The nationwide rallies this week calling for equal rights for immigrants both legal and illegal made for some stunning pictures, as hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out in cities across the US. The experience has Philip Kennicott thinking about the meaning of crowds, and the sometimes contradictory ideas they embody. “The crowd image generally reflects the latent fears inspired by those who have gathered in the streets… Just as the eye scans the multitudes in a Bruegel painting, the lens scans the crowd, and finds it festive or restive, attentive or dull, emotional or over-passionate. But those are really metaphors: The individual stands for the crowd.”
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Filmmaker Vilgot Sjoman, 81
“Vilgot Sjoman, a Swedish filmmaker whose notoriously risqué I Am Curious (Yellow), made in 1967 for $160,000, sufficiently alarmed censors to generate millions at the box office and jump-start a new cinematic explicitness, died on Sunday at a Stockholm hospital. He was 81.”
Crowding The Shelves
“Birds travel in flocks, fish in schools. Sometimes books arrive in cohorts, too, testing the attention spans of booksellers, reviewers and, most of all, readers… For publishers and authors, these pileups can lead to a scramble to distinguish their books from the pack, with moved release dates and changed marketing plans. Authors battle to snag talk-show spots. Book reviews often pair books, and booksellers clump them onto a themed table. For readers, this can create confusion, or worse, fatigue.”
Berlin Biennale, Thinking Outside The Usual White Box
This year’s Berlin Biennale has apparently outgrown any single venue, and organizers are using the city itself as the staging area for the 8-year-old event. “Visitors were not simply making their way to and from a museum or some smartly retrofitted warehouse, the usual location for a big contemporary art survey. They were waiting in the cold spring air to enter private apartments, an office, a ballroom, a shuttered school, a former horse stable, the church, the cemetery and the white-walled galleries of the Berlin Biennial’s organizer, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art.”
Oregon Symphony Prez To Head Florida Opera Company
For the second time in three years, the Oregon Symphony is losing its president to another ensemble. William A. Ryberg, who is credited with reducing Oregon’s annual deficits and increasing donated income during his short time in Portland, will take over as head of Florida’s Palm Beach Opera this fall. It was three seasons ago that then-Oregon Symphony president Tony Woodcock resigned to accept the same position with the Minnesota Orchestra.
Big Week For KC PAC
Kansas City’s long-planned (and long-delayed) $326 million performing arts center faces a major turning point this week, when the center’s board will have to decide whether to break ground this year, despite having less money in the bank than they would like. Kevin Collision says that successful cities are those that recognize and leverage their civic assets, and that the center could be the centerpiece of a rebirth for Kansas City’s urban core.
The Monograph Solution
For 2-1/2 years now, Oxford University Press has been catering to the needs of academic librarians on a budget with “a browsable database that contains the complete texts of more than 1,000 Oxford monographs, in four areas: economics and finance, political science, philosophy, and religion. As a result, participating institutions no longer have to shell out for print copies of Oxford titles in order to make them available to faculty members and students.” For cash-strapped university libraries, the program is a godsend, and far from hurting print sales of the monographs, the easy and cheap availability of the database appears actually to have stimulated interest.
What Do You Do When The Ride Ends?
We tend to think of rock stars as having it made, rolling in dough, and assured of lifelong comfort and wealth. But the truth is that popular music is a fickle business, and even artists with long-standing track records can quickly fall out of favor. Chart-topping artists go broke every day, and why? Well, just try getting a 22-year-old phenom with a $10 million record deal interested in long-term financial planning.
Another UK Theatre Chooses A Woman To Lead
“The Birmingham Rep Theatre has appointed a female artistic director for the first time in its 93-year history. Rachel Kavanaugh, an associate director at the venue, will replace Jonathan Church, who left Birmingham this month to run the Chichester Festival Theatre. Kavanaugh’s appointment is a significant addition to the small but rapidly growing list of UK theatres steered by women.”
South Bank’s Tall Order
“As the new artistic director of [London’s massive South Bank Arts Centre], Jude Kelly has become one of the most important figures in Britain’s art scene.” But Kelly faces almost innumerable challenges in her new job, not the least of which is the perennial public confusion over what exactly South Bank is, and why they should care.