According to the Hennen’s American Public Library Rating index, between 1999 and 2001, the Denver Public Library was America’s No. 1 library. But budget cuts last year have closed the library one day a week and forced other cutbacks. Does this mean the city will have to return to its past, when its first libraries were located in saloons?
Tag: 04.18.04
A New Idea For The Barnes?
A large piece of property next to the Barnes Collection is about to be sold. Could the property represent a solution to the Barnes’ financial woes? “Were it to acquire a slice of Episcopal’s campus for a short access road, the Barnes could open an entrance on busy City Avenue, solving at a stroke the intractable traffic and parking disputes that have dogged the institution for years. Add a parking lot, and thousands more paying customers could see the foundation’s unrivaled collection of Renoirs, Matisses and Cezannes in the original halls designed by founder Albert C. Barnes for his collection. With a few other simple changes, the operating deficits that have plagued the Barnes for years would be gone.”
A Martha Graham Story
The Martha Graham Dance Company is in residence in New York once again. “The Graham legend, a mythology in its own right, contends that she combined the Puritan and the sensualist in her makeup; ostensibly this made her an authority of sorts on forbidden games. Today, forty years after the premiere of Circe, its would-be sexy parts seem dopey to the point of embarrassment.”
Aussie Arts – Flinging Open The Doors
Australia’s most venerable stuffy cultural institutions have found new life in the past decade. “Some call it “a renaissance”, others “a revolution”. Either way, many of our most august institutions have reinvented themselves. The walls that once protected their vast collections of artefacts and books from the ravages of the outside world have become porous. Why? In short, they have been rejuvenated by the internet.”
A Play About The Great Critic
Kenneth Tynan was one of the great theatre critics of the 20th Century. “Now Tynan, the brilliant writer who made his name on The Observer in the 1950s and helped to launch a new tradition of stagecraft in Britain, is about to become the subject of a Royal Shakespeare Company play.”
Getting Off On Off-Broadway
Where’s the interesting theatre in New York? “Everyone knows that 99 percent of the most interesting work is happening someplace other than on Broadway. Indeed, on any given night, more than 40,000 people are attending the theater somewhere in New York City, and about 14,000 of them are parked at one of New York’s nearly 300 off-Broadway playhouses.”
Old Culture War Fears Bedevil Arts Funding (Still)
The failure of a major initiative to fund arts in Cleveland came down to some very old issues left over from the culture wars of the 1990s: “The reluctance to approve government-administered money for the arts might be due to the two deep-rooted and opposing fears that the Mapplethorpe battle caused: Would the grants pay for art that the public finds incomprehensible, unattractive, obscene or blasphemous? And would the government place restrictions on artists’ freedom of expression as a direct or indirect condition of the grants?”
Cuban Connection – Cuban Artists Struggle In US
Boston Ballet shares something with the National Ballet of Cuba – two principal dancers. “Artists from Cuba are torn about returning or not, and the work they make in the US often addresses that inner conflict.”
Are Bad Movies Badder Than They Were?
AO Scott likes the best of today’s movies. “The good movies may be doing just fine — they may even be better than ever — but I can’t shake the gloomy feeling that the bad movies just aren’t as good as they used to be. Now, by bad I don’t mean actually incompetent or unpleasant to watch. Nor am I referring to movies that have become fodder for slumming, tongue-in-cheek, pseudo-camp enjoyment. What I mean is that a vital strain of American filmmaking — unpretentious, easily ignored by polite opinion, the opposite of respectable — may be in crisis, and that this malaise may be in danger of spreading upward and outward, robbing the best and the worst alike of intensity and conviction.”
DVD’s In Blazing Detail
A new DVD digital scan process promises to deliver movies that approach the quality of a 35 millimeter print. “The scenes look as brilliant as anything I’ve seen on a video disc — and better than any video of a color movie that was shot 35 to 40 years ago. Colors are saturated and natural. Gardens have dozens of shades of green. Flesh tones are uncannily lifelike. Shadows look like shadows, not gray blots. Motions are smooth, not jumpy.”