Category: today’s top story

From the epilogue to her history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels: “After years of trying to convince myself otherwise, I now feel sure that ballet is dying. … [Our] intense preoccupation with re-creating history is more than a momentary diversion: we are watching ballet go, documenting its past and its passing before it fades altogether.”

“Howard Jacobson’s laugh-out-loud exploration of Jewishness, The Finkler Question, last night became the first unashamedly comic novel to win the Man Booker prize in its 42-year history. … [The book] beat a strong field including a novel that had unexpectedly become odds-on favourite with the bookmakers,” Tom McCarthy’s C.

“Late this month, with some help from the sale of its first small crop, grown under California’s liberal medical marijuana laws, the group [Life Is Art] plans to present an inaugural exhibition on its land, of sculpture and installation work by more than 20 visiting artists” – in the hope of “creating a kind of Marfa-meets-ganja art retreat north of San Francisco and a new economic engine for art philanthropy.”

“[How] is it possible to speak of buying and selling, or collecting, an art form that has no object, only a process and an experience?” It is possible: Marina Abramovic. Ana Mendieta and Tino Sehgal are just three well-known performance artists whose works are fetching prices of five and even six figures.

While he was always admired by music insiders, Burke’s music was better known to the public via other singers’ versions of hits such as “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” “Goodbye Baby” and “Got to Get You Off My Mind.” Being a God-fearing man, he rejected the label of “rhythm and blues” (the Devil’s music) and had the term “soul” coined for his songs.

Stanley Fish: “[The] new movie about Allen Ginsberg starring James Franco … is not only about literary criticism but is the [actual] performance of literary criticism, an extended ‘explication de texte’.“

“The 74-year-old has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays. He is the first South American winner of the prize since 1982 when it went to Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

“Off Broadway, the MCC Theater has acquired the rights to mount the first professional production of Carrie since it closed on Broadway in 1988, three days after opening to a pile of hide-under-the-covers reviews and setting a record by losing more than $7 million.” The original musical is being heavily revised, and (alas) the Pig Ballet has been cut.

“An unfinished painting of the Virgin Mary and Christ owned by a former pilot is a lost masterpiece by Michelangelo,” according to art historian Antonio Forcellino. The small oil painting on a fir panel is said to have been owned by Renaissance cardinals and German barons; it is currently in the hands of a pilot in Buffalo.

The proposed cuts in public funding “will threaten the whole ecosystem, cutting off the green shoots with the dead wood, reducing the number of plays and exhibitions, discouraging innovation, risk and experiment and threatening the ability of organisations to earn or raise money for themselves. You don’t prune a tree by cutting at its roots.”