Category: today’s top story

“Ms. Bourgeois often spoke of pain as the subject of her art, and fear: fear of the grip of the past, of the uncertainty of the future, of loss in the present. ‘The subject of pain is the business I am in,’ she said. ‘To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.’ … Yet it was her gift for universalizing her interior life as a complex spectrum of sensations that made her art so affecting.”

“Our public funding doesn’t limit our initiative, and it doesn’t make us lazy thinkers. A generation of new artists is coming through whose desire to reuse, borrow and recycle is driven as much by being green as by saving money. It’s a truism that in the theatre, constraint is a condition of our creativity but it’s important to stress that our ability to make constraint a virtue isn’t limited to periods of austerity.”

“Authorities said a remote or timer-controlled bomb went off outside the House of Culture and Sport, near the [Stavropol] city center, shortly before the start of a concert by a dance company linked with Kremlin-backed Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.”

“Out of 114 cultural institutions polled in January, 42% anticipate cancelling or postponing programs this year, the exact same amount as last year. And nearly 30% of the groups are postponing moves or capital projects this year compared to 25% last year.” On the upside, fewer organizations plan to lay off employees.

“Over his decades as an entertainer, he had many roles – radio host, TV host, celebrity endorser, comic, anti-drug crusader – but his best-known work came in TV and radio shows based on a simple idea: that ordinary people are tremendously entertaining.”

“It’s fair to ask if Renzo Piano was fully sane when he agreed to design the addition to Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum. … [He] is likely to be vilified by both architecture fans and art world purists no matter what he comes up with. … But Mr. Piano has managed to find that magical and elusive balance between respecting a great work and adhering to one’s own aesthetic convictions.”

The museum’s board “voted on Tuesday afternoon to begin construction on a building in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, to be completed by 2015, that will vastly increase the size and scope of the museum.”

The vastness of the nation helps to protect them. “Let’s say you hit the National Gallery — you gonna escape to Baltimore?” asks the founder of the FBI’s National Art Crime Team. “If you rob a museum in Philadelphia, where you gonna go — Camden? Countries in Europe are so close, and you have open borders and unarmed guards.”

No matter that he doesn’t have the go-ahead yet for the downtown Los Angeles site. “Even as he continues to negotiate with city and county officials,” he is courting “blue-chip architects. Of the six architects asked to prepare preliminary museum designs this month for the site on the corner of Grand Avenue and 2nd Street, four are winners of the Pritzker Prize….”

“A well-liked and stalwart presence on the New York theater scene, Kuchwara had reviewed for the AP since 1984. As more and more newspapers opted in recent years to cut on-staff theater critics and run reviews from wire services, Kuchwara’s notices, read in hundreds of publications, gained increasing prominence.”