“The San Francisco Opera will close the books on the 2003 fiscal year with an operating deficit of $3.8 million, General Director Pamela Rosenberg said Friday. That deficit on an operating budget of approximately $60 million is a sizable amount, but far less than the previous year’s loss of $7.6 million — not to mention the $9.2 million shortfall that company officials had originally predicted.”
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Barenboim – An Artist’s Dilemma
“The question of when an artist must engage in politics remains a painful, personal dilemma. It is an issue that preoccupies Daniel Barenboim, Israel’s most celebrated musician and its most vociferous critic. Barenboim has taken his opposition to Israeli policy to the front line, forming a youth orchestra from both sides of the conflict and teaching twice a year at a conservatory in Ramallah whose 800 students, he admits, are imbued with a hatred of Israel. He has been abused by Israeli politicians and pelted with vegetables in a Jerusalem restaurant. But the more he criticises Israel, the deeper his commitment grows.”
Former NYPhil Trustee Jumps To Lincoln Center
A major trustee of the New York Philharmonic, who left the board last month after opposing the orchestra’s proposed merger with Carnegie Hall, has joined the board of Lincoln Center. “While Rita Hauser has made donations to Lincoln Center and has served on its board as a representative of the Philharmonic, most of her financial support — millions of dollars — has gone to the orchestra during her 25 years on its board. She said yesterday that she might continue to support the Philharmonic but ‘not at the same level’.”
Barnes Collection Makes Its Case In Court
A hearing to determine the fate of the Barnes Collection began Monday. The Barnes wants to break its founder’s trust and move to downtown Philadelphia. Museum officials testified the Foundation will go bankrupt if it is not allowed to move.
I Wanna Be Taller (The Tallest)
“The tall building is the symbol of all that we hope for—height, reach, power, and a revolving restaurant with a long wine list—and all that we cower beneath. It is a symbol of oomph and of waste, the lighthouse of commerce and the outhouse of capitalism, the tallest candle on the biggest cake, and the cash-economy prison made up of countless anonymous cells. When the Empire State Building was being built, as Neal Bascomb reveals in his new book, the motive for its height was insistently said to be commercial—it was more economical, and the spire would be a place for wandering zeppelins to find a mooring—even though everyone knew that the real motive was just to be . . . taller.
Family Feud – Why Scotland’s Most Famous Composer Shut Up
James MacMillan is Scotland’s most famous composer. But “over the past five years or so, the steady deterioration in the relationship between the country’s most famous composer and Scottish society at large has progressed gradually and relentlessly, until now, when there is no relationship at all. Systematically, MacMillan has cut himself off from communications with the outside world.
Many of the circumstances of the decline are well-known – notorious, even – though one day there is a large footnote to be written in the history of Scottish contemporary cultural life, in order to document the whole sad, shambolic affair.”
Is Tate Modern Building A Failure?
Architect Will Alsop says that Tate Modern has been hugely overhyped, and that it should never have been located in a former power station. “I don’t think [Tate Modern] is a great building. It casts a very large shadow over the river edge. They should have pulled the existing building down. When I go around I feel I’m being guided in the same way I might be guided round a shopping centre.”
Perry Makes Difficult Turner Choice
Choosing Grayson Perry to win this year’s Turner Prize was evidently no slam dunk as far as the judges were concerned. “The judges’ verdict was anything but a foregone conclusion: it took hours longer than usual to reach a decision, and they went out of their way to praise ‘the outstanding presentations produced by all four artists’. But, in the end, Perry’s use of the traditions of ceramics and drawing, and his “uncompromising engagement with personal and social concerns” put him out front.”
Does Perry Deserve The Turner?
Why did Grayson Perry win this year’s Turner Prize, asks Adrian Searle. “Grayson Perry is, at least in terms of his self-constructed public image and his candid interviews, an interesting, complicated character. But he makes middling, minor art. What counts most, perhaps, is Perry’s invented alter ego, Claire, who is exactly the kind of creation the media loves. Yet I have always wondered what the pots, the drawing, Perry and Claire have to do with one another – apart from all being Perry’s invention, all aspects of Perry.”
The Literary Jackpot (Doesn’t Happen)
Ah yes, what writer doesn’t dream of an instant bestseller – prfereably for one’s first novel. But “the truth is that the jackpot theory of literature only works up to a point, and, particularly, in an impressionable marketplace like America where barrow-loads of fashionable books are bought but not read. Most of the time, in Britain, the so-called ‘overnight success’ usually turns out, on closer inspection, to be the well-deserved fruition of a painstaking apprenticeship.”