“We tend to take it for granted, but the alphabet was a human invention. Without it, we wouldn’t read books and newspapers or write shopping lists ande-mails. We would have to rely on recitations and recordings to transmit language. But as vital and visible as the letters of the alphabet are, they usually go unappreciated.”
Tag: 11.17.04
The New MoMA – White, White, Everywhere…
Robert Campbell feels letdown by the new Museum of Modern Art. “It isn’t bad, it’s just uninteresting. It’s the old MoMA all over again, only bigger. Here are the same-old same-old white walls and ceiling track lights, and then more white walls and more ceiling track lights. You feel like a lab rat in a snow maze. There’s no attempt to create memorable architectural space for the artworks to inhabit. Instead, seeing them spotlighted on these placeless, anonymous white walls is like seeing isolated images on a screen in an academic slide lecture.”
Two Boston-Area Theatres Struggling
Two Boston-area theatres are cutting back operations because of a “difficult economy.” “Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, one of the longest-running theaters north of Boston, this week announced a multistep restructuring in an attempt to stay solvent. The Wang Center, meanwhile, said yesterday that it would cancel its production of “True West” early next year.”
MoMA – Ah, But The Art!
“The new museum wasn’t the only thing being built: The collections were, too. The MoMA has acquired hundreds of works since the exodus. The words “New Acquisition” appear on label after label. While museums that ignored the 20th century lament that it’s too late now to catch up — the art isn’t available and its cost would be prohibitive — the MoMA has received from its supporters a windfall that would make up an entire 20th-century department in any other institution. And these new additions match the quality of the existing holdings — which is staggering. Very few things are less than the finest of their kind.”
Art Basel Miami Commits To Miami
Art Basel Miami Beach has re-upped its commitment and will stay in Miami indefinitely. ”We are certainly pleased that the show has garnered the international reputation that it has and that it was generally acclaimed as the most important contemporary art fair in North America after its first incarnation.”
Toews Wins GG Fiction Award
Miriam Toews has won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction for her novel A Complicated Kindness, a “victory that surprised many, since Alice Munro’s collection Runaway won the Giller Prize last week and received a rave review from U.S. novelist Jonathan Franzen in the Sunday New York Times.”
Are Concert Stagehands Overpaid?
It can cost $40,000 to rent Carnegie Hall for the night. What drives up costs? Partly it’s the stagehands’ union. For example, “in the fiscal years ending June 30, 2001, 2002 and 2003, Carnegie stagehand and properties manager Dennis O’Connell made between $309,000 and $344,000 annually, second only to former executive and artistic directors Franz Xaver Ohnesorg and the late Robert Harth. That’s more than some principal players in major symphony orchestras. Three stagehand colleagues came in third, fourth and fifth, earning more than, say, Carnegie’s senior staff or director of development.”
Writing Right In Pittsburgh, City Of Asylum
Huang Xiang “earned international attention in 1978 when he and friends traveled 1,500 miles to Beijing and posted his political poems on a wall in the street. The Democracy Wall Movement, as it became known, put him at odds with the authorities. For the next 20 years, he was jailed numerous times, blamed for inciting a riot and sent to labor camps. It was only when a Beijing company revoked a long-awaited publishing contract because of governmental pressure that Huang saw a way out of China.” Eventually he got to America, where he became part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh…
Kramer: New MoMA Is Cold, Elephantine
Hilton Kramer registers his disappointment with the new Museum of Modern Art: “The first and gravest of our disappointments is with the ill-conceived architecture. Yoshio Taniguchi’s redesign has at every turn in its cold and elephantine structure the look and feel of a Japanese parody of the kind of American modernism that has itself long outlived its expiration date. Thus the galleries are essentially an architectural assemblage of—what else?—bleak, oversized white boxes in which the scale of the interior space and the unrelieved whiteness of the walls conspire to discomfort the viewer while diminishing the aesthetic integrity of works of art marooned in an environment remarkably hostile to the pleasures of the eye.”
MoMA In Middle Age
The Museum of Modern Art reflects a change in the museum’s character. “MoMA is no longer the edgy institution of its youth, a place of argument, sharp elbows, and missionary zeal. It remains a vital museum, but one whose energies now seem older and more contemplative. In its early days, the museum’s celebrated garden was a place of retreat—not just from the hurly-burly of the city but from the metaphysical racket within the museum. Now, in this new building, Taniguchi has imbued the entire museum with the spirit of the garden, creating a light-filled temple.”