“In a decision expected to have major ramifications throughout the international art world, a British judge yesterday found the venerable auction house Christie’s guilty of ‘negligence’ and ‘misrepresentation’ in the sale 10 years ago of two urns to Canadian heiress Taylor Lynne Thomson… If the complex, 71-page judgment holds, it should result in changes to the way auction houses in Britain and likely elsewhere attest to the accuracy of the information they present in their catalogues and by their staff for the objects they sell. Heretofore, auction houses have described their views on their consignments as being essentially ‘opinions,’ not statements of fact.”
Blog
Getting To Know The New Guy
As the Colorado Symphony prepares for the arrival of new music director Jeffrey Kahane, comparisons to outgoing MD Marin Alsop are inevitable. Alsop rose to international acclaim during her time in Denver, and the CSO caught some of the attention as a result. Kahane, by contrast, has never topped any overblown lists of conductors thought to be “the next big thing,” but he is quietly beloved by musicians, audiences, and administrators nearly everywhere he conducts. He doesn’t micromanage his orchestras from a musical standpoint, but behind the scenes, he seems to have his hands in nearly every facet of the organization.
Where’s That Philly Sound?
Is the Philadelphia Orchestra slipping a few steps? “With a new performance space, and a European tour imminent under a new director, all seems rosy enough superficially. But there have recently been mutterings in the press about strife beneath the surface, including difficult contract negotiations for the players and arguments about poor acoustics at the Kimmel Centre. But then in Philadelphia, there is a sense, more than other places I’ve been, that the orchestra is a potent symbol, an ambassador of the city, and everyone you meet has an opinion about it.”
Opera Australia Funding Crippling Company’s Activities
Opera Australia posts its second annual deficit. The company’s chief executive says Victorians were “not getting the opera they deserved. He said the company could not afford to service Melbourne as it would like unless the Victorian Government increased its contribution. ‘The funding level of the company is too little to do all the activities that are asked of the company and the cost of staging opera in Melbourne had been seriously underestimated when the formula was drawn up in 2000. As a result, Victorians were now seeing fewer productions.”
Remaking Davenport, Heavy On The Arts
Times have not been good lately in Davenport, Iowa, one of the four adjoining Iowa/Illinois river towns known as the Quad Cities. But the city is trying to make its own good luck with a $113.5 million revitalization program focused on making Davenport a cultural center for the region. From the wholesale renovation of a ballpark frequently called the most beautiful in all the minor leagues to a $9 million dollar museum and performance venue celebrating the city’s jazz/blues tradition to a spectacular new $34 million building housing the Davenport Museum of Art, civic leaders have unquestionably been putting their money where their mouths are.
Ebert: Palme d’Or Race Wide Open
“The 57th Cannes Film Festival heads into its closing weekend with no clear favorite for the Palme d’Or, and with critics generally agreeing there have been good films but no sensation that has pulled ahead of the pack. The most rapturous reception was for Michael Moore’s Bush-whacking documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, but the applause was as much for its politics as its filmmaking.” In fact, Roger Ebert says that some of the best films he’s seen this year at Cannes are playing on the fringes of the festival, and aren’t even officially entered in the competition.
Whitney on the Web
The Whitney Biennial has a web site, of course, just like every other organization on the planet. But unlike many other attempts to merge art exhibits and websurfing, Jim Regan says that this site actually does an excellent job of complementing its real-life counterpart. “The overriding reason for visiting the site will be to view the Art and Artists section. With 108 candidates to choose from, displaying the options in an intelligible manner presents a challenge. This is what the Whitney site does so well.”
A Dumpster Full of Unanswered Questions
So Peter Stumpf has his priceless Stradivarius cello back, thanks (apparently) to the benevolence of a woman who was ready to turn it into a CD rack. But why won’t anyone at the L.A. Phil, Stumpf included, answer questions about the incident? Simple embarrassment might be part of the reason, but some observers speculate that the owner of a valuable instrument is much better off if the world doesn’t have a lot of details about what harm may have come to it. In fact, the world of high-end instrument dealing is so shady these days that it doesn’t seem unlikely that the Philharmonic might be hiding some of what it knows about the case of the stolen cello.
Is The Tide Turning Against Conceptual Art?
“In the last decade or so, Conceptual Art – represented by the Young British Artists – has won all the prizes, especially the Turner Prize, and occupied the commanding heights of the British art world, for example the various Tate Galleries, and grabbed all the media attention. Meanwhile the Campaign for Real Painting is in retreat, overshadowed, pushed out and buried by an art establishment who believe that the practice of painting the human figure, by hand, in oils, from life or from imagination, is thoroughly old hat and beneath consideration. And now the whole world is filled with installations, video-projections, ready-made objects, dead animals, manipulated photos and obscene model-making. But is the tide about to turn?”
Jansons in Pittsburgh: Well Worth The Effort
Lost in all the hoopla surrounding the impending departure of Pittsburgh Symphony music director Mariss Jansons is the memory of how long it took the orchestra to adjust to its leader. Jansons’s style was so different from that of his predecessor, Loren Maazel, that it was several years before musicians and conductor seemed to feel at ease with each other. But the result of the collaboration has been widely deemed to be worth all the effort spent building a rapport – in recent years, the PSO has been hailed by critics as regularly coming up with “once-in-a-lifetime” performances. Jansons bows out this weekend, with the ultimate curtain-closer: Beethoven’s 9th.