A municipal cultural center in France “organized a reading of a 265-year-old play by Voltaire, whose writings helped lay the foundations of modern Europe’s commitment to secularism. The play, ‘Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet,’ uses the founder of Islam to lampoon all forms of religious frenzy and intolerance. Islamic activists demanded the performance be cancelled. Instead, the mayor called in police reinforcements to protect the theater. A small riot broke out involving several dozen people and youths who set fire to a car and garbage cans. The dispute rumbles on, playing into a wider debate over faith and free-speech.”
Blog
Oscars TV Ratings Down
Sunday’s Oscars TV broadcast attracted only 39 million viewers, the second lowest on record. “Except for the 2003 count of 33 million viewers — when “Chicago” took the best-picture award — the Oscars hadn’t dipped below 40 million viewers since 1987, Nielsen said.”
Rewriting Art History
There’s a new “revised version of ‘Janson’s History of Art,’ a doorstopper first published in 1962 that has been a classroom hit ever since Horst Woldemar Janson wrote it while working at New York University. For a generation of baby boomers, it defined what was what and who was who in art. But in recent years it has lost its perch as the best-selling art survey and has been criticized for becoming a scholarly chestnut. So its publisher recruited six scholars from around the country and told them to rewrite as much as they wanted, to cast a critical eye on every reproduction, chapter heading and sacred cow.”
Remote Author Signings – End Of The Book Tour?
Margaret Atwood tries a remote pen machine at a book signinjg, but it fails to work. “Not everyone had welcomed the gadget that Ms Atwood launched yesterday, called the LongPen, which is designed to allow authors to be in one place while signing their books, in real time, in another. Critics feared it might even spell the end of the book tour, saving writers many wearying hours schlepping from town to town, but ultimately cutting them off from their readers altogether. And it might – but not until they get it working.”
Richard Rodney Bennett At 70
“The world of music these past 50 years has not had much in common with Mozart’s time, so Bennett – born 70 years ago this month – got passed off as a chameleon, too commercially successful for his own good. He has done everything, from percussion concertos to Pizza on the Park, fanfares to Four Weddings and a Funeral. The composer who started out admiring Elisabeth Lutyens and studying with Pierre Boulez – two icons of musical modernism – ended up playing jazz and cabaret. The bottom line is that Bennett is still busy, and audiences love to hear him perform.”
James Levine Injury Update
“Levine, who has gained weight in recent years and displays a hand tremor, fell full onto his shoulder. It could be anything from a bruise to a slight tear or a serious tear that would require surgery. Levine expects to have an M.R.I. scan on Monday if the swelling goes down enough, to determine the extent of the injury. A bruise may mean as little as a week of recovery; surgery could keep him out for several months.”
“Corrie” Cancellation Heretical
New York Theatre Workshop was surprised when there were big protests over its decision not to present “My Name Is Rachel Corrie.” It shouldn’t have been. “What made it a more volatile act was that by declining for now to offend with the play, the theater violated the most sacred principles of our artistic temples. Those principles are: Thou shalt offend, thou shalt test limits, thou shalt cause controversy. If there is an artistic orthodoxy in the West, it is that good art is iconoclastic and provocative, and that any pull back from this orthodoxy is cowardly and craven. In this distended context, the New York Theater Workshop’s act was heretical.”
Serial In Seattle
“In the 1950s, when all eyes were on New York and nobody cared about the regions, that’s when, paradoxically, the most distinctive regional art emerged: Bay Area Figurative, the Northwest School, L.A. Cool, and New Image in Chicago. Although they were tuned in to what was going on in the national and international context, their audiences weren’t, necessarily. The audiences were focused on their home team. That support didn’t stifle innovation, it seems to have helped make it possible. In today’s pluralistic context, there is no home team and no label to describe the rich diversity in any one place.” So how about Seattle Serial?
Budick: Whitney Biennial Premise A Cliche
We’re told that artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial are “challenging concepts,” “transgressing boundaries,” “blurring lines” and “investigating relationships.” But Ariella Budick has some news for the curators: “There are no boundaries left to transgress. Art can’t be liminal in the absence of the thresholds. How can you challenge conventions that have already been burned beyond recognition? There’s something almost quaint about the use of these cliches. Where have the curators been for the past 20 years?”
The Mozart Requiem, Brazilian Edition
An unknown version of Mozart’s unfinished Requiem has been hidden in the archives of a former Brazilian cathedral. A new recording of the Requiem on the specialist K617 French label has been released, “in a version written 30 years after Mozart’s death by an Austrian-born composer, Johann Sigismund Neukomm. It has lain forgotten in a Rio de Janeiro vault for nearly 200 years.”