“The move by Greenwich Council to completely cut its grants to two companies, leaving them with six months transitional funding, and reduce financial support for seven others by 10%, has been branded a fiasco.”
Tag: 05.28.08
A Return To Classic Painting?
“If large precincts of the art world are still in thrall to ‘novelty art,’ there is also a vital and increasingly prominent current of artistic practice seeking the rehabilitation of aesthetic canons and plastic techniques that were pioneered in the Renaissance and promulgated in the studios of the Beaux Arts.”
Time To Retire Trafalgar’s Plinth Art?
“The Fourth Plinth has popularised modern art at the expense of robbing it of what makes it modern in the first place. It has taken the excitement of British art a decade ago and co-opted it.”
What Your Funeral Music Says About You
“Choice of funeral music dates us just as surely as clothes or what children’s programmes you remember with affection. One of the UK’s current favourites, according to a recent survey, is Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
The Man Remaking The Bolshoi Ballet
Alexei Ratmansky “has created close to 40 ballets. His choreography and his musical choices are enmeshed like a pair of courting skylarks. His dances are often witty, unpretentious and technically accomplished, but rarely fussy. He comes from a tradition in which even ballet is expected to have something to say whether the subject is love, class, power, the genius of Comrade Stalin, the fleetingness of life or the importance of celebrating beauty for its own sake. Dancers in his ballets move as if they were ravenous for space.”
Shakespeare’s Grave Needs Repair
“The illustrious bard is believed by many to have personally penned the threat on a stone marker above his grave: It promises to bless anyone who spares the stones but curse any intruder who moves his bones. That’s all well and good, but the stones above his grave are starting to flake and fall apart.”
To Live Or Die By The Blurb
“Good blurbs set an expectation, and if people read the book and think that it sucks, then you’re just back where you started. You’re only as good as your book. And more often than skeptics think – your blurb, too.”
Pulling Back From von Karajan’s Utopia
“Seen, however, from the relatively short distance of 19 years after his 1989 death at age 81, his lost utopia is hardly inviting. This is not to debunk Karajan but to examine what happens when one of the century’s great talents pursues an apparently noble goal that eventually becomes a gray area between the rarefied and the inconsequential.”
Art That Fits On Your Phone
“Cell phone art is gaining ground. The Australian Network for Art and Technology has a good site. There are festivals for cell photos, videos and even ring tones. In Japan, teenagers write novels on their way home from school. The field has yet to attract established major artists or produce one of its own.”
Music Improvised To News Of The Day
“The ever-popular cellist Julian Lloyd Webber is joining forces with composer Michael Wolters and an ensemble of students from Birmingham Conservatoire to present And Now, The News: the musicians will effectively improvise their way through a 7pm live news broadcast from BBC4 relayed into the hall.”