American Ballet Theatre has named its school after Jacqueline Kennedy. “Her daughter, Caroline, who is currently an ABT trustee, beamed from the stage at Lincoln Center as the announcement was made during last night’s spring gala, which officially kicked off the new season.”
Tag: 05.11.04
The Power Of Pictures
Why have the pictures from Abu Ghraib provoked such a big reaction? “The illusory immediacy of the medium no doubt accounts for some of its power. The event depicted may have taken place minutes or years ago; and yet each time we look at a photographic image it’s as though we are actually there at the moment the shutter was clicked. By capturing the light of the past and embedding it into the chemical fabric of its own production, photographs offer convincing, “scientific proof” that something happened or once existed. Unless we actually see a picture of a female reservist holding a naked Iraqi man on a leash, most of us would have difficulty believing that it had taken place, and those in charge would have a far easier time denying it.”
Scotland Spends More On Arts
“Arts spending in Scotland accounts for less than half of 1 per cent of all public expenditure in the country, a major University of Glasgow survey has found. But spending per head is sharply higher in Scotland than in other parts of the UK.”
The $104 Million Question – Art As Commodity
What makes one painting worth $104 million and another only a few thousand dollars? It’s certainly not for how looks hanging on the wall. Here’s a primer on the valuation of art and who plays the art acquisition game.
Disney’s Unconventional Organ
Disney Hall is an unconventional concert hall. So the organ designed for the hall should be unconventional too. Its builders “had to adjust the size, sound and volume of each of its 6,134 pipes to suit the acoustics of the four-tiered, 2,265-seat hall. They had to engineer a way to make huge display pipes in bizarre shapes, anchor them securely into the rest of the structure, and yet allow them to sound normally. And since earthquake faults run beneath downtown Los Angeles, they had to make the organ quakeproof.”
The Soccer Bard
Jonny Hurst is the newly-chosen Bard of the Boots, or soccer “chants laureate.” Hurst beat 1,500 entrants for the post, more than 100 times as many as applied for Andrew Motion’s job (as British Poet Laureate) last time it fell vacant. Most of them, like him, not only sing chants but write them and try to get football crowds to adopt them. His brief is less onerous than that of the poet laureate, who is expected to produce poems about big public events, whether or not these are interesting. The chants laureate has to watch matches and compose a selection of chants reflecting key moments throughout the 2004-05 season.”
The Barcelona Makeover
“On Saturday, Forum Barcelona 2004 opened. It is a kind of four-month-long Expo with ambitious geopolitical themes, or, as it bills itself, a vast “meeting point for citizens of the world”. At its heart is the Forum building, a cinematic tour de force designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. The building is also the fulcrum of an entirely new quarter of Barcelona on the coast north-east of Barceloneta and Port Olympic, the first remodelled, the second created, to coincide with the 1992 Olympics. When Forum Barcelona 2004 closes at the end of September, the city will inherit impressive new parks, yet another cleaned-up port and beach, concert and congress halls, public walkways, a new railway station dedicated to high-speed trains, clusters of new apartment blocks, an “e-city” of shiny office buildings dedicated to dotcoms and other forms of electronic enterprise, and yet another boost to its international prestige.”