Blog

Martha Graham Company – Putting A Life Back Together

The 26 dancers of the Martha Graham Company are back, finishing a week in New York. They “expect to go on tour soon, to engagements that are being negotiated and should be announced in coming weeks. With a current annual budget projected at $7 million, the company is seeking at least $3 million in outside funding. Next week, the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance is moving from various Manhattan locations to a building on East 63rd Street where Graham had taught for many years. The property was sold during the company’s financial crunch of the 1990s, and repurchased recently.”

Get The Picture? Supersize It!

“Like S.U.V.’s and television screens, photographs throughout the 90’s swelled to almost irrational dimensions. As technology allowed huge color prints to be processed with ease and buyers paid top prices for them, big became the norm. Younger photographers and students, when asking themselves how large an image should be, often opted for the McDonald’s answer: supersize it.”

A Grand Night For Booing

Does an audience have the right to boo? Certainly there’s a long tradition of it (and some would say not enough booing goes on) at the opera. But “at some point, doesn’t loud booing cross the line from an expression of displeasure to a disruption of the performance? The issue was raised recently at the Metropolitan Opera during the season’s first performance of Mozart’s ‘Entführung aus dem Serail’…”

Robert Hughes Recalls His Afternoon With Albert Speer

“Who was Roosevelt’s architect? Nobody we can remember. Stalin’s? No one cares. Churchill’s? Silly question. But there is no doubt who Hitler’s architect was: Albert Speer. Almost nothing of his buildings survives, either because they were not built or because they were demolished after 1945. Modern art has never had much political power, but modern architecture is a different matter. Architecture is the only art that moulds the world directly. Of all the arts, it is the supreme expression of politics and ideology. It marshals resources and organises substance in a way that music, painting and literature cannot. It is an art that lives from power.”

The V&A – A Prayer Not To Screw It Up

As the Victoria & Albert Museum prepares to redo its Medieval and Renaissance galleries, one critic hopes planners don’t botch the job like they did the new British galleries a few years ago. “If the faults of the British galleries were caused through inadvertence (by mistake, a remarkable bust is shown looking into a corner) that would be bad enough. But most of these faults are faults of policy: the downgrading of the individual object – whether in the fine or the decorative arts – is a matter of policy. It must have been, to be so systematic. So let’s hope the policy has already had its day.”

Oundjian – A Star Is Born?

None of this waiting for years between appointing a new music director and the time he starts conducting your orchestra. The Toronto Symphony announced Peter Oundjian as its music director only last month. This week he gave his first concert. Were people excited? You bet. “Torontonians who, for the most part, have acted with severe ennui to the recent decline in fortunes of the Toronto Symphony” showed up in droves. “Roy Thomson Hall, which has often been half-empty for some of the greatest performers in classical music, was filled to overflowing for the free concert. The place was stuffed to the rafters, with lineups outside the hall and hundreds of people turned away. Hundreds turned away. When’s the last time that happened for a TSO concert? Answer: never.”

Ousting Your Museum Director When You’re Building A New Home – A Good Idea?

Newfoundland is building a huge new cultural complex in St. John’s that eventually will house the archives, museum and art gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador. But in a strange move, the province has ousted the “well-regarded” director of the museum who’s had the job 20 years. She was told she could reapply for her job when a national search got underway, but in the meantime the government appointed the provincial archivist to run the place. “The institution has no real Crown corporation or arms-length status, and its day-to-day administration is being handled by someone without experience in the visual arts…”

Creating The Iconic Writer

Mordichai Richler was a major literary presence in Canada. But his cult fame has grown sionce his death a year and a half ago. “Since his death, at 70, in July, 2001, from complications related to kidney cancer, Richler has continued to be a significant, vibrant presence in Canadian culture. There’s even a type font named after him, for Yaweh’s sake. But it seems we’re going to be hearing, seeing and thinking about him even more if various plans to enhance and heighten his legacy come to fruition in the next five years.”