Only one in every five paintings in public art collections is on display. One man is assembling catalogues in an attempt to bring the art to light. “The catalogues are both wonderful social histories and crammed full of small-scale artistic discoveries. You find yourself building little stories up about both painters and subjects; armchair travelling around places you might normally only drive through. It is like flicking through Pevsner’s counties without the small print; as English as the shipping forecast or Marmite.”
Tag: 12.04.05
The Reinvented Baryshnikov
“It would be difficult to find a better exemplar of career reinvention than Mikhail Baryshnikov. Of course, he started with a few little advantages, like being one of the most idolized ballet dancers of all time, like being seductively handsome, like having multiple talents and the fame to capitalize on them. He has starred on film and on Broadway and on television. He has choreographed and been artistic director of American Ballet Theater, and founded and starred in his own White Oak Dance Project. But most of his efforts so far have been extensions of his dance career, rather than a transition from it. Now he is overseeing something else, the much-bruited, still almost stealthy Baryshnikov Arts Center.”
Sundance – Swamped By Movies
The Sundance Festival has chosen 64 movies for this season’s event. “The festival has become so famous it is practically synonymous with independent film. In a rare discussion of the festival’s inner workings, the programmers said they were suffering not only from the sheer volume of images cascading into their heads, but the pressure of discriminating among them. Five people combed through 1,004 American and 936 international features (up from last year’s 761 and 843, respectively) and 760 American and 448 international documentaries (up from 624 and 385). Then there were the shorts: 4,311 of them (3,887 last year).”
Davidson: American Tragedy Lives Up To Name
Justin Davidson writes that Metropolitan Opera’s “An American Tragedy” is a disappointment for all the effort spent on it. “Eight years after the Metropolitan Opera commissioned a new work from Tobias Picker – and five since the company’s last world premiere – comes an opera that should have been half as long and twice as taut.”
Battle For The Architectural Soul Of The South
America’s Gulf Coast is rebuilding. But a battle has broken out about what rebuilding will look like. “The idea that New Urbanists may be helping to write plans for the new Gulf Coast has horrified many architects and left-leaning cultural critics — revealing, in the process, quite a bit about the ambitions and anxieties that mark contemporary architectural practice in this country.”
Classical Ideals – Still Relevant?
“Epic tales, attributed to the Greek poet Homer, aren’t just adventure stories, although on that level alone they deserve to have endured for centuries. They’re also instructive moral and ethical allegories about virtues such as courage, fidelity and honor. European artists of the 17th through the 19th centuries were inspired by these sagas, which attests to their durable appeal. But now we’re in the 21st century. Do paintings and sculptures that propound classical ideals still have anything to say that today’s museumgoers would find meaningful?”
Deep Cover – The Singers Who Save
“Cover singers are opera’s equivalent of the Broadway understudy, and like replacement artists in most forms of live performance, they are an essential but unseen part of the process. Without them, an incapacitated star can send a production scrambling. Even worse, they can bring it to a grinding halt.”
Suzanne Farrell At 60
“At 60, after more than 2,000 performances with the New York City Ballet (and a few hundred with the Bejart Ballet), the dancer who now directs will receive the Kennedy Center Honors tonight, right across the street from the apartment she calls home.”
Scottish Opera To Go Pop?
The embattled Scottish Opera will be branching out, becoming more adventurous, says its chairman. “I would like to see Scottish Opera doing West Side Story. It is a great piece, one of Bernstein’s best and a dead ringer for Glasgow. This is because the Puerto Ricans and New Yorkers in the 1950s mirror the razor gangs in Glasgow of the same period. I am very keen on playing in a stadium. I am very keen on that. I saw Teresa Berganza singing Carmen in the Stade Bercy in Paris in front of about 18,000 people and it was electrifying.”