Rita Duffy, Northern Ireland’s foremost artist, plans to tow a giant iceberg from the Arctic and moor it off Belfast. She says “allowing it to melt is about ‘thawing’ a place locked in a political and emotional deep freeze where divisions are firmer than ever. ‘A huge big mountain of ice seems to be the most eloquent way of describing where we are. There is a certain type of madness in Northern Ireland society, a denial of what has happened to us. Maybe it’s time to come out of denial and confront what has sunk us’.”
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Amazon’s Book Review Champion
Harriet Klausner is Amazon’s most prolific book review. “In terms of productivity (8,649 reviews as of mid-March) and the ability to turn out what the site calls helpful information, Ms. Klausner is in a league of her own.” She reads four or five books a day, and publishers have taken to sending her everything they publish in hopes of getting a thumbs-up…
Theatre Of Major Reality
London’s Tricycle Theatre is staging a series of enactments of real events. “Critics have hailed the ‘tribunal’ productions as more revealing than any news report. For a start, we can go where cameras are banned. And, thanks to painstaking verisimilitude (every word in the script was spoken by the characters to whom they are attributed), the key players come alive. We see lawyers exchanging notes, water being poured, secretaries looking bored. Lights remain up during the performance, so you can’t help feeling implicated as witnesses lie or prevaricate.”
Why Woody Doesn’t Work Anymore
“Back in the 1970s, a Woody Allen movie was the way you measured your humanity. Allen’s nebbish persona represented the thinking everyman, assuming you also valued intellectualism, high culture and complicated, brilliant women. The collective high point of the Allen gestalt was “Annie Hall,” Allen’s ode to love in all its messy, modern dysfunctionalism, and, two years later, “Manhattan,” his salute to the city of dreams, culture, love and Gershwin. But in the past few decades, as Allen’s casts became collective ensembles, as he started aping Chekhov, things changed. His movies got crowded with East Side untouchables.”
How The Internet Is Transforming Entertainment
“The internet is changing the entertainment business from one that is driven by hits to one that will make most of its money from misses. This is good news for consumers, because it means more choice, and we all like things that will never make the best-seller lists for CDs, books or movies. And although it might sound strange, this “new economics of abundance” is already the basis of the net’s most successful companies, such as Amazon, eBay and Google.”
The Orchestra, The Concertmaster, And His Tell-All Blog (Oh My…)
When the Seattle Symphony fired longtime concertmaster Ilka Talvi last summer, he took the orchestra to arbitration. But this is the internet age, a time when the agrieved… write a blog. In the week since Talvi started Schmaltzuberalles he’s dished deep and unflatteringly about his former orchestra and Gerard Schwarz, its music director. Sure names have been changed in the blog, but it’s not difficult to figure out who’s who. Word of the blog has spread like wildfire through the orchestra world, and evidently has even caught the attention of Seattle Symphony management. Talvi writes that a few days after the blog began, the orchestra called to fire his violinist wife from her contracted SSO work. The next day Talvi writes of getting a visit from Seattle police, acting on a complaint about the blog…
Where Are Those Trivial Books?
“In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote of the necessity of writing that covers all aspects of our lives, and of women, in particular, making the subject of what they know an honourable and serious one: ‘I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial’. Where are these books now, that hesitate at ‘no subject however trivial’? Despite the burgeoning interest in houses, gardens and cooking on television, in non-fiction and a certain kind of popular novel, in literature it seems we continue to gloss over the significance of home.”
Gossiping In Cleveland
A controversial former Whitney Museum director, a well-liked London director known for his fundraising skill, an Asian art specialist from Australia by way of Richmond, and a recent director of L.A.’s Getty Museum are among the candidates said to be on the shortlist to head the Cleveland Museum of Art…
Russia’s Museum Culture War
“Culture wars over blasphemous art, such as Andres Serrano’s urine-dipped crucifix or Chris Ofili’s elephant dung-decorated Madonna, have flared up periodically in the United States in recent years. A similar conflict is now raging in post-Soviet Russia. But there, the debate is not about whether taxpayer money should be used for museum displays that offend some people’s religious beliefs. It’s about whether a provocative exhibition at a privately owned museum should be a crime with harsh penalties for the accused blasphemers.”
Axelrod May Get A Second Chance With Arts Groups
Two years ago, Herbert Axelrod was known as a selfless philanthropist and a hero to mid-Atlantic arts groups. These days, he is painted as a villain who played fast and loose with the tax code and defrauded an orchestra. Reality may lie somewhere in between. “Axelrod, 77, is a big-time donor in the arts sector, which last time I checked is not exactly overflowing with big-time donors. The arts community will be counting the days until his release, all too happy to help Axelrod rehabilitate his reputation… After all, it is possible to have a fabulous way with vintage wallpaper and have participated in obstruction of justice. It is possible to have been a star football player and have murdered (probably) your wife. In fact, it’s likely. Life is complex.