“Here’s the thing: Nobody reads or goes to the ballet because it’s the right thing to do. People who read literary fiction or listen to Brahms do it because they love it, and because they get something from it, and stressing that will always be a better way to evangelize about what they love than accusing So You Think You Can Dance of being inadequately dire.”
Tag: 03.16.11
When Private Art Collections Show In Public Museums
“When the collectors are trustees or provide financing for an exhibition, it looks as if the museum is selling out to vanity shows or renting its galleries. If museums show a collection without the promise of a gift, they are seen as endorsing the art and elevating its value.”
The New Interactive Engaged Museum
“While museums have long strived to be welcoming places as well as havens of learning, social media is turning them into virtual community centers.”
Riccardo Muti Takes The Podium Again (And Makes An Impassioned Plea)
“The timing for last week’s unusual opera performance could not have been more melodramatic: Here was Italy’s best-known conductor just one week before Italy marks 150 years of unification, imploring Italians to defend their culture as he led an opera synonymous with the 19th century Risorgimento movement that galvanised Italians to seek unity.”
Tax Law Changes Worry UK Art Market
“The UK art market is in danger of being squeezed by changes to Britain’s tax regime in conjuction with new European Union regulations that affect the trade.”
Garrison Keillor Announces Retirement Plans
The 68-year-old host of A Prairie Home Companion, one of the most popular shows in U.S. public radio history, will retire in the spring of 2013, once he has found a replacement to keep the program running. Keillor suffered a mild stroke last year.
Shifra Lerer, One Of the Last Yiddish Theater Actresses, Dead At 95
“[She] was discovered at age 5 in Argentina by the great Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky and went on to become a winsome and wide-ranging trouper of the Yiddish theater for the next 90 years.”
Bernie Madoff Play, Having Staved Off Elie Wiesel Lawsuit, Will Be Staged
Deb Margolin’s Imagining Madoff, “a freewheeling inquiry into the mind and morality of Bernard Madoff that invented a booze-soaked encounter between the disgraced financier and the humanitarian icon Elie Wiesel – was derailed after Wiesel threatened legal action against the theater.” A new version with a fictionalized character will run in Washington next fall.
Peter Brook on His Artistic Legacy: ‘I Never Think About That’
“I never think about that, which is why I’m delighted that two fresh faces have taken over from me at the Bouffes du Nord. The horror of someone trying to reproduce what I once did appalls me.”
445-Year-Old Mass Makes UK Pop Charts
“Several years ago, the work, [Striggio’s] Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, was rediscovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where it had been miscatalogued. In 2007, it was given its first modern performance at London’s BBC Proms. Now, a new recording of the work has made its debut on the pop charts at number 68, beating the likes of Bon Jovi, George Harrison and Eminem.”