Arts and Culture News

The Scream’s price tag should make us all despair

(see link source below) — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:10:11 +0000

Jonathan Jones

The art market has reduced Edvard Munch’s harrowing insight into the human condition to a saleable plaything

I used to like The Scream. Its sky of blood and zombie despair seemed to say so much, so honestly. Munch is a poet in colours. His pictures portray moods, most of which are dark. But sometimes on a spring day on the banks of Oslofjord he can muster a bit of uneasy delight in the world. Right now, I would rather look at his painting Ashes, a portrayal of the aftermath of sex in a Norwegian wood, or Girls on a Pier, whose lyrical longing is fraught with loneliness, than at Munch’s most famous epitome of the modern condition…..

The Guardian

Globe to Globe – Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

(see link source below) — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:52:41 +0000

Many of the world’s greatest directors, over six hundred actors from all nations, and audiences from every corner of our polyglot community, will assemble to celebrate the stories, the characters and the relationships, which are etched into all of us. Shakespeare is the language which brings us together better than any other, and which reminds of our almost infinite difference, and of our strange and humbling commonality. And above all there are the plays themselves, plays which have travelled far and wide, and which on their travels have midwifed new theatre cultures, spread light and laughter, and helped nations, new and old, to define themselves. A Globe beside the Thames is where many of these plays began their extraordinary journey. Another Globe beside the Thames is delighted to be bringing these plays, dressed in the clothes of many peoples, back home …

Globe to Globe

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

Iraq in Venice

(see link source below) — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:46:51 +0000

Iraq in Venice, six exiled artists show their work on a world stage

IN A country where a litre of water costs more than a litre of fuel, it isnt hard to see why art isnt a priority.

The irony and Alan Yentobs latest film for the BBCs Imagine series was full of it is that Iraq was once the cradle of civilisation.

Dictatorship, destruction and despair, particularly in 35 years of Saddam Husseins rule, have squeezed the life out of people and out of their culture…..

The Examiner

Britain’s Proms: music for everyone in Olympic UK

(see link source below) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:15:30 +0000

Reuters) – In London’s Olympic year, the BBC Proms is mounting an olympian effort to attract audiences to its 92-concert summer season, and to be sure they can get there amid the crush of athletes and hundreds of thousands of fans flooding the city.

“It’s an international musical festival which happens to take place in the UK,” Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller Roger Wright said at a news conference on Thursday launching the 118th Proms season.

The Proms open on July 13 and run until early September, providing a rich feast of concerts, chamber music, opera, musicals, world music and, most famously, the flag-waving, singalong pageantry of the Last Night of the Proms…..

Reuters

Dr Jekyll and a not so wicked Mr Hyde

(see link source below) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:10:47 +0000

Dr Jekyll and a not so wicked Mr Hyde: how a portrait of evil was toned down
Robert Louis Stevenson deleted “certain appetites” to make his creation Mr Hyde less sinister, an edited draft of his novella to be displayed at the British Library reveals.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of English literature’s most famous stories: the enduring classic of a man’s transformation into a monster, first published in 1886. Now the manuscript for the novella is to go on show, revealing its transformation as Stevenson toned down his more explicit ideas.

The most complete draft of the novella – Stevenson burned a first draft because his wife was so alarmed by it – is covered with corrections. Reading between its chaotic lines shows how Stevenson deleted details such as the sexual connotations of Jekyll becoming “in secret the slave of certain appetites”…..

The Guardian

Jean Cocteau’s Murals in Notre Dame de France, London

(see link source below) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:12:48 +0000

Battle to save Cocteau’s hidden legacy from vandals and decay

Restorers are working in a little-known French church in central London to save works of art by the celebrated filmmaker Jean Cocteau which are threatened by pollution and “vandalism”.

Cocteau, who died in 1963, was well known in the UK as a director during the 1950s for works including Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus. He also wrote poetry, novels and plays. But his paintings are little known in Britain.

The murals in Notre Dame de France, a Roman Catholic chaplaincy close to Leicester Square, are part of a series of five sets of works carried out by the director, and the only ones in the UK.

The church was rebuilt after the Second World War, and Cocteau agreed to paint the murals in 1960 following a request from the French ambassador…..

The Independent

EYE, the new film museum

(see link source below) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:52:22 +0000

EYE, the new film museum, opens on April 5th with

Found Footage: Cinema Exposed.

The exhibition and accompanying film program reveals how artists and filmmakers utilize the virtually inexhaustible reservoir of moving images that can be found in film archives, on Internet, TV and DVD. This found footage serves as raw material with which they make new works and give new meaning to existing moving images. The participants include Douglas Gordon, Bruce Conner, Aernout Mik and Matthias Müller. Found Footage: Cinema Exposed is curated by Jaap Guldemond, Director of Exhibitions at EYE.

The exhibition presents fifteen works of art and installations. In total, it takes up an area of 1200 m2 and can best be described as a landscape of freestanding projection screens, monitors, flat screens and 16mm projections in which the rattling projector is also a component of the work. The exhibition Found Footage: Cinema Exposed begins with American filmmaker Bruce Conner (1933-2008), who started making films without using a camera as long ago as the late fifties. Via artists such as Douglas Gordon(1966) and Matthias Müller (1961), renowned for their appropriation of footage from well-known feature films, the visitor is acquainted with the work of Italian duoGianikian/Ricci Lucchi (1942) that rearranges, slows down and adds color to fragments from early, silent cinema. The visitor also encounters home movies rescued from the hands of garbage collectors by Pablo Pijnappel (1979), TV Décollages by Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell (1932 – 1998) and the installations specially designed for the exhibition by Aernout Mik (1962) and Christoph Girardet (1966), using footage from the EYE’s own collection. Other participating artists include David Claerbout, Anri Sala, Bill Morrison and Joachim Koester.

EYE Film Institute Netherlands

Art museum news

(see link source below) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:21:42 +0000

Swedish museum opening delayed until May
The opening of Bildmuseet, the new art museum building in the northern Swedish city of Umea, has been postponed from March to 19 May. “It [has taken] longer to install all the necessary technical… MORE

More art museum news from The Art Newspaper

The restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s last work Saint Anne

(see link source below) — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:16:06 +0000

The Louvre uncovers restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s last work Saint Anne.

The 18-month-long restoration of the painting that Leonardo laboured on for 20 years until his death in 1519 will go a long way to raising “Saint Anne” to its place as one of the most influential Florentine paintings of its time and a step towards the high Renaissance of Michelangelo.

The cleaning has endowed the painting portraying the Virgin Mary with her mother Saint Anne and the infant Jesus with new life and luminosity. Dull, faded hues were transformed into vivid browns and lapis lazuli that had visitors awestruck.

“It’s unbelievable, so beautiful. Now you have that same feeling as when you enter Michelangelo’s restored Sistine Chapel. Look at the blue!” one visitor, Odile Celier, 66, said on Wednesday.

The exhibit brings together some 130 preparatory drawings and studies by Leonardo and his apprentices – something curator Vincent Delieuvin likened to “a police investigation” – tracing the painting’s conception and revealing to experts today the entire development over the last 20 years of Leonardo’s life…..

The Telegraph

National Theatre Live

(see link source below) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:00:24 +0000

The best of British theatre broadcast live to cinemas around the world.

National Theatre Live