Category: today’s top story

Alastair Macaulay: “[It’s] time to say that ballroom [dancing] today (at exhibition and competitive levels)” – and in shows like Burn the Floor and Ballroom’s Best – “proposes behavior from both sexes that looks not much like courtship and seduction but something alarmingly close to rape and whorishness. … [A]ll these stunts, acrobatics, point-scoring and flashy displays of sexual availability are what matter. Musicality, phrasing, intimacy and actual sensuousness are what don’t.”

“Not every artist will be Isaac Stern or Meryl Streep or Jennifer Bartlett, but for each one who makes it into the mainstream, a hundred more are struggling to move the form forward, creating a cultural identity. The payoff for encouraging them will rarely be measurable in economic terms. So here’s a different strategy for the arts endowment. … Create a public- private alliance to fund the NEA so it can really begin making the arts central to the lives of all Americans.”

“It’s much harder these days for a major advertiser to find the concentrated mass of eyeballs it needs to reach in order to boost its sales numbers. … [This may well lead to] a vicious cycle in which television audiences fragment, so advertisers stop paying big bucks to run commercials on TV shows, so the funding for the shows dries up, so the quality of the shows declines, so the audience begins to flee even faster.”

“[I]t is time to scrap the Fringe. And the International Festival. And the Mela. And the Book Festival. And the TV Festival. And the Art Festival. And the Jazz and Blues Festival.” In their place? The Edinburgh Festival. “Most people outside Edinburgh make no distinction between the various components of what they already call the Edinburgh Festival. It is merely a recognition of reality to say we should end the differences and call them all by one name.”

“During the long reign of J. Edgar Hoover, Leonard Bernstein was a person of considerable interest to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His file has not yet appeared in the F.B.I.’s Electronic Reading Room–an interesting place to while away an afternoon–but the Bureau sent me a copy on request.”

“Rocco Landesman, 62, made clear that he has little patience for the disdain with which some politicians still seem to view the endowment, more than a decade after the culture wars that nearly destroyed it.”

Richard Corliss: “Hughes generated successful movie-comedy franchises as fast as other people wrote postcards. First the National Lampoon Vacation films … Then the teen movies” – Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – “not strictly a series but with more or less the same rep company of kids. And then the blockbuster Home Alone” and its sequels. (Not to mention the movies about Beethoven the enormous dog, written under a pseudonym.)

“Embattled Skylight Opera Theatre managing director Eric Dillner has resigned, ending a standoff that pitted company management and its board of directors against the artists who have regularly worked for the troupe. … William Theisen, whose dismissal on June 16 began the strife at the Skylight, will not return as artistic director, but he will direct four of the five shows he originally planned to stage for the 2009-’10 season – the company’s 50th.”

Sam Sifton, currently the paper’s culture editor, will replace Frank Bruni in October. “Bill Keller, the executive editor [of the Times], called the decision both eccentric and obvious. … Mr. Sifton steps into a job that Ruth Reichl, Biff Grimes and Mr. Keller himself told us that, in some ways, doesn’t quite have the power it used to.”

“While big broadcasters mutter about public service remit and top-slicing the licence fee, the tiniest galleries and dance companies are producing videos of their own. … Channel Five may have ditched its last arts programme in 2008 (Tim Marlow On . . . ), but does this matter when orchestras, theatres, even newspaper arts desks now make their own web TV? Are we witnessing the end of an era, or the birth of a new one?”