“[T]he geese were first spotted crossing Colorado Boulevard during a harrowing rush-hour escapade Thursday morning. … But once safely across the busy boulevard, attempts to gently herd them around the building to the pond didn’t work. So a mad dash across the lobby, past the Ellsworth Kelly painting and the Henry Moore bronze, was the only solution.”
Category: today’s top story
Lincoln Center Launches New Festival Of Spiritual Arts
“Lincoln Center on Wednesday announced plans for a fall festival devoted to spiritual expression and the illumination of ‘our larger interior universe.’ Called the White Light Festival, it will run next season from Oct. 28 to Nov. 18 and feature an eclectic and at times esoteric lineup of works.”
On View: WWII Art Made By Interned Japanese Americans
“In Washington, D.C, the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery is exhibiting art and other objects created in [internment] camps — a grim yet handsome reminder of a dark chapter of American history.”
An Opera Renaissance In Cape Town
Longtime London music critic and Cape Town native John Allison remembers how the apartheid-era government lavished funding on this European art form and how South Africa’s companies faded away once real democracy arrived. Now, he says, “opera has been reinvented” in his hometown and “is unmistakably part of the ‘new’ South Africa.”
NC Symphony Musicians Agree To 15 Percent Pay Cut
“The musicians’ union voted last week to ratify a contract modification that will enable the financially strapped symphony to save $1 million annually in the next two years. ‘It is a stunningly significant sacrifice from our 68-person orchestra,’ David Chambless Worters, the symphony’s president and CEO, said in an interview.”
American Conservators To Aid In Rescue Of Haitian Art
“The initiative, in its swiftness, its close collaboration with a foreign government and its combination of private and government financing, represents a new model of American cultural diplomacy, one that organizers believe stands in stark contrast to the apathy Americans were accused of exhibiting during the looting of Iraqi artistic treasures in 2003.”
America’s New Cultural/Political Reality
“For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing–though it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations. Others…”
Why Patrimony Claims Are Seldom Simple
“[T]he general question, looting and tourist dollars aside, is why should any objects necessarily reside in the modern nation-state controlling the plot of land where, at one time, perhaps thousands of years earlier, they came from? The question goes to the heart of how culture operates in a global age.”
Take Heart, Theatre Critics! People Think You Do Matter After All
“An overwhelming majority of theatre audiences and professionals believe that critics are still important to the industry, according to a survey conducted by The Stage. Almost nine out of ten respondents (89%) to our questionnaire believe that critics still play a valuable role in theatre, although nearly half (46%) think they are less important than they were a decade ago.”
How The Critic Vs. Cleveland Orchestra Battle Got So Ugly
“The Plain Dealer and the Musical Arts Association — the group that manages the Cleveland Orchestra — are ensnared in a civil lawsuit brought by [music critic Donald] Rosenberg seemingly because an internationally renowned conductor couldn’t stomach a steady diet of criticism throughout his eight-year tenure here.” Well, also because Rosenberg’s editor didn’t back him.