The National Endowment for the Arts is taking an ambitious but misguided step with its plan to bring Shakespeare to the hinterlands, says Michael Phillips. “Class is a commodity like any other, and with the Shakespeare touring projects the NEA is spending more than $2 million on a classy image makeover. These days the NEA does not concern itself much with tossing seed money to artists or companies who may be controversial or risky or untested. In [NEA chairman Dana]Gioia’s words, the agency intends to focus on bringing ‘art of indisputable excellence to all Americans.’ It sounds right. It sounds inclusive, and unassailably democratic. Yet somehow a Shakespeare initiative sounds like an investment in yesterday’s culture, not tomorrow’s.”
Tag: 10.19.03
Goya’s Secret Self-Portrait
Siri Hustvedt was as surprised as anyone when she realized that he had discovered an apparently unknown self-portrait of Goya hidden in the corner of on of the artist’s best-known works. The painting, titled “The Third of May,” depicts a bloody peasant massacre conducted by Napoleon’s soldiers, but a shadowy portion in the lower left of the canvas hides an unmistakable image of the artist. “It’s a simple rendering – large eyes, flat nose and open mouth, but it includes the artist’s signature leonine hair flowing out from around his jawline. I turned away, thinking I had really gone crazy. After a moment, I looked back. He was still there.”
Bactrian Hoard Uncovered In Kabul
“It lay hidden for 2,000 years in Afghanistan, eluded the Taliban and escaped dozens of adventurers and bounty hunters. Now the Bactrian hoard, one of the world’s greatest archaeological collections, has been found. President Hamid Karzai discovered the 20,000 gold coins and artefacts, worth tens of millions of pounds, in a sealed vault under the main palace in the capital, Kabul, after ordering it to be opened earlier this year.”
Sydney’s Icon Turns 30
The Sydney Opera House celebrated its 30th anniversary this weekend. Initially plagued by construction delays and cost overruns, the sleek, swooping building has become an icon for the entire continent, and the first image many foreigners imagine when they think of Australia.
Spoleto’s Surprise Surplus
“Spoleto Festival USA’s board of directors has learned that the 27th season of the arts festival ended up $10,007 in the black. The unaudited results for the fiscal year ending Aug. 31 showed that the festival’s $6.3 million budget got a strong boost from a record $2.5 million in ticket sales, according to a statement released by the festival Friday following a board meeting in New York. Not only was this year’s festival the highest-grossing ticket sales season in its history, but about half of its performances also were sold out.”
Catalan Author Dies at Airport
“Manuel Vazquez Montalban, one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, has died aged 64. Mr Montalban died of a heart attack as he changed flights at Bangkok international airport on Friday, Spanish diplomats said… The Catalan author and left-wing political commentator was famed for writing 50 books – translated into 24 languages – as well as creating the fictional detective character, Pepe Carvalho.”
Why Must Music Be Transcendant?
Classical music, and opera in particular, is often held up as a beacon of transcendant, other-worldly beauty, in a culture obsessed with speed and reduced to communicating through sound bites. But that perception doesn’t often square with reality, says Anne Midgette, and the fact that listeners aren’t being transported to a higher realm on an average night at the Met doesn’t mean that the music has failed, simply that our expectations are misplaced. “Opera deals in human emotions, not divine and ethereal ones. When singing is sublime, it’s partly because it amplifies those emotions with a kind of inner purity.”
Keeping The Nasher Collection Local
One of the world’s finest collections of sculpture is located in Dallas, Texas. This is a fine thing for Dallasites, but such remote outposts of great art have a way of rankling the artistic glitterati in New York, London, and other ‘glamour cities,’ and for years, various museums and collectors have schemed and plotted various courses of action by which they might acquire the Nasher Collection. “But to the relief of home fans, Mr. Nasher, having thoroughly enjoyed the wooing, rejected the suitors… [This week,] the $70 million Nasher Sculpture Center, a smashing combination of indoor museum and outdoor environment built and owned by the Nasher Foundation, opens to the public.”
Nasher’s Garden: A Story Of Love & Art
“On the one hand, the opening of the magnificent Nasher Sculpture Center and garden is a public event of international significance… But the sculpture center is also an intensely personal story of the marriage of Patsy Rabinowitz, daughter of a Dallas businessman, and Massachusetts-born Raymond Nasher, a self-made man, the son of Russian immigrants. It is the culmination of their remarkable collecting partnership that ended prematurely with Patsy Nasher’s death from cancer in 1988 at age 59.”
The Disney As Grace Note
LA’s new Disney Hall is “indeed a dynamic sculpture in the cityscape, but it entices rather than asserts. Its lilting abstract geometries flow seamlessly into one another, and its billowing walls, pieced together out of 10-by-4-foot sheets of stainless steel, seem alternately to reflect and absorb the changing natural light. And then there is the 2,265-seat concert hall itself, a surprise within a surprise, a spacious cocoon of rotund wooden forms with seating all around the orchestral stage.”