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How Montreal Symphony Management Blew It On Charles Dutoit – 15 Years Ago

Robert Everett-Green points out that allegations of Dutoit’s bullying of musicians in rehearsal – allegations repeated in detail last week in two of Montreal’s francophone newspapers – were made very clear by the players in 2002. And when they were, Dutoit abruptly stormed away from his job, and the orchestra’s management was far more concerned with his feelings than those of the musicians. “It’s worth looking at the circumstances that may have led [the board] to brush off the players’ complaints for about 20 years.”

Paris Reveals Final Plans For Grand Palais’s Three-Year, €466M Renovation

“An spokeswoman says that the site will be ‘totally closed from December 2020; the Rue des Palais, Nef [nave] and Grand Galleries will open in the spring of 2023’. During the 2024 summer Olympics, fencing and taekwondo will be held at the historic venue. The closure will, however, cause upheaval in the art fair calendar with three major fairs – Fiac, Paris Photo and La Biennale Paris – forced to relocate to temporary locations for their 2021 editions.”

Ava DuVernay And City Of Los Angeles Launch Program To Increase Diversity Behind The Cameras

“Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti joined filmmaker Ava DuVernay and producer Dan Lin on Monday to launch the Evolve Entertainment Fund, a public-private partnership aimed at creating new opportunities for communities that have been historically excluded from the entertainment industry. The fund plans to raise $5 million by 2020 to award grants to various entertainment industry organizations.”

Looking Into The ‘Toxic’ Backstage Culture At English National Ballet

“Rumours of bad human relations and plummeting morale had been circulating for years, seemingly validated by a staggeringly high turnover of staff year after year. … Fifteen dancers left the company last summer alone. And yet the Times report was the first time allegations of unacceptable managerial conduct in the company came out into the open. … Why have people with compelling stories to tell not spoken out before? Or sought redress in-house? We talked to twelve ENB dancers past and present, as well as support staff, and had sight of relevant documents. And the answer we consistently got was ‘fear.'”

The Reclusive Artist (I’m Sorry, We Don’t Have Tolerance For That These Days)

Once upon a time, not turning up for an awards ceremony held a kind of clout: “When a writer doesn’t show his face,” as DeLillo wrote in his 1991 novel, “Mao II,” about a reclusive novelist who becomes a prisoner of a terrorist organization, “he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.” Now it feels a little rude, like not showing up to a dinner party held in your honor.

Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.13.18

Know Your Communities
This is a sneaky post. The emphasis of this series is on the small, simple, inexpensive things that can be done to pursue community engagement in the early days of such efforts. That would be true of what follows if our industry’s marketing were grounded in audience awareness. Unfortunately, it is not. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2018-02-13

 

There’s Nothing Smart About “Smart” Cities So Stop Saying It

The cities of the future won’t be “smart,” or well-engineered, cleverly designed, just, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy, affordable, or resilient. They won’t have any particularly higher ethical values of liberty, equality, or fraternity, either. The future smart city will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on gadgetry, deployed by City Hall, mostly for the sake of making towns more attractive to capital.