“Where museums were originally established with the responsibilities of, simply, housing and looking after the objects from which the public was encouraged to learn, today’s museums (and their funders) want to provide an experience – and not just of the art. They want the museum to have more broad appeal. As museums become more businesslike in their efforts to appeal to the public, there is a fear that they will distance themselves from those characteristics that make them desirably different from commercial businesses: That entertainment (glitzy blockbusters) will replace study (scholarly small-scale discoveries), liveliness replace quiet contemplation, and communication replace communion.”
Tag: 06.25.06
Memory In A Jar (It’s Coming)
A few months ago, “researchers at West Virginia University stumbled across a gene in the mouse brain that appears to erase long-term memories. When scientists switched off the gene, the mice developed super-charged memory, able to recall the solution to a maze they’d seen six weeks before, an eternity in mouse time. The discovery is only the most recent in a flurry of breakthroughs that promise a new class of drugs that might help us retain newly learned information and stave off diseases like Alzheimer’s.”
The Arts Center All Dressed Up With No Place To Go
The huge Public arts center in West Bromwich, England was supposed to be a wondrous thing to revitalize a town in need. “The Public was meant to open last year, create or safeguard 400 jobs, and attract almost 500,000 visitors. It should have cost £38m. It’s already cost £52m, the largest slice of it from the Arts Council. But the real problem is not so much what the building costs. It’s working out what the Public is for.”
Study: Girls-Only Schools Don’t Help
A new study concludes that “half a century of research ‘has not shown any dramatic or consistent advantages for single-sex education’ for boys or girls. ‘The reason people think single-sex schools are better is because they do well in league tables. But they are generally independent, grammar or former grammar schools and they do well because of the ability and social background of the pupils’.”
Music As Captive To Dance
“If one presumes that one of the goals of becoming a conductor is to deepen your interpretation of the repertory, conducting for ballet does not do that, because it’s about suiting the dance and the demands of the choreographer.”
Conducting Left-Overs
The Saratoga Performing Arts Center unveiled a new logo with a picture of a left-handed conductor. Nothing unusual about that. Except… how many left-handed conductors are there?
An Abiding Interest In Whistler’s Mother
“Whistler’s Mother is one of the world’s most famous paintings… Yet in the recent edition of a prominent art history textbook, ‘Whistler’s Mother’ was omitted for the first time.”
Museums – Priced Out Of Collecting?
“Museums and galleries are facing a crisis of acquisition. As the art market booms, it becomes increasingly obvious that we have pitifully meagre resources with which to buy works of art to add to, and keep up to date, our museum collections. How on earth can we increase our collections if works of art cost so much? How can we find new sources of funding?”
Portaits (But No Pictures, Please)
Washington DC’s National Portrait Gallery is holding a competition. But it has some problems… “Maybe the worst move of all was to limit the contest to the old-fashioned arts of painting and sculpture. If you’re simply looking for the best imaginable portrait art, why rule out all the photographic media that artists love to use these days? Some of the best artworks of recent years have been pictures of people, done in film and video and photography, by world-famous artists.”
That Elusive American Thing
“The whole idea of some kind of more fundamental ‘Americanness,’ seeping into all our art the way the landscape of Bordeaux seeps into its wines, falls apart as soon as you start testing it. What if it turned out, for instance, that all of Jackson Pollock’s pictures were actually painted by a Frenchman — a certain Jacques Saint-Paul Oc — who got a hard-drinking young American to flog them for him? Someone would be bound to insist that only a Frenchman could have managed all that insouciant paint-dripping, with its Gallic joie de vivre and a soupcon of panache.”