The Bohemian lifestyle, romanticized in Victorian times, has been absorbed into the mainstream. “We have to recognise that many of our present assumptions about life have originated from people who, sometimes in very small ways but motivated by revolutionary ideals, hope and defiance of convention, challenged the establishment 100 years ago. In a way, we’re all Bohemians now. We can conduct relationships with people from any social class without fear of ostracism, while deploring oppressive, stratified societies.”
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Theatre Critics meet
This week 100 members of the American Theatre Critics Association converge on San Francisco for their annual meeting. This year’s conference features new plays…
Jowell: Let’s Support Art Because It’s Art
UK culture minister Tessa Jowell has made a case of art for art’s sake, for supporting the arts because it’s a good thing to do. “Too often politicians have been forced to debate culture in terms only of its instrumental benefits to other agendas – education, the reduction of crime, improvements in wellbeing…”
Kael & Sontag: Portrait Of Two Critics
David Kipen is a fan of a new book about two very different critics. “Craig Seligman’s new book about Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag is the sassiest, classiest work of popular criticism since Nick Hornby’s “Songbook.” Kael might have praised it as “fizzy,” Sontag could call it “serious” and neither would be wrong. But “Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me” transcends these catchwords to present a funny, smart diptych of two bookish girls from California who took Manhattan and knocked it sideways.”
Forsythe: Next Up After Frankfurt Ballett
There was an uproar last year when German officials announced they were closing Ballett Frankfurt to save money. The company’s well-regarded director William Forsythe isn’t sitting around though. “Forsythe plans to form a new, smaller ensemble soon, and Ballett Frankfurt will cease to exist in August.”
In Search Of Shakespeare’s Music
Where is the music that originally accompanied Shakespeare’s plays? “Many scholars believe that the music that originally accompanied Shakespeare’s plays has been lost. But perhaps it was so much a part of the popular culture of Shakespeare’s time that we simply haven’t been able to sort it out from all the surviving examples in library archives. Enter Canadian musicologist Ross W. Duffin, who has not only collated and reorganized all previous known studies on this subject but used computer-matching techniques to supply appropriate period music for songs that have come down to us with Shakespearean lyrics but no known melodies.”
Canadian Art Market Sets New Records
“The bullish Canadian art market showed no signs of slowing down as Sotheby’s Canada sold more than 160 lots worth almost $6-million at its spring auction in Toronto, setting records for least four Canadian painters in the process.”
Barenboim Says He’ll Be Done In Chicago
Daniel Barenboim says he won’t appear with the Chicago Symphony again as guest conductor after his contract runs out in 2005-2006. He has said he “disliked guest conducting, preferring to work with orchestras on a longer-term basis.”
Complexity Complex
Complexity theory is “the ultimate of interdisciplinary fields.” It “has blossomed into a broad movement of scientists searching for universal patterns that occur at all levels of nature and society when local interactions give rise to new collective behaviors. They want to know, for example, how millions of amoebas swarm into a self-directed slime mold, how a trillion-celled organism develops from a single egg, and how markets arise from the interactions of individual human beings. Complexity theorists want to reproduce these patterns with computer models, in order to gain a kind of insight that equations or statistics supposedly cannot match. What’s more, they want to see both the forest and the trees, by viewing big patterns through the local rules of interaction that produce them.”
Scotland’s Brilliant New Parliament Building
Scotland’s new Parliament building is about to open. Finally. After its budget came in 800 percent over projections. “Why has it been so very costly? The intricate design by the late Enric Miralles, of Barcelona, commissioned in 1998 and realised by the joint Catalan-Scottish practice EMBT/RMJM, is one of richness and great complexity. It has a style very much of its own, neither in nor out of fashion.”