Istabbul has its first museum of modern art, newly located in a former customs warehouse. “While Turkey has a solid tradition of painting and a lively private gallery scene, the museum could provide a much-needed, stable institutional base, acting as a two-way bridge to Europe and other established centers of Western art.”
Blog
St. Louis Symphony To Strike?
Contract negotiations between musicians and the St. Louis Symphony broke down Sunday night, and the players will vote whether to strike today. “There are a number of issues under discussion, including benefits and work rules, but the biggest one is economic: Management has asked the musicians to take a pay cut, and they want a raise.”
195 Added To Book Of People Who Mattered
“The lives of 195 people who died in 2001 – including Beatle George Harrison – have been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The book includes biographies of kings, queens, celebrities, philosophers, assassins, builders and scientists.”
“Wall Of Air” To Protect David?
Officials in Florence are considering installing machinery that would envelope Michelangelo’s David in a constant stream of air. “The “wall of air” is one of several steps the museum is considering that could protect the statue from dirt particles without encasing it in glass. More than a million tourists are said to visit the statue every year in the Italian city of Florence.”
Peter Rabbit In Glyphs
Beatrix Potter’s “Peter Rabbit” has been translated into hierogyphics. “The translation turns the story of a mischievous rabbit into symbols of the Egyptian world, shapes and squiggles. Peter Rabbit becomes a square, a semi-circle, an ellipse and a rabbit image. The “time seemed appropriate” for the hieroglyph version, due in April, translators said, as the story had already been published in 35 languages.”
St. Louis On Strike
Musicians of the St. Louis Symphony voted 85-3 to strike Monday. “The impasse comes as a blow to the symphony, which seemed to be making strides after nearly going bankrupt in 2000 and after the debilitating illness and death of its former music director, Hans Vonk. The hiring of David Robertson, a darling of the critics, as music director next season had brought a sense of excitement to the orchestra.”
Central Park “Gates” Begin Installation
Installation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” in Central Park has begun. “The $20 million project, a quarter-century in the making and financed by the artists, will go on full view on Feb. 12 and remain until Feb. 27. It is expected to attract thousands of art lovers from around the world. The artists are trying to create “a visual golden river appearing and disappearing through the bare branches of the trees, highlighting the shapes of the footpaths,” according to a brochure explaining the project. The color was chosen to cast a warm glow over the park at a gray time of year.”
The Many-Sided Sontag
For what, will Susan Sontag be best remembered? “It’s not clear what, in the future, will be made of Sontag’s many-sided career. It may be that the fiction will be treated as a secondary matter. “The Volcano Lover” was a high peak of modern psychological realism, but Sontag never matched it in her other novels. If there is one achievement that people should remember her for, it is the critical essays, mostly on writers and filmmakers, that she collected in “Against Interpretation” (1966), the volume that made her famous; “Styles of Radical Will” (1969); and “Under the Sign of Saturn” (1980).”
Looking Around At 2005
Is 2005 the start of a new era in art? “We don’t have art movements any more, for one thing. We have market movements. In the place of successive modernist and post-modernist esthetic revolutions — now decades in the past — we have fads and collector enthusiasms, things like Japanese anime, Chinese photography and the new Leipzig painters. Such developments are symptoms of a fallow, second- and third-generation period, and at the same time indicate new levels of competition in the continuously expanding, robust international art market.”
A Meditation On Endings
Steve Winn ponders endings: “Endings define and disappoint, gratify and frustrate. They confer meaning and confirm the structure of what’s come before — in a movie, a sonata, a work of fiction. But they also kill off pleasure, snap us out of the dream and clamp down order on experience that we, as citizens of the modern world, believe to be open-ended, ambiguous and unresolved. It’s a delicious paradox. Fairy tales, adventure films, mystery stories and Mozart symphonies all gain velocity by pointing us at one ending, toying with our biology of anticipation and racing off toward some new false conclusion and then another and another before finishing themselves off.”