The Royal Shakespeare Company has been looking for a London Home. “But why does the RSC need a London base? Partly because it is the will of the Arts Council that the company has “a regular and sustained presence in the capital”, and partly because the management finds it difficult to persuade agents to sign their actors up for a Stratford season unless a London transfer is part of the deal. These are not altogether cogent reasons.”
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Beneath The Medici Tombs (More Bodies)
Begun last month, the Medici project “aims to exhume 49 bodies of the Medici family and reconstruct the dynasty’s genetic make-up and their real family tree.” Explorers of one Medici burial site have discovered a secret crypt that contains the bodies of seven children and one adult. “Though the tombs had been seriously damaged by the flood of 1966, the remains of a nine-year-old boy are still in good condition. Expertly embalmed, he wears red clothes and a small crown. We could have found the illegitimate children of Grand Duke Cosimo I.”
Group Art… Really?
“Just how inventive can an anonymous group of people be? Could an online mob produce a poem, a novel, or a painting? We like to believe that the blue bolt of artistic inspiration strikes only the individual. ‘[The] group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man,’ John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden. Hollywood scriptwriters constantly moan over how their brilliant ideas were mutilated by studio ‘editing by committee’. But collaboration has a long history in art.
Vietnam’s Bad Hair Day
Vietnam has passed an edict banning wild haircuts on stage. “Regulation 47 bans ‘hairstyles which inflict horror, painted or dyed hair, shaved heads or long, uncombed hair’ The ban, announced by the ministry of culture last week, also tackles ‘revealing performance outfits’.”
Art Tax Scores A Bundle (Of Art)
A UK program that allows people to pay inheritance taxes in art rather than cash has netted the government art “worth more than £21 million, including paintings by Constable and Turner.
Vandals Attack More Outdoor Italian Art
“In the latest in a string of attacks on outdoor artworks in Italy, vandals have smashed a stone bee that adorns a centuries-old fountain by Renaissance master Gian Lorenzo Bernini in central Rome. The attack late on Monday night followed similar assaults in Rome and Venice in which vandals have used hammers and stones to chip away at priceless works of art.”
Cincinnati Symphony In Major Cost-Cutting
“Three consecutive years of operating at a deficit will require the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to look at major cost-cutting despite a $1.8 million gift from an anonymous donor that will erase the deficits for the 2003 and 2004 fiscal years.”
Post-Fire – Rebuilding Hell
Among the millions of dollars worth of artwork destroyed in Saatchi fire was the Chapman brothers’ Hell, considered their best work. It consists of 10,000 plastic figures and took two years to make. Now the brothers have decided to rebuild. “We’re going to make a second version, a more extensive, updated `Hell.’ There are a lot of things that didn’t go into the first `Hell.’ This has given us a second opportunity to revisit it.’ Much has changed since 1998, when they began working on Hell. ‘At the time we had just lost our gallery and were unemployed. We had time on our hands’.”
Sondheim On Track
“Those who keep their culture in tidy boxes have a problem with Stephen Sondheim. For 47 years, ever since he jetted to attention at 27 as lyricist of West Side Story, Sondheim has walked both sides of the track and straight down the middle. He plays in commercial theatres and state opera houses, in am-dram and at the Kennedy Center. All his life he has defied categorisation as high art or low, common entertainer or lofty public edifier.”
Trying Out An Ashton Diet
“We in America have been on a thin diet of Ashton for many years (even his own company, the Royal Ballet, has been on strict rations). Granted that dancing Ashton requires a certain specific training, there’s still no good reason why companies around the world, so desperate for distinguished repertory, should shy away from the work of the man who is almost universally regarded as the second (with Balanchine) of the 20th century’s two greatest choreographers.”