“Musical theater was once a staple of television. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ regularly featured performances from the latest Broadway shows, allowing people who had little prospect of seeing the productions to get at least a taste of them. In the mid-’50s, when Mary Martin brought “Peter Pan” to NBC, it was a national event — one that the network repeated regularly for years. Televised productions of such musicals as “Wonderful Town,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” “One Touch of Venus,” “Brigadoon” and “Kiss Me, Kate,” among others, also were presented during that era. Where did it all go?”
Blog
Tavis Smiley Presses His Case For Public Radio Diversity
“For many years, public radio executives have studied the makeup of their audience and concluded that its single most defining characteristic is college education. Consultants advising programmers on how to shape their stations blame the audience’s lack of racial diversity on ‘longstanding educational inequities.’ Whatever the cause of the divide, more and more public stations are trying to broaden their mix of listeners.”
Indonesian Writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 81
“Pramoedya is best known for his ‘Buru Quartet’ series retracing the rise of Indonesian nationalism in the first decades of the 20th century, a version differed from that of the government at the time. Hailed by many international critics as Indonesia’s leading modern novelist, his work has been translated into 30 languages.”
Judd At The Altar
“It is unsettling that the first large-scale U.S. exhibition of the work of Donald Judd in almost 20 years has been organized by Christie’s auction house. Not because this isn’t a museum, although this fact gives pause. What’s unsettling is this isn’t a show at all. It’s a sale—some would say an unnecessary one.”
New Orleans Music – Unending, Unknowing
“New Orleans is two cities now—one inching toward renewal, the other caught in what David Winkler-Schmidt of the local Gambit Weekly called ‘the horrible unending of not knowing.’ Already Gambit’s music section lists my favorite clubs hosting my favorite bands, many of whose members travel from Atlanta or Baton Rouge for gigs. But the great body of culture that long inspired and still shapes the sound of American music—in the form of jazz musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, Social Aid and Pleasure Club second-liners, neighborhood brass bands, and up-from-the-projects MCs— remains stuck in that unending.”
UK To Compensate Family For Nazi-Looted Drawings
The British government is to compensate relatives of a man whose drawings were stolen by the Nazis. The drawings are in the British Museum. “Relatives of Dr Arthur Feldmann are to receive £175,000 after a special panel decided they had ‘firm evidence’ that the works had been seized in 1939. The family says the Old Master drawings can stay in the British Museum. The panel has asked the government to introduce laws permitting the return of objects plundered during the Nazi era.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, 97
Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was “The Affluent Society” (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on complex topics, and many of his compelling phrases — among them “the affluent society,” “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power” — became part of the language.
A Glasgow Favorite Emerges As A New Model For Museums
Glasgow’s much loved Kelvingrove gets a radical makeover. And does it work? “It’s as full-on educational as I have ever seen in a museum. A Victorian painting is shown in various stages of cleaning. There are panels explaining pentimenti and underpainting, why paintings look the way they do, all using actual objects from the collection. My initial reaction is that this is quite a lot to take in, but it is a good way to start people off on art appreciation, and most importantly it captures the imagination and makes you want to see the works in the following rooms, probably now in a new light.”
The Barenboim Doctrine
“Suddenly, classical music has become sexy. In the course of a single month, one man – conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim – has achieved what generations of musicians and musicologists have strived to achieve: to find a way of talking about music that makes us see its relevance to our everyday existence.”
When Once The Critics Were Titans
A new biography takes the measure of Clement Greenberg. “The power of critics such as Clement Greenberg in art or Edmund Wilson in literature — both did much to shape elite and popular taste in the mid-20th century — is hard to imagine today. Contemporary art is self-parodic and insulated against Greenberg’s style of criticism, and art-world success is now determined almost exclusively in the marketplace, not on the printed page.”