“New architecture—variously bright, shiny, brittle, show-offy, and slightly crazed but a lot of it significant and some of it even thrilling — is now happening in New York as it hasn’t since the Lever House–Seagram Building–Guggenheim Museum fifties.”
Tag: 11.21.05
Staff Shortages Restrict Robert Louis Stevenson Access
Public access to an important trove of Robert Louis Stevenson memorabilia has been restricted because of staff shortages. “While visitors to the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh can enjoy full access to the collections of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns on the upper floor, Europe’s finest Stevenson’s artefacts, including photographs, letters and a pair of the author’s boots, is mostly kept under lock and key in the basement because there is no attendant to keep an eye on them.”
Can Going To Art Galleries Cure Binge Drinking?
That’s what a London report suggests. “Offering the public more varied night-time entertainment, not geared solely towards young drinkers, is the key to avoiding a surge of antisocial behaviour in the wake of this week’s extension of pub opening hours, according to the London Assembly.”
Piano: Suburbs Have Been Misunderstood
Architect Renzo Piano says cities have ignored suburbs at their peril. “The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians . . . They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be.”
How Music Companies Are Screwing Us On Digital Music
“Not many music lovers have warmed to the idea that they don’t retain all the rights to the music they buy. The crux of the debate is this: When you buy a song, an album, or a movie, are you buying the content only in the form it comes in? If you purchase a song from Apple’s iTunes store, should you be able to play it on any hardware you want?”
Soprano Cheryl Studer Suffers Heart Attack
The 50-year-old singer was in Spain, and her performances have been canceled for the next three months. “Local newspaper Diario de Leon reported Monday that Studer had received rapid medical attention and was diagnosed as having suffered a mild heart attack. She had been scheduled to perform Friday at the Auditorium of the City of Leon.”
Can “David” Cause “Mental Imbalance”?
So says one of Florence’s top researchers, who has studied more than 100 people who have been rushed to hosptital after collapsing. “The artistic intoxication is caused by a combination of several things, including the stress of the trip, an ‘overdose’ of beautiful art and the degree of sensitivity of the person. We should not forget that a work of art is a very powerful stimulus and can stimulate memories in our unconscious, sometimes triggering a crisis.”
Nasty Ballroom
“Ballroom dancing has long been a political minefield. In the 1920s, dancing professionals tried to stamp out the ‘freakish’ steps of jazz-inspired crazes such as the Charleston and the Varsity Drag, which threatened to ‘turn the ballroom into a bear garden’. For the editor of the Dancing Times, excessive liberty on the dance floor had produced ‘artistic Bolshevism’. So the Official Board of Ballroom Dancing sanctioned only four official dances – waltz, foxtrot, quickstep and tango – and outlawed illegal steps, lifts and sidekicks.”