Oakland Opera is a small company that does big things with contemporary work. Case in point – its revival of Anthony Davis’ “X”. “Operating on a shoestring — Sunday afternoon’s performance went ahead with neither lighting nor programs after a series of mechanical mishaps — the company has once again assembled all the elements it needs for gripping musical theater. There seems to be no limit to what these folks can pull off.”
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New Website To Track Nazi-Looted Art
“The year-old project offers free access to claimants, enabling them both to search the site’s extensive inventory of objects believed to have been looted during World War II, and to list objects they believe had at one time belonged to their families.”
Kimbell Returns Turner Painting To Heirs
The Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth Texas is returning a JMW Turner painting to heirs of the collector from whom it was stolen by the Nazis. This “puts a big hole in our collection. This was our only Turner and we don’t have a Constable either, so we’re missing both of these two great British landscapists. But this is one of those cases where the evidence was very strong that it was from a forced sale under the Nazi regime, and morally there was only one thing to do, which was to give it back.”
Pondering The Allure Of Opera
A gala at the Metropolitan Opera has Alex Ross thinking about the attraction of opera. “For a long while, during the macho decades of rock and rap, it seemed as though vocal floridity had been drummed out of pop music. But it turns out that there is an abiding hunger in the heartland for high notes, melisma, fioritura, and the rest. So why don’t more people warm to the grand original? One problem is that there is no way of capturing opera’s elemental thrill on television, or even on a recording.”
So You Wanna Be A Star…
Each year hundreds of families flock to Hollywood in the hopes of making stars of their children. “Some industry people attribute the flood of green arrivals to their exposure to behind-the-scenes TV programs, star biopics, celebrity news shows and teenage entertainment magazines, which give the untutored a sense of confidence about the way show business works.”
Buildings Made Of Dreams
“Engineering Art is in part a dating agency between creatives and science, through events that Dr Miodownik organises at Tate Modern to get architects, artists and designers just to feel materials, to ‘innovate through their fingers’, learn their properties and get them ‘out there’ on buildings. Their obsession with novelty means that architects are as sensitive to trends as schoolkids.”
Report: Scenario Where Art Market Could Decline
“Contemporary art prices have quadrupled since 1995, according to index-maker Art Market Research. In recent years, they’ve been propelled by growth in the U.S. and emerging markets, where wealthy businessmen have started to buy their national art at international auctions.” But a new report says art prices could collapse if there’s a global economic slowdown.
UK Fans Can Copy CDs They’ve Bought
“UK music fans no longer face the threat of prosecution for copying their own CDs on to PCs or MP3 players, as long as the songs are only for personal use.” Thus says the British recording industry.
Zadie Smith Wins Orange
Zadie Smith has won this year’s Orange Price for fiction for her book “On Beauty.” “Her previous two novels, White Teeth and The Autograph Man, were shortlisted in 2001 and 2003 respectively but failed to win. Ali Smith’s The Accidental – nominated for last year’s Man Booker – and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love were among the six books vying for the title.”
A New Push For British Culture
The British government has invested heavily in the arts in recent years. Now it’s time to go to the next level, writes Nicholas Serota. “We are confident we are attracting a growing audience, and can make a significant contribution to the success of the 2012 Olympics, when the eyes of the world will be on us. We want to show what the cultural sector has achieved in the past 10 years – and what it could achieve if the sort of investment it has received under this government is sustained. We want to get across our values, and our vision – and make sure they really are part of the government’s, and the country’s, core script.”