California’s historic missions are falling down. So the US House of Representatives has passed a bill to spend $10 million on repairs. “The missions have been ravaged by the passage of time and the invasion of natural pests, such as the beetles that are gnawing their way through the redwood beams and statuary in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores. Two centuries of California earthquakes have left many of the buildings with seismic troubles. Irreplaceable artwork desperately needs preservation work.”
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Glam Kid Lit – More About The Author
Why are all these celebrities writing children’s books? “Everyone agreed there was lots of money and publicity to be made in kid lit. It was a time, after all, when a young British woman — who didn’t have a famous name when she started — wrote a series of books about a boy named Harry and, legend has it, became richer than Madonna, and richer, even, than the Queen of England.”
Disney Hall – A French Curve In A T-Square World
Herbert Muschamp writes that LA’s new Disney Hall is more than a building. “It’s a home for everyone who’s ever felt like a French curve in a T square world. Disney Hall is a riotous rebirth. Not just for downtown Los Angeles, where the building is situated, and not just for the whole sprawling mixed-up La-La. What is being reborn is the idea of the urban center as a democratic institution: a place where voices can be heard.”
Disney Hall’s Great – But Where’s Money For The Poor?
Disney Hall’s opulent opening may herald a redefined downtown for Los Angeles. But nearby homeless and advocates for the poor see Disney as a symbol of catering to the rich. “It’s fine to have a music centre, but this has cost $276m and, if you add the $200m that the cathedral cost, that’s almost half a billion dollars to provide services for the rich. Where’s the half billion for the poor?”
Court To Webcasters: Pay Up
“Radio stations must pay royalties to recording companies and performers, as they do to composers and songwriters, when musical broadcasts are streamed over the Internet, a federal appeals court has affirmed… Traditional radio broadcasts haven’t been subject to royalties to recording companies and performers because they have served to promote sales of recordings. But Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which required such royalties from webcasters.”
Making The ‘Creative Class’ Feel Welcome. Or Not.
What with the down economy, the war, and all, it can be easy to forget that an urban revival is continuing to progress in cities throughout North America. Thanks in large part to author Richard Florida’s urban planning idea-of-the-moment (that cities should embrace the arts, culture, and something called the “creative class” in order to spur economic development,) cities are seeking out new ways to include the arts in their plans for a bigger and better future. But there’s a difference between throwing a theatre festival designed for the same old elite (and mostly suburban) crowd, and actually looking for new ways to bring a community together around a cultural scene.
Harbourfront, After The Storm
“The International Festival of Authors will be launched tonight in Toronto with a lavish party at Harbourfront Centre’s Premiere Dance Theatre, proof positive that it has survived the summer cataclysm of founder Greg Gatenby’s ouster. His successor, long-time festival manager Geoffrey Taylor, has cobbled together a 2003 festival that, like some literary fable, contains elements programmed by Gatenby and others by Taylor, with nobody able to tell which is which. That’s because neither party feels free to speak.”
OCAD’s New Look
The Ontario College of Art & Design has a new building rising in downtown Toronto, and Lisa Rochon is already impressed with the “flying box” design and “hallucinatory” architecture. “In this scenario, technology has been twisted into art to produce an exhilarating building. A public square has been rammed directly into the architecture, sending sparks flying from the impact… Fully executed and carefully resolved, the building and civic square at OCAD could become Canada’s version of the Centre Pompidou.”
The Ongoing Legacy Of A Provocateur
Bill T. Jones is not as scary as he once was. Or maybe it’s that society has finally caught up to his way of looking at the world. In any case, the 51-year-old choreographer, who stunned the dance world with his harshly political looks at AIDS, race, and religion in the early 1990s, is still producing new works, and they are still provocative, if not quite so shocking as they used to be. Simply by enduring, Jones seems to have advanced the notion that dance can be as political as any other art form to a new acceptance within the mainstream dance community.
Escher Museum Opens In The Hague
MC Escher, who always said that he was as much mathematician as artist, has a new museum dedicated to his work. The Escher Museum, based in the Netherlands, “arranges Escher’s prints and drawings chronologically, with early realistic sketches, linoleum cuts, and some commercial designs on the first floor and most of the masterpieces of perspective and optical illusion that made him famous in the 1950s and 1960s grouped thematically on the second, main floor. The museum also adds a modern touch with a ‘virtual reality’ display on the third floor that turns some of Escher’s best-known works into moving holograms.”