Toronto’s mammoth CityPlace project is “one of North America’s largest residential developments and, at the risk of putting too fine a point on the matter, it’s making an ass of downtown Toronto.” How does it go wrong? Let me count the ways…
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Using Poor Workers As Fodder For Art – Is That OK?
Spanish-born artist Santiago Sierra hired 10 Iraqi immigrant workers and sprayed them with liquid plastic to make his latest work. “My first reaction to the use of living men and women in this way was revulsion. I felt indignant that a modern artist should use vulnerable people to make work that will be shown to a small, rarefied, and comparatively affluent audience. Is it not a violation of human dignity to pay immigrants to participate in so hazardous and humiliating a process? As visitors to the exhibition, are we not somehow colluding in the economic exploitation of migrant workers?”
Ottawa Pulling Out Of Human Rights Museum Project?
A new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, to be built in Winnipeg, was the dream of the late Izzy Asper. He put up much of the money and the Canadian government said it would chip in a significant amount. But then the country got a new Prime Minister, and though the project is well into the planning and design phase, the feds have reversed field. The government “position is simple and stark: There is no written commitment for federal funding beyond the $30-million, and therefore no commitment exists.”
Smiley’s Letter-A-Day NYT Habit
Novelist Jane Smiley has had nine letters to the editor published in the New York Times in the past four years. Considering the Times gets about 1000 letters a day, that’s quite a record. How does she do it? “Depending on what’s going on in the world, I send them a letter every day. Some days I send two.”
The New Producers
A new generation of London theatre producers is changing the business. “These new-style producers are not just moneybags, but are intrinsic to the creative process. They represent genuine producer/practitioner partnerships. The behind-the-scenes efforts of this new generation, who often work in non-traditional theatre spaces, are changing the face of British theatre beyond all recognition and making the mainstream sit up and take notice.”
Been There, Done That…
“The fleeting melancholy and euphoria associated with déjà vu have attracted the interest of poets, novelists, and occultists of many stripes. St. Augustine, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and Tolstoy all wrote detailed accounts of such experiences. Most academic psychologists, however, have ignored the topic since around 1890, when there was a brief flurry of interest. The phenomenon seems at once too rare and too ephemeral to capture in a laboratory.”
Music’s Next Big Thing
What’s the Next Big Idea in music? It’s a flawed question, to be sure. Just asking it betrays a bias about how the history of music works. Twelve of America’s best music critics debate the question in a new AJ Blog called Critical Conversation…
NY Phil In the Round?
Facing a $300 million bill to renovate Avery Fisher Hall, the orchestra is experimenting with a stage that would put the orchestra in the center of the auditorium surrounded by seats. “The experiment put the orchestra out much closer to the middle of the hall than ever before, allowing it to play under a higher ceiling. Onstage the musicians play in what is essentially a box set back under a lower roof than the one over the audience.”
Magnificent Organ (If Only It Worked)
The Royal Albert Hall organ is a magnificent beast. “It has 9,999 pipes, 147 stops, weighs 150 tons, and at its loudest sounds like a jet taking off. It is a quite magnificent beast that the Royal Albert Hall has just spent £1.7m restoring to all its Victorian majesty. Which is why there was a palpable air of embarrassment hanging over the hall yesterday, because on Saturday the damn thing wouldn’t work: not a squeak from one of its much-vaunted 9,999 pipes.”
Poetry And The Presidential Candidate
Improbably, US presidential candidate John Kerry has been reciting poetry oon the campaign trail. “Although there isn’t a strict separation between the worlds of presidential politics and poetry, they don’t collide with great frequency these days. And Kerry’s use of Let America Be America Again, a poem written by the late Langston Hughes, represents a head-on collision.”