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Ashland Attendance Falls

For the second season in a row, attendance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland has declined. “Attendance was 356,770 for the year, a drop of about 25,000 from 2003. The theater sold about 80 percent of its seats during the season, for ticket revenues of $12,854,751. The 2003 season finished at about 86 percent of capacity.”

La Scala Moves Back Home

“After a three-year exile on the city’s outskirts, the famed opera company is returning to its renovated 18th Century theater in the heart of Milan in time for its traditional Dec. 7 opening night. The contested renovation was completed a few weeks ahead of schedule, giving conductor Riccardo Muti time for rehearsals. Muti tested acoustics of the “new” La Scala with a 40-minute rehearsal last Friday, and theater officials reported that the maestro broke into applause at the end to express his satisfaction with the sound quality.”

Know Thyself – MoMA’s New Home

The new Museum of Modern Art building is essentially conservative. “This museum wouldn’t have wanted Bilbao if Frank Gehry had done it for nothing. The Modern has supported, collected, and celebrated architectural design more than any other museum in America, but it has never allowed its identity to be defined by any architecture of its own. It is one thing to display Frank Lloyd Wright models inside your galleries; it is quite another to have Rem Koolhaas design your building.”

John Updike Strolls Through MoMA

“Is more truly more? moma, which I first visited in the late nineteen-forties, was a relatively intimate collection of human-scale works in non-palatial rooms. You could hustle through it in an hour or two, on a one-way route. With the expansion of 1964, which added the great Picasso-Matisse room, some choices for ambulation were offered; but it was still, on the second floor, a single experience. Now four floors, plus soundproof galleries for video and media, beckon from all sides. One of the charms of a museum for modern art was that there wasn’t too much of it, just as a lifetime of history wasn’t too much. After seventy-five years, a life is a stretch and the cathedral may have too many chapels.”

Jazz’s Next Big Diva?

Twenty-three-year-old singer Gwyneth Herbet is the hottest young thing in UK jazz. “In only 18 months, Herbert has gone from trying to persuade landlords to turn off the telly and let her sing in their pubs, to rehearsing for the concert she’s giving at the Queen Elizabeth Hall to open the London Jazz Festival on Tuesday. Not long ago she was lucky if she could get someone with influence in the music world merely to agree to listen to her demo tape. Now she can count princes and pop legends among her admirers.”

The Whitney’s New Expansion Plan

The Whitney Museum has proposed expanding in the past, but the timing (or building design) hasn’t seemed right. “Now the Whitney is trying a gentler approach. A new design by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, approved last week by the museum’s board, is conceived as a stoical nine-story tower that would rise alongside the existing 1966 landmark. The tower’s simple form and silvery copper-and-aluminum-alloy skin would be a dignified counterpoint to Marcel Breuer’s brutal dark granite masterpiece.”

Can Contemporary Chinese Art Avoid Selling Out?

Contemporary Chinese art is hot right now. “For a country that has virtually no contemporary art history, where artists’ training is dominated by an ultra-traditional grounding in Chinese painting techniques, where the first clues as to what was happening in the postmodern western art world trickled through as recently as the late 1980s, the scene has mushroomed and transmuted with staggering velocity, artists running through mini-movements (political pop art, the much discussed trend for body art in the mid-1990s, through to a strong focus today on installation, film and video) with alarming speed.”