He’s “famous for packing more concerts, operas, sponsors’ dinners and general wheeling and dealing into a normal working week than most conductors manage in a year. … ‘I have come to realise that you can’t have it all,’ he intones gravely, as if he has just discovered that the Earth revolves round the Sun.”
Tag: 01.12.10
This Easter, A Passion Play In Trafalgar Square
“With a cast of about 150 actors, donkeys, horses and an artificial tomb, the organisers anticipate some 25,000 spectators. … The crucifixion, which involves Jesus being winched up a cross, will not ‘pull any punches’ in its goriness.”
Flattery Will, In Fact, Get You Somewhere
“Most people tend to not appreciate flattery accompanied by obvious ulterior motives, and consider themselves fairly adept at determining whose compliments are sincere and whose are BS.” But what if flattery works nonetheless, even on the skeptical? Studies are finding that it does. (Except, of course, on the sophisticated readers of ArtsJournal.)
‘Vancouverism’: Engineering An Ecotopia
“To a degree probably unmatched anywhere else in North America, the city of Vancouver has tried to impose notions of sustainability in its decisions on what, where and how to build. The result has come to be known as ‘Vancouverism,’ an urban motif of public transit instead of freeways, a low-carbon energy infrastructure and gleaming high-rise condominium towers in sunlit, walkable neighborhoods laced with urban parks.”
Canada’s Second-Oldest Magazine Changes Its (Unfortunate) Name
The 90-year-old bi-monthly is rebranding because the original title’s “unintended sexual connotation has caused the history journal to become snagged in Internet filters and has turned off potential readers.” Says the editor, “Market research showed us that younger Canadians and women were very very unlikely to ever buy a magazine called [name redacted] no matter what it’s about.”
Why Is The Theater Down On Romantic Comedy?
“It wasn’t always thus: consider As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream et al. and Shakespeare starts to look (well, just a little) like the Nora Ephron of the Elizabethan age. … Of course, there are still plenty of romances in theatre – but not many [non-musical] plays that satisfy themselves with romance alone, and fewer still that are funny.”
Dancers Face Down Their Aging Onstage
“The Three Man Project: Full Bloom … is inspired by the famous Bette Davis quote: ‘Getting old is not for sissies.’ “Co-creator Kevin O’Day says: ‘We chose the title Full Bloom to be sarcastic. The performance career for most men in dance is over by their forties, yet here we are, three old guys putting ourselves on stage for an hour and 10 minutes.”
William Blake: ‘The Essential British Artist’?
Jonathan Jones: “Loving Blake is natural when you’re a teenager. Some people turn against him later on and see him as a hamfisted draughtsman, a Hanoverian hippy. In reality Blake … is the only [artist] we have ever produced who really captures the national genius. This is because he was a writer as well as an artist.”
Triennale Design Museum To Open On MoMA’s Block
“The Milan-based Triennale Design Museum has signed a 15-year lease for 18,067 square feet at 40 W. 53rd Street, to open a four level museum. The space will be the Triennale’s first location in the United States, and its third overall.”
Alain De Botton: We Need Artists To Teach Us About Work
Human beings spend much of their time at work, “and yet this ‘work’ is unseen; it is literally invisible, and it is so in part because it is rarely represented in art. If it does appear in consciousness, it does so via the business pages of newspapers, it does so as an economic phenomenon, rather than as a broader human phenomenon.”