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The Worst Of Stage On Screen

A project from the 1970s to film some of the best stage productions and offer it as movies, hoped to offer the best of each medium. “Instead of combining the best of Hollywood and Broadway, it combined the worst. There were basically two ways of shooting theater before AFT came along (and after live television went the way of the horse-drawn carriage). The networks and public television would videotape a play in the theater or on a soundstage, hoping to capture the intimacy and general feel of live theater. Conversely, when the film industry shot a play or musical — Mike Nichols’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” or Olivier’s “Richard III” — it would be “opened up” and shot on location to look less stagy.”

In Search Of: Missing Books That Won Awards

When Canada’s Governor General Adrienne Clarkson first looked in the Governor General’s library, she discovered that 150 of the 492 books that have won a Governor-General’s Award since the inaugural prize in 1937 were missing from the collection. Scouring secondhand bookstores, Clarkson and her husband John Ralston Saul have reduced the number of missing books to only 11. “The problem is that the vanished volumes are now out of print and thus nearly impossible to find…”

Why Did The Bellevue Art Museum Suddenly Close?

The Bellevue Art Museum, in a suburb of Seattle, had a signature architect and significant community support when it opened three years ago. So why did the $23-million museum suddenly close its doors this fall and its managers declare the organization was out of money? “The museum’s unexpected closure left Bellevue leaders stunned and arts patrons baffled that a cultural institution serving some of the country’s wealthiest communities could fold for lack of money. Even the timing of the closure was bizarre, announced just two days before a new exhibit opened.”

How Much Time Does It Take To “Appreciate” Art?

Kenneth Baker writes that visitors to museums don’t seem to take much time looking at pieces of art. “Research has shown that people spend between 20 and 60 seconds per art object. The figure sounds shockingly low — until we reflect on our own viewing habits. So how much time should we devote to an artwork? How much time do we need to ‘get it,’ and who says?”

Marber On Top

Star playwright Patrick Marber can “currently do no wrong. Ten years since he was a stand-up comic, then Steve Coogan’s sidekick, Marber now has three hit plays to his name, Hollywood beating at his door and After Miss Julie, his update of Strindberg’s classic, about to open at the Donmar. Plus another play ‘on the go’. Most people who know Marber would still expect him to find something to moan about. He’s the kind of bloke, for instance, likely to offer a masterclass in misery about turning 40 next year. But no, he says, he feels ‘quite comfortable’ about it.”

Collings Turns Back On BritArt – “Postmodern Art Is Rubish”

Matthew Collings, like all critics, “has made a career out of parasitism. Without Damien’s shark and Tracey’s bed, we wouldn’t know his name.” He was the critic who talked us through all the wierdnesses of BritArt and the YBAs. But now he’s in a different mood: “We don’t live in a great time for art; we live in a time when art is very successful as a leisure activity. Art is very amusing, but within that culture there’s still a hierarchy of better and worse. I’m interested in that hierarchy but I recognise that modern art and pre-modern art were very important, and postmodern art is rubbish, really.”

Reading A Story Person-By-Person (Literally)

“New York author Shelley Jackson plans to ‘publish’ her short story ‘Skin’ by having each word tattooed on a different person.
Volunteers are pouring in from all over the world – bookshop assistants from London, mothers and daughters from Nebraska, artists from Brazil, a man in Bangkok. There will be ifs, buts, ands and other words inscribed on heads, arms, legs and backs from Birmingham, England to Birmingham, Alabama.”

Hogwood: Opera Amputees – Is It Really Fair?

Christopher Hogwood laments the casual way opera directors edit and disfigure operas. “The great liberties taken in opera productions today are often laughable and ludicrous: think of Brünnhilde with her head in a paper bag or cleaning her teeth while Siegfried is declaiming his love, or of the chorus in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera sitting on toilets. But such silliness is, strictly speaking, cosmetic: close your eyes and the music proceeds as intended, and eventually she removes the paper bag and they pull up their trousers. But amputate an aria, remove a recitative, reallocate an interval and, even with eyes closed, the structure wobbles fatally.”

What Disney Means To Gehry

David Dillon writes that Disney Hall “confirms Mr. Gehry’s standing as the boldest and most inventive architect of his generation. Looking at the hall’s billowing facade – a sail, a kite, a lotus blossom, the visual analogies are endless – it’s easy to forget that Mr. Gehry started out designing shopping malls and spec office buildings for James Rouse and other developers. And when he won the competition for Disney Hall, he was known primarily as the kooky guy who put chain-link fence on his house and asphalt on his kitchen floor – not the sort of architect who should be trusted with a major civic building, thought the culturati. The breakthrough came with CATIA, a computer program used to design the French Mirage fighter.”