Category: today’s top story

“We don’t hear people having tantrums about their costumes, or not wanting to wear puce, or complaining that a neckline is too high. I’ve seen more divalike behavior in Starbucks over soy milk than I’ve seen backstage at the Metropolitan Opera.”

“Three weeks ago the San Diego Union-Tribune laid off nationally admired art critic and books editor Robert L. Pincus. … In the last couple weeks Pincus’ readers have started a Facebook page, Reinstate Robert Pincus at the Union-Tribune, and a blog, Campaign to Reinstate Robert Pincus. The goal of the two sites is to force the equity fund that owns the Union-Tribune to reconsider its termination of Pincus’ position.”

“Jean Nouvel likes red. But then so did Matisse who said, ‘things only become what they are when I see them with the colour red.’ And that’s Nouvel’s point too. It is not simply about redness, but how it affects the other colours that are within its glow.”

Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi museum has the world’s culturati all abuzz, and Renzo Piano and Massimiliano Fuksas are designing major new developments near Rome’s out-of-the-way ethnography museum. Meanwhile, chunks are falling off the Colosseum, and pieces of the Domus Aurea keep collapsing.

“Next season the New York Philharmonic will have a rare 12 openings, or roughly 12 percent of its instrumental work force, thanks to a confluence of retirements, departures for better jobs and long-unfilled positions. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has 10 vacancies, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra 9, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic 7.” They’re not alone.

“A new opera production at a major company can cost millions of dollars; a world premiere adds another million or so to the price tag.” But new opera “springs up in smaller corners of the performing arts scene” in Washington, which “may actually be a harbinger of the future of the field around the country.”

“[O]ur own national determination to close the mind, and all the senses, to things that are unusual or different does seem to be far less pronounced than it was in my childhood. This is not just true of intellectual or cultural matters: it is true of everything. … I sense, though, that there are still one or two fields in which narrowness of mind prevails, and they are in culture.”

“It is an almost impossibly tricky line to establish, the one between revolution and prudence. In establishing it, Jefferson not only formulates a new approach to government, he inaugurates a new prose style, an American prose. Its central principle is the following: When addressing matters difficult and august, it is best to be chatty.”

The 67-year-old collector “announced today that the 70,000 sq ft gallery would be renamed MOCA London (Museum of Contemporary Art, London) when he retires, and would feature ‘a strong, rotating permanent collection of major installations’, all of it free to the public.” The donated art “will include seminal YBA pieces such as Tracey Emin’s My Bed.”