Blog

Dallas Expands Arts District

After months of wrangling over zoning codes and property rights, the Dallas city council has voted to expand the city’s downtown arts district. The move is largely an effort to bring several “weed-choked lots and run-down gas stations” into line with what has become one of Dallas’s most elegant and well-designed neighborhoods.

The Jansons Philosophy

Ask a musician who the greatest conductor currently working the international scene is, and it’s likely that the name you’ll hear will be Mariss Jansons. The 62-year-old Latvian has risen to the top of his profession in the last decade, and has done so without any of the maestro’s traditional pomp and showboating. For Jansons, music is all about the emotional connection, and he goes to great lengths to instill this idea in the musicians he conducts. “My philosophy is that I can conduct if I have a relationship with a piece. If I don’t, what’s the point?”

Has New Music Made Itself Irrelevant?

Classical music devotees tend to be sharply split over the issue of contemporary music, to the extent that a conductor devoted to the work of, say, Elliott Carter may quickly find himself with a very small core audience. “The problem isn’t just a decline in musical literacy. You don’t have to be able to read a score to ‘get’ a piece by R. Murray Schafer or Einojuhani Rautavaara, just as you don’t need a thorough basis in colour theory and composition to respond to a painting by Frank Stella or Joanne Tod. Without really thinking about it, the broad arts public has decided that the truth of our times is not to be found in contemporary music, or at least not to a degree to make the search worth while.”

Oakland Ballet Back On Its Feet

The Oakland Ballet hasn’t danced in nearly a year, as administrators struggled to balance the company’s books during a planned dark year. But those who feared the demise of the troupe can now breath a sigh of relief with the announcement that the red ink has been eliminated, the 2005-06 season has been unveiled, and a new “fiscally conservative” business model has been adopted.

A Foundation That’s Quick On Its Feet

Getting money from foundations and government is usually a log complicated process. by contrast, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a charitable trust established by the banking family that owned M&G takes a simple approach. “The foundation spends more than £5.5 million a year on the arts and heritage. It shows how money can be delivered quickly and productively to places where it can stimulate and support good art without socio-political agendas getting in the way.”

Dissing The Diana Ballet

The reviews are in on a new ballet based on the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. They’re not kind: “While Diana the Princess, created by Danish dance impresario Peter Schaufuss, is indeed pretty bad, it does have moments of comic genius. The problem is it’s hard to tell whether they’re intentional or not.”

Culture Reporter Taken Off Air By NPR?

Veteran art-news reporter David D’Arcy has been taken off the air by National Public Radio (NPR) after the Museum of Modern Art complained about his report on the long-running controversy over the ownership of Egon Schiele’s painting, Portrait of Wally. Though the painting was stolen by the Nazis from Viennese dealer Lea Bondi in 1939, its present owner, the Leopold Foundation in Vienna, refuses to return it to Bondi’s heirs, and a contentious court battle has raged ever since the painting turned up in a 1997 MoMA exhibition.

Lining Up To Support D’Arcy

“David D’Arcy is one of only a few reporters who understand and have been covering the complex Nazi era art restitution story and he is a respected arts reporter. No print media have yet reported the story that appears below; Artnet News is the first to report publicly. You can read who has rallied in support of David, and it’s stunning that NPR has refused to reconsider its very weak and unsupportable position.”