English National Opera has commissioned a new work from the Asian Dub Foundation, an experimental group “best known for their blend of breakbeats, rap and politics.” No one seems quite sure what the opera, which will premiere in 2006, will consist of, but just in case anyone was worried that the ADF would take its usual act down a notch for the sake of high art, they have announced that the protagonists will be Libyan dictator Colonel Moammar Gadafi and his “revolutionary nuns.”
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Assessing the Holdings of a Nation
A UK charity is attempting to catalog every work of publically owned art in the Great Britain. “The nation’s collection is one of the richest and broadest in the world. But many works hang unregarded in public buildings from hospitals to council offices to fire stations. More still, in some counties up to 90% of public pictures, are in storage in regional museums, often in terrible conditions. Not only are they unavailable to the public which owns them, but they can also be inaccessible to academics, with individual museums lacking the means to put out catalogues.”
From Beige To Bold
Architecturally speaking, Toronto has always been an exceedingly ‘beige’ city. But with countless cultural organizations planning and executing new cutting-edge buildings, the city is poised to emerge fom the shadow of Montreal and become one of North America’s most architecturally diverse and fascinating metropolises.
Cleveland Museum Looks For $36 Million In Government Help For Building
The Cleveland Museum is asking local and federal governments to contribute $36 million towards a $225 million expansion project. “The expansion and renovation would enlarge the 389,000-square-foot museum complex by nearly 200,000 square feet, and add 31,000 square feet of new gallery space. The museum hopes to complete its design by January and to break ground in March or April. Construction would take four years.”
Reconsidering Goosens
A new film examining the tragic life and career of British conductor Sir Eugene Goossens is screening at the Sydney Film Festival, “impelling Australians to reflect on a shameful episode in their past.” Goossens was brought to Australia to lead the Sydney Symphony in the 1950s, but his promising career was cut short when he was fired and deported after airport authorities discovered pornographic photos in his luggage. Goossens died in disgrace in London, but the film portrays him as “a victim of the tabloid press and a morally zealous vice squad detective.”
County Grills Miami PAC Mangers For Cost Overruns
Unhappy Miami-Dade County officials are grilling project managers for the county’s new performing arts center, currently under construction and $67 million over budget and 20 months behind schedule. “It’s a money pit. The report says total costs still aren’t capped. I guarantee they’re going to be back for more money. It’s a 900-pound gorilla, and we’ve got to rein it in.”
Is British Opera Strangling Itself?
With the quick demise of Savoy Opera, the attempted murder of Scottish Opera, and the seemingly endless melodrama at English National Opera, Norman Lebrecht is wondering whether the UK’s opera world realizes the trouble it is in. “A view is forming, not unreasonably, that opera has reached saturation point in Britain, and most congestively in London where Covent Garden and English National Opera compete year round with visiting troupes at Sadlers Wells, the South Bank, the Barbican and the Proms, not to mention an incursion of festivals.”
US Senate Repeals FCC Rules On Media Ownership
“The Senate voted on Tuesday to repeal rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission that make it easier for the nation’s largest media conglomerates to expand and enter new markets. The rules, approved last June by a divided F.C.C., largely removed previous ownership restrictions on media companies.”
BC: Getting Magazined-Up
The magazine business is booming in British Columbia, and several new magazines have international aspirations. “In the past two years, more than a dozen new titles have emerged, with a particularly strong showing from a new generation of edgy arts-and-culture magazines.”
NYT’s Muschamp – They’re Glad To See Him Go
New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp’s retirement from the architecture beat is “a relief to a new crop of editors unwilling to defend, as their predecessors did, the critic’s iconoclasm and obscurantism, his unapologetic dilettantism and his unabashed socializing within the highest social circles of the creative world he judges in print. It’s a fall from grace that represents the kind of Times-writer morality tale alumni of the paper know all too well. At the height of his career, Mr. Muschamp’s writing was the talk of the New York cultural scene; today, his professional conflicts of interest and very public breakdowns have pushed him to the margins of architectural society.”