Blog

The New South Bank (Really!)

For more than a decade, London’s much-maligned South Bank Arts Centre has been talking about reinventing itself, without much actual progress. But two years ago, with the Barbican Centre unveiling a major upgrade across the Thames, things got serious on the South Bank. “Enter, in 2002, as chairman the former banker and press baron Lord Hollick, whose close links with New Labour and reputation for hard-headedness could only be welcome… Together with the supervisory architect, Rick Mather, they have managed to save the SBC by thrashing out a modified longer-term version of the development which the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and funding bodies find acceptable.”

V&A’s New Architecture Gallery Opens

London’s Victoria & Albert Museum unveils a spectacular new architecture gallery this week, and the curators have an astonishing collection on which to draw. “The display can be changed almost infinitely, encouraging repeat visits and allowing keen visitors to construct a picture of how buildings have been commissioned, designed, built, perceived and appreciated – or not – over hundreds of years… Although handsomely designed in a perfectly rational manner by the Glaswegian architect Gareth Hoskins, the collection of architectural riches is the museological equivalent of a box of expensive, gift-wrapped chocolates: temptation layered upon temptation.”

Labour, Tory, Or Redgrave?

Actress Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin, also an acclaimed stage actor, are starting a new political party in the UK. “Its manifesto calls for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq; the cancellation of third world debt; the return of Britons held at Guantanamo Bay and the release of all foreign nationals held without trial in the UK.” The party is not expected to have any actual influence on the British political system, and seems to have been conceived largely as an attempt to draw attention to the issues of human rights which have long been championed by the Redgraves.

Welcome To Wales, Home Of The Bloated Armadillo

“Rarely has a building attracted quite so many similes. Some locals think it looks like a slug, or a bloated armadillo. Glimpsed from sea it seems very like a whale emerging from the deep… For some it is already a white elephant – the latest example of a witless public-sector mentality. The comparisons multiply because nobody knows what exactly Wales’s all too multi-purpose Millennium Centre really is. The latest, and the last, of the big millennial lottery-funded projects opens next week – the legatee of more than a decade of wrangling about what should be built in the middle of the reconstructed Cardiff Bay.”

Lucking Wins Schweppes Photo Prize

The $28,000 Schweppes photographic portraiture prize has been awarded to German photographer Jens Lucking for his stark and engaging shot of three young Japanese women. The picture, which was posed, stood out for the way in which its subjects stared defiantly into the camera, and the jury also praised Lucking’s use of classical arrangement techniques.

Street Smarts: A Deal Gets Done In Philly

An all-night bargaining session between the musicians and management of the Philadelphia Orchestra has led to a tentative 3-year agreement, thanks to another intervention from Philadelphia Mayor John Street. The musicians will take a wage freeze in the first year, but by the third year, they will have the highest minimum salary of any orchestra in the US. The musicians’ pensions will also be moved from an in-house plan to the national plan administered by the players’ union, and there will be a temporary reduction in the number of full-time musicians. Mayor Street’s involvement in the talks was applauded by both sides, and it was evident that a deal would not have been possible without his mediation.

Something Borrowed (Now I’m Blue)

“Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property. In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. Courts have become more willing to grant intellectual-propert protections. Fighting piracy has becom an obsession with Hollywood and the recording industry, and, in the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime.”