With the Minneapolis-based Children’s Theatre Company collecting the Tony award for best regional theatre, is the world of high drama finally ready to embrace truly excellent productions for kids? More important, should audiences now expect the same high level of performance and production from shows directed at children as they do from ‘adult’ theatre? “For decades the field was seen as the theatrical bush leagues, the province of sanctimonious pedagogues, dramaturgical amateurs and dubious actors in animal suits. But those prejudices have been eroding, and now there is a highly visible emblem of this shift.”
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Are There Too Many Holocaust Films?
It’s a touchy question. Such a momentous and terrible event as the Holocaust surely deserves to be memorialized on film. But with so many new documentaries being released every year, is the supply outstripping the demand? More importantly, is the sharpness of the message dulled by such a glut of messengers? That notion is starting to make it more difficult for filmmakers wanting to focus on the Holocaust to win financial backing.
A Gift With Broad Implications
Eli Broad’s $60 million gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art towards the construction of a new wing is being hailed as an unexpected windfall at a time when many museums are having to postpone or cancel expansion projects. But the gift’s impact may be more far-reaching than even Broad himself expected, says Christopher Reynolds: “Although its key goal is the creation of a new contemporary art building, LACMA’s leaders are already imagining how this will change the shape of their institution.”
The Blogging Professors
More and more academics are getting into blogging. The online journals are a great way to trade information, opine on work in progress and interact with colleagues. “What blogging offers is immediacy. Compared to what we’re all used to in academia, where you submit something and then maybe when you have grandchildren you’ll hear whether it’s going to be published, the immediacy is something that we’re all unaccustomed to. I think a lot of people feel sort of like kids in a candy store.”
Neither The Best Nor The Worst Of Times
The sky is not about to fall down on the world of symphony orchestras, but neither is the future outlook as rosy as some industry soothsayers think, says Paul Horsley. The fact is that orchestras with responsible fiscal policies are thriving, even in the down economy, but that doesn’t make it any easier for the groups in trouble to dig their way out of the financial hole. The ‘X factor’ in orchestral success remains a commitment to artistic quality, and the orchestras that stay afloat are the ones that can find a way to maintain their standard, even as they cut the necessary monetary corners.
Can’t Anyone Paint A Face Anymore?
When did it become so impossible for an artist to sit down and crank out a recognizable representation of an actual human being? Has contemporary art become so self-conscious, and so detached from the real world, that a decent portrait is no longer achievable? The dearth of quality portrait painters is such a problem, in fact, that Britain’s National Portrait Gallery has been reduced to holding a contest to find an artist capable of doing the job. The gallery generally “has to make do with the artists available; and when they are famous in their own right, it then has to deal with the consequences, for example, of blowing untold funds on a Lucian Freud or a Hockney.”
An Architectural Clash of the Titans
Jacques Herzog and Rem Koolhaas see themselves as the twin giants of the architectural industry, says Deyan Sudjic, and like any other rival titans, they cannot seem to resist the temptation to one-up each other. “Between them, they have transformed architectural debate… [but] the relationship between them is becoming more like that between Godzilla and King Kong. They can’t help but go swarming all over the skyline, trying to take pokes at each other. And in the end, they are interested in entirely different things.” Herzog’s magnificent new Prada store in Tokyo is the latest salvo in the friendly battle: it “comes hard on the heels of Koolhaas’s much- publicised New York flagship for Prada, and effortlessly eclipses it.”
The Next Great Jazz Star?
In April, Universal Jazz beat Sony to sign Jamie Cullum for £1 million. The news sparked a media frenzy. Was the 5ft 5in, Wiltshire-raised 23-year-old worth the hype? When he sang, sighed and emoted his way through “You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You” on Michael Parkinson’s BBC1 show shortly afterwards, the answer appeared to be yes. Online superstore Amazon ran out of his second CD, Pointless Nostalgic (released on the independent Candid label), the next day.
Is Britain’s New Labour Party Destroying The Arts?
“New Labour has wrecked culture in the sense of encouraging the lowest common denominator. It is total populism. That’s the reason why so many of us [in the arts] hate them – not just for our political differences.” So says playwright Tariq Ali, joining a chorus of cultural figures in the UK decrying the ruling party’s abandonment of high culture. Part of the anti-Labour venom is surely a result of Tony Blair’s unpopular support for the American war in Iraq, but the split runs deeper than a single issue. Where Labour was once thought to be the political ally of the serious art world, it seems increasingly clear to many artists that New Labour isn’t interested in anything but making the masses happy.
Expressionism On The Outs
“In an environment of unprecedented artistic variety, where almost anything is permissible and worthy of encouragement, Expressionism stands out today as the one strand of art that is woefully unfashionable. Expressionism is not quite as dirty a word, mind you, as it was in the 1930s, when the Nazis labelled it ‘degenerate’ and when, adding insult to injury, Thomas Mann contributed the idea that German expressionism and Nazism sprang from the same root of emotional self-abandonment. Nevertheless, although there have been subsequent periods when forms of expressionism were revived, the word is now generally used pejoratively.”