Dana Gioia is the new head man at the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s been a fairly thankless job for the last decade or so, ever since the agency came under congressional fire for funding a few controversial artists in the early 1990s. Gioia admits that his toughest task may be to somehow craft a new image for the NEA, while also working to reestablish it as the preeminent funding institution in the American arts world, something it hasn’t been in quite some time. This objective is further complicated by the strange nature of current events: state governments nationwide are slashing their arts budgets and artists are coming under public fire for their opposition to the war in Iraq.
Blog
In Memoriam: Piecing Together The World Trade Center
“Though New Yorkers have publicly, sometimes acrimoniously, debated how to build memorials to 9/11, people in communities from Fawnskin, Calif., to Franklin, N.J., quietly have been getting to work. Across the nation, they have incorporated World Trade Center steel into more than 250 tributes to the dead. Girders carefully stacked like Lincoln Logs have become the centerpieces of municipal gardens. Church bell towers display an incongruous mix of battered metal and smooth stone. Civic reflecting pools shimmer with wavy images of cold, hard steel.”
Material Girl Decides To Stay Out of The War Debate
On the eve of its official debut, pop superstar Madonna has decided to recall her latest video, which is reportedly a vicious indictment of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The video had been much talked about in light of the unfavorable publicity which has befallen other musicians who dared to question U.S. policy in recent days. But Madonna’s video is said to be much more overt than a simple statement against the war: in its closing moments, the singer “pulls the pin on a hand grenade and angrily tosses it into the crowd – where it is handily caught by a smug George W. Bush lookalike. The pseudo-Bush smiles and reveals the grenade to actually be a cigarette lighter, which he uses to light a big cigar.”
Toronto FilmFest’s New Home Unveiled
“The new, year-round home of the Toronto International Film Festival, scheduled to open by September 2006, will be a four to six-storey ‘podium’ at the base of a condominium tower that could be as high as 38 storeys. [But] details of the festival’s home and the tower it will anchor were sketchy at a well-attended media conference yesterday announcing the start of a $120-million capital/endowment campaign for the TIFF facility, currently being called Festival Centre.”
Lessons From L’affaire Quincy Troupe
Quincy Troupe’s fall from his position at the University of California, San Diego after he lied on his resume “raises questions about whether academic credentials really matter in certain fields, like poetry and art. Should one lie ruin someone’s credibility and career? Some say there’s no question that it should. Plagiarism, faking academic credentials, stealing research – all deal a serious blow to academic integrity, and a high price must be exacted. Mr. Troupe is hardly the first professor or college administrator to be caught fabricating his résumé.”
Courting Diversity in Dallas
There are so few African-Americans and Hispanics in the classical music world that almost no one is willing to even talk seriously about the problem, let alone make any real effort to change it. But in Dallas, the Young Strings program, founded by members of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra with the aim of providing mentoring and professional training to young minority musicians, is starting to pay dividends. Young Strings alumni are pursuing degrees at Juilliard, Oberlin, and other top conservatories, and the program is still going strong in Texas.
Getting Down With Classical Music
“Recently, there have been signs all over the place that the wall between classical and rock music is finally beginning to crumble. If much of this development is due to the rise of a better class of rockers who have warmed up to Olivier Messiaen, a lot of it is also owed to an eagerness by young classical musicians to get down and lighten up. Not surprisingly, the classical prime movers are two California maestros — [LA Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka] Salonen in Los Angeles and his counterpart with the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas—and the Golden State’s unofficial composer in residence, John Adams.”
So Is This The War, Or A Very Special “Fear Factor”?
The ever-increasing blur between news and entertainment on television is either fascinating or horrifying, depending on how you look at it. With ‘reality’ shows competing with actual reality for viewer’s eyeballs, watching TV has become intensely disturbing and confusing. “On the one hand, CNN presents strategic maneuvers in Iraq as if it’s covering the Olympic Games; on the other hand, paratroopers – I mean contestants – take the leap for cash prizes on NBC’s ‘Fear Factor.’ It’s one big interwoven mesh of reality, unreality, and – when it comes to ‘Flipper’-like news segments on mine-sensing dolphins – surreality.”
Savannah Racing The Clock
The hardest part about guiding an orchestra through a fiscal crisis is that the clock does not stop while you do it. In Savannah, where the Savannah Symphony has canceled the remainder of its season, and is trying to regroup in time for the next one, the challenges are myriad, and the leadership is still at a bit of a loss as to how much can be done without some sort of large cash infusion. According to the orchestra’s chairman, it will soon be too late to book soloists and sell tickets for a 2003-04 season. Furthermore, if the ensemble does survive, it will need an entirely new set of leaders, and those type of management saviors don’t exactly grow on trees.
Will The Real Bierstadt Please Stand Up?
“Missing for nearly 140 years, a painting of the Yosemite Valley by the widely admired landscapist Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) has been found and put on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington — along with two curious copies that at first glance seem indistinguishable from the original.” One of the copies is a chromolithographic print of the original, albeit a high-quality one. The other is an actual hand copy by an anonymous New York art student. The Corcoran doesn’t go out of its way to point out which painting is the genuine article, but doesn’t completely hide it either.