Southern California museums are facing money problems just like anywhere else. But though some high-profile building projects have been postponed or canceled, others continue. “For every local building plan that has gone awry, several others are shaping up. If all the major projects that are in the works materialize, by 2005 the museum landscape here will look dramatically different.”
Tag: 04.14.03
Rosenthal To Gioia: Fund Artists Over Institutions
LA Times reader Rachel Rosenthal doesn’t like NEA chairman Dana Gioia’s emphasis on only funding arts institutions at the expense of artists. “Yes, art should be taught in school; yes, it’s good to reach out; yes, art should be part of the fabric of social life. But by denying direct support to artists, what you are doing is forcing individual creative artists to mold their output to fit the tastes and policies of existing presenting organizations (theaters, galleries, concert halls) instead of following their own muse. This is a distorting and painful situation for most creators, and it favors interpretive artists: actors, musicians, curators.”
Shakespeare And Hip Hop – They’re Like This, I Tell You…
Shakespeare and hip hop – a natural fit, don’t you think? “It was only a matter of time before an American stage production put us in touch with Shakespeare’s inner hip hop. The all-male, cross-dressing The Bomb-itty of Errors, a critically acclaimed sell-out on the Edinburgh Fringe last year, is now bound for the West End after a six-city tour. The marriage of hip hop and early Shakespearean comedy is by no means a shotgun one: they share a musicality of language, rhyming couplets, tongue-twisting obsession with wordplay and a taste for bawdiness.”
Our Cultural Leaders – Where’s The Considered Debate?
Clive Davis is disappointed by the behavior of Britain’s cultural leaders over the issue of the war. “At a time when cultural figures should have been leading a considered debate, Britain’s cultural elite (and a fair part of America’s too) responded with a mixture of hysteria, self-righteousness and wilful ignorance. If you think I am exaggerating, consider just some of the evidence. Exhibit 1 is the poetry (for want of a better word) of Harold Pinter, a once-respected figure who has turned into the literary equivalent of a sad old man with a ‘The End Is Nigh’ sandwich board.”
London – Going Up…
This week there will be a vote on allowing the building of Europe’s tallest skyscraper in London. “Nothing can avoid the fact that this massive building will transform the scale of London. St Paul’s Cathedral still holds its own against tall buildings in the City, but London Bridge Tower is three times its height. At the moment, Tower 42, the former NatWest Tower, sets an unofficial 600ft height limit in central London. If London Bridge Tower gets the go-ahead, all developers will be aiming at 1,000ft, the limit imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority. London will become a high-rise city, with the dome of St Paul’s slowly reduced to a pimple. Organised opposition to such a transformation has largely evaporated.”
Erasing The Story Of Civilization
The looting of Iraq’s museums is “a cultural catastrophe. Yesterday the museum’s exhibition halls and security vaults were a barren mess – display cases smashed, offices ransacked and floors littered with hand-written index cards recording the timeless detail of more than 170,000 rare items that were pilfered. Worse, in their search for gold and gems, the looters got into the museum’s underground vaults, where they smashed the contents of the thousands of tin trunks. It was here that staff had painstakingly packed priceless ceramics that tell the story of life from one civilisation to the next through 9000 fabled years in Mesopotamia.”