Category: today’s top story

In the last 10 years, an artistic director, a general conductor, a musical director and four ballet artistic chiefs either have quit or been pushed out. When the musical head of the theater, Alexander Vedernikov, quit in 2009, he told the daily Izvestia that “the Bolshoi Theatre doesn’t possess any traits of an artistic organization.”

“I believe that there is a Shakespeare in Topeka today, that there is a Ben Jonson, that there is a Marlowe and a Bacon, most likely, but that we are unlikely ever to know who these people are because our society does not encourage excellence in lit­erature. That’s my opinion.”

A list…

“About 1,300 venues, theatres, galleries and arts groups applied for grants from the council, which had its budget cut by £100m in October’s Spending Review. Some 695 groups will get funding for 2012 to 2015 – down from 849 – while 110 new groups have been successful.”

“The Syracuse Symphony Orchestra’s board of trustees voted Tuesday to suspend operations as of Sunday because of a shortage of funds.” The decision follows the SSO musicians’ rejection of $1.3 million worth of cuts in compensation.

“Not only do those protecting free speech and artistic freedom need to be clever, they need to be better organized and bring in more allies, such as libraries.” Says one gallery director, “We have to get better at discourse and have discourse that can be at a level that is honest and in layman’s terms.” (Then why is she using the word “discourse”?)

“Over the past 15 or so years, some of the most original and idiosyncratic art institutions in the country — the Barnes, the ‘Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston — have embarked on major expansions to modernize (and in some cases, to generate more revenue), significantly transforming their identities.”

“Many of Wilson’s highly regarded plays” – Balm in Gilead, The Hot L Baltimore, Burn This – “probed the lives of lost, urban souls. Many of Wilson’s characters were desperate eccentrics whose fears and needs were invariably drawn with sympathy. But Wilson always seemed the most comfortable and revelatory when writing dramas set within a few hours’ drive of the Ozarks, the region of his birth.”

“The company’s plan to digitize every book ever published and make them widely available was derailed on Tuesday when a federal judge in New York rejected a sweeping $125 million legal settlement the company had worked out with groups representing authors and publishers.”