A new survey reports that “half the Swiss population visits a museum at least once a month. A quarter of those polled said they had attended an exhibition at least ten times in the past six months.”
Blog
LA Opera In The Fast Lane
“Los Angeles Opera is growing like a rambunctious weed. In 2004-5 there will be 100 performances, a 30 percent increase over this season. The budget of $48 million is up by a third over this season and double what it was when Plácido Domingo took over as general director five years ago. These numbers put Los Angeles in position to challenge San Francisco’s longtime West Coast operatic primacy and to surpass, in terms of quantity if not necessarily quality, other worthy companies like those of Seattle and San Diego.”
Berlin Biennial A Drag
Berlin is a great art city. But its Biennial is oh so wrong. “The biennial is subtitled Complex Berlin, and it is a complicated affair. It supposedly deals with the city itself; with politics, economics, club scenes, subcultures and “sonic scapes”; the city as a leitmotif, migration as a metaphor, division, history, integration and paradox. You get more sense of this, of course, walking Berlin, doing the Walter Benjamin thing, losing yourself. This biennial is a grind.”
Royal Academy Row Over Destroying Art To Get At Art Below
“A row has broken out among the guardians of Britain’s cultural heritage over the proposed destruction of an acclaimed series of Victorian paintings on a ceiling at the Royal Academy of Art, to “reveal” an earlier masterpiece.”
Trafalgar Statue Chosen
Judges have chosen the statue of a pregnant victim of thalidomide to occupy the fourth vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. “Alison Lapper says her portrait, by the artist Marc Quinn, is ‘naked, pregnant and proud’. Her portrait, made when she was eight months pregnant, was chosen last night by the judges to be created on a monumental scale, 4.5 metres high (15ft) in white marble, and take its place among the bronze generals and grubby pigeons on the fourth plinth which, despite more than 150 years of arguing, has been empty since the square was created.”
Report: News Business In Transformation
A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that the news business is in the midst of enormously challenging changes. “The news business is ‘in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television,’ the report says. ‘Journalism is not becoming irrelevant. It is becoming more complex’.”
Magazines See Large Circulation Declines
The American magazine business is in trouble. In the most recent quarter, seventy percent of magazines were down in newsstand sales. “The most horrible set of numbers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been tracking [circulation] for 25 years.”
Page: Goodbye To A Star
Luciano Pavarotti’s opera farewell at the Metropolitan this weekend was a nostalgia-charged event, writes Tim Page. The door has still been left open as to whether the great tenor will come back to opera. “Myself, I hope he packs it in. It has been a glorious career and it might be best to leave before mounting and irreversible infirmities, apparent throughout the evening, overwhelm what remains of his fragile but still magnificent artistry.”
The Best, Worst And Indifferent Of This Year’s Whitney
This year’s Whitney Biennial, writes John Perreault, doesn’t adhere to the premise set out for it in the curators’ catalogue essay. “The current biennial, they write, suggests an art ‘sea change’ as important as that delineated by the 1993 biennial (whatever that change was). The present change seems to have something to do with 9/11, corporate greed and dot-com collapse. Alas, although I enjoy the new biennial a great deal, I don’t think this point is adequately demonstrated either by their text or their exhibition. All three, nevertheless, produced credible single-author essays, leading one to suspect that the introduction is a bit of an exquisite corpse…”
Opera – One Size No Longer Fits All?
Covent Garden’s rude brush-off of Deborah Voigt for being too big is a sign of a changing opera world, writes Joshua Kosman. “The resultant possibilities for mocking and excoriating this once- respected opera company are rife and fairly obvious (insert “the opera ain’t over” joke of your choosing here). But this mini-scandal reveals some important shifts in the prevailing attitudes toward opera and the performing arts in general. Have we really reached the point where only the slim or the beautiful (the two terms are far from synonymous) need apply? Does artistic prowess now count for less than comeliness? Must every other consideration be subsumed to the visual?”