Lofti Mansouri prepares to retire from the helm of San Francisco Opera after next season, and the tributes have already begun. – Los Angeles Times
Tag: 06.25.00
KARAOKE ON STEROIDS
Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project opens in Seattle with a weekend full of music. It’s not so much a museum of pop culture as it is the ultimate hand-on journey. Pictures, video and a review of the bash. – MSNBC
THE “IT” CITY
London is the place to be these days. Great food (imagine!) smart theatre, interesting music, and hip artists and art. There’s something new in the air and the the whole idea of what London is has changed in less than a generation. – New York Times
HOOF AND MOUTH DISEASE
The fiberglass animal craze is spreading to cities all over America. Latest to catch it is San Jose, which proposes to deploy 1,000 fiberglass bulls throughout Silicon Valley. At least the title of the project acknowledges the idea’s commercial underpinnings: “Silicon Valley Stampede: Home of the Bull Market.” – San Jose Mercury News
NOT EVERYONE CAN BE MICHAEL JORDAN
Critics have always savaged American Impressionism for being second-rate and sentimental. But what they’re really upset about is that “American painters failed to measure up to the French genius of Claude Monet. This is like damning all golfers for not being Tiger Woods.” – Hartford Courant
WHEN SMALL MUSEUMS TRY TO BE BIG
“Art means less to people than it used to. Hype means so much more. People go to museums to be entertained, not to be moved. We no longer believe in putting intellectual effort into our museum experiences. We demand them on a plate. Prefabricated. Fast. These are conditions in which grandeur and largeness play better than intimacy and compactness. In our national museum-going, we have regressed to the stage where we like things to be written out in capitals.” – The Sunday Times (UK)
ART ON THE RAILS
Los Angeles opened the last part of its mass transit rail system this week. “A city that recognizes the power and value of cosmopolitanism would sanctify the social spaces in which it’s fostered. Alas, L.A. chose not to. Metro Rail’s aesthetic mediocrity was assured at the start, when a bureaucratic decision was made that an engineering firm, not an architect, would design the far-flung system. Designing meaningful civic spaces is an architect’s job, not an engineer’s.” – Los Angeles Times
THE ART OF MIS-DESIGN
LA’s subway is best known for its $6.1-billion price tag, scandalous mismanagement and ineffectiveness as a transportation network. But the new stations also reveal a profound misunderstanding of Los Angeles’ civic identity. Built at a cost of $63 million to $82 million each, the stations are essentially decorated sheds, massive concrete boxes where architecture and art are used to create a thin veneer of fantasy. – Los Angeles Times
LEGENDARY BALLET RUSSES –
– holds a reunion in New Orleans. – New York Times