“For 70 years, the sprawling Whitney Biennial exhibition of contemporary art has prided itself on its insistence on an American point of view. But as times and tastes change and art world boundaries dissolve, the 2006 biennial’s two foreign-born curators have ventured across the Atlantic. Not content with just recording what’s happening in contemporary art around the United States, the curators have scoured artists’ studios in art capitals like Milan, London, Paris and Berlin, a first for Whitney Biennial curators… Given the proliferation of large art fairs all over the world and the speed by which images travel across the Internet, the curators said they wanted to make this biennial something more than a rambling show of new art.”
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Beloved Children’s Author Dies
“Stan Berenstain, who with his wife, Jan, churned out more than 250 books showing how the warm and fuzzy Berenstain Bears – Mama, Papa, Brother and Sister – confronted and learned from life’s little crises, died on Saturday in Doylestown, Pa. He was 82.”
Haven’t Made It Big As A Pianist? (Invest In Yourself)
“At the make it now or never age of 33, Simone Dinnerstein is among the numerous talented classical concert artists who are learning the realities of creating a career without the cachet of being a child prodigy or major competition winner. That means raising funds herself for recordings and concerts. Having begun a successful series of concerts playing J.S. Bach’s 80-minute keyboard Everest, the Goldberg Variations, in Philadelphia in December 2002, she financed her own recording of the piece in February to circulate among the music industry (it has been featured on XM satellite radio).” She followed that up with a recital at Carnegie Hall…”
Decoding The Podsphere
Podcasting, being the ultimate DIY technology, is a bit scattershot at the moment. Competence mixes with incompetence, and it’s fairly difficult to distinguish the good from the bad without downloading and listening to everything you find. But “two new search engines offer to do for podcasting what Technorati does for blogs by letting users search podcasts by keyword to single out audio that suits their interests. Podzinger and blinkx scour audio content for keywords by translating the audio into text and creating an index for quick searching.”
Biting The Hand That Designed You
“[Philadelphia’s] Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts has sued its internationally acclaimed architect in U.S. District Court, accusing Rafael Viñoly Architects of ‘deficient and defective design work’ and delays that boosted the project’s final cost. The lawsuit over construction of the arts center, designed to be one of the world’s great venues for orchestral music, does not seek a specific amount of damages, but it cites a loss of $23 million.” The center, completed in 2001 at a cost of $265 million, has struggled financially, and questions have been raised about the acoustics of its main concert hall, home to the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The Self-Made Virtuoso
The trouble with being a solo musician is that your career is frequently at the mercy of other people’s priorities, whether they be agents, orchestra managers, or whomever. Rarely does a promising young soloist have the time (or the will) to fully manage her/his own career, and the result is a descent into an exhausting and unfriendly world of bookings, recording gigs, and an endless search for more recognition. But as 26-year-old British violinist Jack Liebeck is showing, there is a way to skirt the “usual” process and emerge with both a healthy career and an intact psyche – just do everything yourself.
Rostropovich Walks Out On Bolshoi
Mstislav Rostropovich has pulled out of the Bolshoi Opera’s world premiere production of the Prokofiev opera, War & Peace, after becoming frustrated with the lack of professionalism at the company. The cellist and conductor had reportedly clashed with Bolshoi management, and was further upset by singers he found to be unprepared, and by an orchestra that featured a continually revolving roster of musicians. The production was to have marked Rostropovich’s return to Moscow’s musical fold, seven years after his last performance there met with unfavorable reviews.
South African Tenor Murdered
One of South Africa’s best-known opera stars was shot to death by his father in an apparent murder-suicide yesterday. Tenor Deon van der Walt, 47, had performed in Salzburg, London, Zurich, and other top European opera houses, and was the first South African tenor to become an international success.
Who Knew Deadheads Could Move That Fast?
Bootleg recordings are a mainstay of the jam band genre, with bands regularly encouraging fans to tape their concerts and trade the resulting recordings amongst themselves. But now, the very band that led the jam band explosion, is angering its fans by cracking down on a website that offered such bootlegs for free download. The Grateful Dead, which exists these days primarily as a business in charge of marketing old product, wants the bootlegs to be available only for online listening, rather than downloading. Already, the international Deadhead community has roared into action, circulating a petition protesting the action and threatening a boycott.
Creativity Out Of Mind Meat
“It is what neurologists call the hard problem: how does physical matter give rise to subjective experience? How does meat – the goo of the brain – become mind?” says Gordon enthusiastically, talking at 100 miles an hour during a break in rehearsals. “It is an absolutely crucial question because at stake is our identity and what it means to be human. We live with the illusion that behind every face is a self. It is the essential quality that we impose upon each other. But science tells us that it is an illusion and nothing more. In reality, the self is a story we are told by our brains. We are a fiction.”