Theatre critic Hedy Weiss didn’t much like Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change.” In her review in the Chicago Sun-Times, Weiss wrote: “Unfortunately, Kushner, in the classic style of a self-loathing Jew, has little but revulsion for his own roots.” Kushner demanded an apology: “It is appalling that a playwright can be flatly accused of hating his own people without a single word cited from the play in question.”
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Dare To Be Wrong
The author of a new book says scientists have forgotten how to be wrong. “In any branch of science there are only two possibilities. There is either nothing left to discover, in which case, why work on it, or there are big discoveries yet to be made, in which case, what the scientists say now is likely to be false. The problem is, the top scientists seem to have forgotten that. The result is a generation of scientists who have become a little too confident that their understanding of the world is more scientifically accurate than it will be proved to be.”
Why Does Government Prefer Bland Art?
“Public culture long ago became synonymous with public acrimony. The direct negotiation over meaning and value that occurs between patron and artist, or buyer and seller, never happens when art is displayed by a patron state as an act of general cultural “uplift.” Instead, the cultural becomes political, and the less meaning a work has — “art that does not offend anyone” — the better for the state.”
New Haven’s Long Wharf Gets New Home
Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre is getting a new home. It will be in a long-neglected area of New Haven, and the $230 million project will include a home for “Gateway Community College, and a new hotel and conference center and parking.” This will be “the largest development project in New Haven in 30 years, will be built through state and city funds and from private donors.”
Scottish Opera Crisis At The Wire
“The future of Scottish Opera was hanging in the balance last night after members of the board failed to agree to an Executive-sponsored rescue package. The board meeting had been expected to reach a decision on cost-cutting moves including possible job losses.”
Boston Pops’ American Idol
Hundreds of hopeful singers lined up Thursday to audition for a chance to sing with the Boston Pops. “In its own version of “American Idol,” the orchestra is holding open auditions Thursday and Friday to find a vocalist who will sing in front of 500,000 people expected at the Hatch Shell on the Charles River. The only requirements are that applicants be over 18 and not have agents or recording contracts.”
Chicago’s Literary Elite
Who are the 50 people who make Chicago a great literary place? NewCityChicago made a list: “On this year’s list we have a living legend, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, a literary card shark, last year’s publishing Cinderella story, rock ‘n’ roll poets, Hef’s chronicler and more.”
Irish MPs Legislate Joyce Exhibition
“Stephen Joyce, the highly litigious grandson of Ireland’s greatest writer, James Joyce, has devoted his life to fiercely protecting his grandfather’s copyright, setting his lawyers on those foolhardy enough to take the Joyce name in vain or to reproduce Joyce’s words without consent. But now, fearful for this month’s mammoth celebrations of Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, Irish MPs yesterday rushed through emergency legislation which will prevent Mr Joyce from suing the government and the National Library over an exhibition which displays 500 pages of Joyce manuscripts.”
Tolkien In The Academy
“The decades-old dispute over whether Tolkien’s work counts as serious literature is still alive. So are the debates over how to interpret the cultural politics of his imaginary world. But even before the author’s death, in 1973, some readers were beginning to wonder about a different set of questions: how to understand the relationship between Tolkien’s storytelling and his scholarship.”
Hughes: Art Market Is “Obscene”
Critic Robert Hughes blasts the state of the art market in a speech in London: “I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying for an immature Rose Period Picasso $104m (£57m), close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states, something is very rotten: such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.”