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“Boys” Take Home The Tonys

“The History Boys” received six Tonys, more than any other production, also taking home prizes for actor, Richard Griffiths; director, Nicholas Hytner; featured actress, Frances de la Tour; and two design prizes, sets and lighting. While “Jersey Boys,” picked up the top musical prize and received four Tonys, its main competitor, “The Drowsy Chaperone,” the Canadian-born musical that affectionately celebrates Broadway’s past, won more awards — five — including best book and score.”

The Future Of Canadian TV?

A new study of the Canadian TV industry says that “Canadian broadcasters and producers are going to have to integrate more with the global media business to prosper in the new digital environment. While “public financial support will always be necessary to achieve cultural objectives” in Canada, the paper acknowledges that this support has stagnated in recent years at the same time as the regulatory protections afforded by organizations like the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission have started to erode.”

What Is It About Cuba?

“Just what is it about this small island that has bitten us? Why we should identify Cuba as such an exotic paradise or centre of cultural attraction is hard to define. The quality that seems to be driving interest isn’t its literature, its politics or its food: it’s the music. And that is much more deeply rooted in British culture than you might at first think.”

Evangelicals Fight Over Cable Choice

Evangelical Christians are lobbying for consumers to have the right to pick and choose which stations they get. But “the fear among Christian broadcasters is that a proposal to allow consumers to reject MTV or Comedy Central would also allow them to drop the Trinity Broadcasting Network or Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Cutting off that access could hurt religious broadcasters.”

Gender Barrier Officially Down At U.S. Museums

There was a time when top jobs at museums were more or less off-limits to women, but a survey of today’s art world shows that the glass ceiling has long since shattered, and to good effect. “Women are especially prominent at the nation’s top tier of modern and contemporary art museums… Directors point to women’s long history of involvement in museum-dom, the culmination of decades of institutional advancement and greater diversity on the boards of trustees that hire directors.”

Was Kandinsky Painting By Sound?

“A new exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky’s work shows how the artist used his synaesthesia – the capacity to see sound and hear colour – to create the world’s first truly abstract paintings… There is still debate whether Kandinsky was himself a natural synaesthete, or merely experimenting with this confusion of senses in combination with the colour theories of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Rudolf Steiner, in order to further his vision for a new abstract art.”

Baltic Gallery Under Examination

The Baltic Arts Center in Northeast England is under investigation. The gallery has “threatened legal action against conceptual artist Chris Burden in an attempt to recover costs of £100,000. Questions have also been raised about a £175,000 commission by former Turner Prize winner Antony Gormley, who now serves as a Baltic trustee. The two cases provide an unusual insight into the financial arrangements between artists and public galleries, which are usually shrouded in confidentiality.”

Barenboim’s Tenure: A Success, But Just Barely

Fifteen years is a long time for a conductor to stay with a single orchestra, so it’s not surprising that, as Daniel Barenboim prepares for his final sendoff as music director of the Chicago Symphony this week, the assessments of his tenure are not universally positive. But John von Rhein says that, on balance, Barenboim has been good for the CSO: “Like all marriages, that of Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony survived honeymoon, discord, absences, misunderstandings, threats of divorce and shared successes. Both used the other for their own benefit. Both traveled an enormous learning curve together.”

Boundless Talent, Offset By Endless Self-Importance

The CSO may have benefitted from Daniel Barenboim’s celebrity, says Alan Artner, but it certainly didn’t benefit from his self-important conducting style. “The emotional blockage, vainglory and shallowness of interpretation I heard at the beginning I still hear; only now, it’s no longer offset by the promise of natural ability and aptitude… In place of audible conviction, we have gotten testimonials.”