“Last December, Daccia Bloomstone, a 25-year-old Toronto artist, worked with a friend to set up up a commercial art gallery in downtown Toronto. They called it Virus Arts.” This, of course, was before the SARS epidemic hit, making the whole art-as-infectious-virus notion quite a bit scarier. Still, says Liam Lacey, it may be time to lay aside the old canard that human culture, and indeed humanity itself, is a virus upon the earth. “The life-threatening viruses that have hit this country recently, severe acute respiratory syndrome, mad cow and West Nile, with monkeypox threatening, are a reality check for the pervasiveness and elasticity of the extraordinary widespread viral analogy in popular culture.”
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When Art And War Collide
The Dead Sea Scrolls go on display in Montreal this week, and if you think that’s not a big deal, you ought to have a word with the curator who had to get them there. From the Palestinian uprising in 2000, to the 9/11 attacks, to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, global events have conspired to keep the scrolls out of Canada for years, and no one in Montreal dared believe that their exhibit would actually go off as scheduled until the scrolls physically arrived this month. The Montreal exhibit marks the first time that all three scrolls have been exhibited together outside of Israel.
Ideas Wanted
Toronto’s IdeaCity conference, which gets underway this weekend, is an intellectual celebration without direction, and that’s exactly how organizers want it. The hope is that, by bringing together some of Canada’s greatest thinkers for the mental equivalent of a jam session, great ideas will emerge, and walling in such broad-minded folks with a single ‘theme’ would seem to be antithetical to the effort. “But the event is still trying to find its feet conceptually. Some of the participants are genuinely ‘ideas’ people, but others are pop singers and wilderness adventurers.”
Fash Bash Crash
Fash Bash, the massive annual fundraising event staged by the Detroit Institute for the Arts, has been cancelled by the museum after a sponsor for the event could not be found. Fash Bash raised better than $500,000 for the DIA in 2001, but primary sponsor Marshall Field’s pulled its support after that year to focus on similar shows in Chicago and Minneapolis. Without a large corporation to pick up the tab, last year’s event actually ended up costing the DIA money, a disaster which the museum was determined not to repeat.
A String Quartet Too Hot To Handle
“The culture wars don’t often invade the rarefied world of chamber music. But the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival’s directors have decided to omit the sexually explicit and homoerotic narration accompanying a new piece by Pulitzer-winning composer David Del Tredici… To the composer, who is well-known for celebrating his homosexuality in his music, the issue boils down to censorship fueled by homophobia. To James Tocco, who is also gay, the issue is the festival’s responsibility to an audience that includes children. Trapped in the crossfire are the musicians in the Elements Quartet, which commissioned the work from Del Tredici and offered the world premiere performance to the festival.”
A Hot Steamy Venice Biennale Opens
“The humidity and the extraordinary heat were inescapable. The gardens at the tip of Venice, home to the biennale’s national pavilions for most of that event’s life, became a giant sauna. Even worse than the gardens were the miles of art in the nearby, cavernous Arsenale, the medieval network of shipyards and workshops where the Venetian fleets were once built and where the work of emerging artists is on view. Overwhelming amounts of art were displayed in raw factory spaces and amid relentless heat intensified by the power needed for lighting and video installations. These conditions sent even the most die-hard art lovers fleeing to their hotels during part of each of the three preview days held before the public opening on Sunday.”
New Urbanism Comes To Denver
In Denver, where an abandoned railroad yard long considered a blight on the downtown area has been transformed into “a vibrant new inner-city neighborhood with a mix of offices, residential units and retail businesses,” architect Todd Johnson and his Design Workshop are being celebrated as shining examples of the New Urbanism. At the heart of the Denver design was the notion that it is no longer enough just to build an urban landscape and expect people to flock to it. But the tired notion of getting suburbanites to return to downtown by bringing the suburbs to the city hasn’t worked either. The key to a successful urban design, says Johnson, is to create a space that makes people want to move around in it, preferably on foot, with lots of other people.
Goodbye, Atticus
Actor Gregory Peck, best remembered as Atticus Finch in the celebrated film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, has died of natural causes at his California home. “Possessed of a soul-stirring voice called ‘one of the world’s great musical instruments’ by violinist Isaac Stern, and a face chiseled from the same bedrock as Abe Lincoln’s, Mr. Peck towered over the American cultural landscape for six decades. He consistently played men who saw wrong and did right.” Peck was 87.
Photos From The Venice Biennale
Can’t make it to Venice to make the Biennale this summer? Here’s a gallery of photos of artwork from the Biennale to look at…
The Changing Face of The West End
“Three of London’s major theater institutions – the Royal National Theatre, the Donmar Warehouse and the Almeida Theatre in Islington – acquired new artistic directors in the past year. A fourth company, the Old Vic, has a new head as well, a starry American one: Kevin Spacey, who plans to act in and direct Old Vic productions.” But can any amount of new blood manage to pull the West End out of what has become an embarrassing and extended slump? Michael Phillips sees some promising signs.