A Salvador Dali drawing that hung in New York’s Riker’s Island jail in the presence of round-the-clock guards, was stolen this weekend. “The audacious thief was apparently not only brazen enough to confiscate Dali’s sketchy rendering of Christ on the cross from a locked display case in the lobby of the men’s jail, but he or she also managed to leave behind a schlocky, B-rate copy that at least three correction officers were puzzled to find upon reporting to work yesterday morning.”
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A Crafty Theft
How did A Salvador Dali come to be hanging in a jail? “As the story goes, Dali was due to appear at Rikers for a talk with the prisoners, but he took ill. With reporters waiting in the lobby of his hotel, Dali, famously reluctant to disappoint the press, took India ink to paper and created a gestural evocation of the Crucifixion.”
Denver – Where Is The Theatre Of Protest?
Though ten Denver theatres are participating in the Lysistrata Project, “there is no theater of protest here, no theater of war, not even one token production of the firehouse eulogy “The Guys,” which has brought the tragedy home to cities outside New York in a way no other medium can. Denver is simply not a reactive theater community, which means it is failing in a fundamental and historic civic responsibility: to bring comfort, perspective and understanding not only about our past but also the world we walk out into once a play ends.”
Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum In Turmoil
Amsterdam’s Stedelijk is the city’s modern art museum and once was considered “one of the most dynamic museums” in Europe. But its director left the museum in January and the general director is also leaving. Closure for building work scheduled for this year has been put off for a year, and the city council has decided to privatize the museum. And there are proposals to move the Stedelijk to a new site on the outskirts of Amsterdam…
Tower Of London Wall Collapses
“Part of the moat wall of the Tower of London has collapsed, and hundreds of feet of Georgian cast-iron railings have been removed, during contentious building works intended to improve the setting of one of the most popular tourist attractions in Britain.”
Lost Beethoven Concerto Is Performed
A lost Beethoven oboe concerto got a performance this weekend. “Two Dutch Beethoven enthusiasts have pieced together the musical clues, put them into 18th-century orchestral context and reconstructed the second movement of the only oboe concerto Beethoven ever wrote. The slow, melodic Largo movement of the Oboe Concerto in F Major was performed Saturday night in Rotterdam and billed as a ‘world premiere’ – even though the full concerto was performed at least once before, 210 years ago.”
In Quebec – A Fight To Keep A Book On The Shelves
In Quebec, from 1993 until last summer it was illegal to publish biographies of “persons living or dead without permission from the subject or his or her heirs.” So for seven years there were virtually no biographies published in Quebec. Just before the law’s reapeal, though, a writer got stuck on the horns of the law, and the matter is now in court…
The Closing Of A New-Music Friend
The closing of the new-music label CRI in January changed the classical music landscape. “CRI, for many listeners, was not just an entree into new music but appealed to an anarchic way of listening: adventurously, without expectations, and individually, as an explorer of sound unfettered by what authorities (critics, professors, pompous friends) dictate. Young listeners, tired of whatever music they were weaned on, could find music on CRI that was, by virtue of being the forgotten avant-garde of 20 years before, far more foreign and fascinating than the newest of the new.”
WTC: Protecting A Master Plan From The Gnats
“Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the former World Trade Center site, selected Wednesday, is a new noble, logical diagram – one that is sure to need a shield if real estate interests try to torture it with death by a thousand ‘gnat bites,’ as Robert Ivy, the editor of Architectural Record, so trenchantly put it. It inevitably will be changed, as all master plans are, as the economy rises and falls, as interest groups like the victims’ families make their voices heard, and as political actors enter and exit from the stage. The questions are: Will the change be for good or ill?”
Starting Over With A Develpment Plan
Now that a plan for the WTC site has been chosen, the real heavy lifting begins. One good first step, writes David Dillon, would be abandoning the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and Port Authority’s development plans and starting over. “The Port Authority’s program belongs to the 1960s, not the 21st century, and repeats many of the mistakes that made the World Trade Center a bad neighbor.”