It grows out of this idea that I had that people weren’t getting enough out of it’.”