“Carnegie’s cutbacks may be hardly noticeable to the average concertgoer, in part because hall rentals by outside groups have filled in some of the gaps. Elsewhere, programming cuts are far more apparent. Columbia University’s Miller Theater is presenting 35 concerts this season, down from as many as 60 concerts in the 2007-08 season. Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series has just 33 concerts on its calendar in 2010-11, down from as many as 76 performances in 2008-09, and 62 in 2009-10.”
Category: today’s top story
Egypt Threatens To Take Back Central Park Obelisk
“The Egyptian government official charged with protecting his country’s ancient monuments is threatening to take back an iconic obelisk in Central Park unless New York City takes steps to restore it.”
Plans Unveiled For New LA Broad Museum
The billionaire collector and philanthropist hopes the $130-million building will help bring about his vision of downtown L.A. as a bustling urban hive of culture and street life.
Marion True Speaks Out About Her Prosecution By The Italian Government
“Unfortunately, facts played little role in the Italian court’s charges or the media’s presentation of them. The intention was to use the case against me to condemn publicly the collecting of antiquities and to terrorise museums and collectors, especially in the United States. Remarkably, no European or Asian museum has been pressed in this manner, though there are recently purchased objects in many, pieces that were offered to me for the Getty but that I declined to propose.”
The Death Of Punctuation?
“Punctuation is a train wreck among my students. I have no doubt as to the root of the problem: Students haven’t spent much time reading. Punctuation, including the use of apostrophes and hyphens, is governed by a fairly complicated series of rules and conventions, learned for the most part not in the classroom but by encountering and subliminally absorbing them again and again.”
Belarus Free Theater’s Escape to New York
Members of the dissident theater company – forced to go into hiding during the wave of repression that followed Belarus’s disputed elections in mid-December – have smuggled themselves out of the country and arrived in New York for their performances in a January festival.
The New Global Super-Elite – They’re Different From Us
“Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition–and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly.”
Actor Pete Postlethwaite, 64
“Equipped with prominent cheekbones and equally conspicuous penetrating eyes, he was able to convey, with the most imperceptible shifts in emphasis, whole worlds of pride, perturbation, suffering, resignation, wonder and warmth. The quiet mournfulness of his flinty physiognomy anchored many of the roles he undertook with a rare quality of humanity, integrity and vulnerability.”
The New Critical Paradigm
“The age of evaluation, of the Olympian critic as cultural arbiter, is over. While there are still critics out there, often at prominent publications, who like to issue dogmatic rulings (“The novel exists to _____!”) and to chastise writers, their nostalgic efforts merely add to the noise of culture.”
Is Identity Politics Infecting History Museums?
Edward Rothstein: “Me! Me! Me! … Tell my story, in my way! Give me the attention I deserve! Haven’t you neglected me, blinded by your own perspectives? Now let history be told not by the victors but by people over whom it has trampled. And why, after all, should it be any different? Isn’t that the cry made by most of us?”