It has been a busy two weeks or so, as I attended three of New York City Center’s Fall for Dance programs, New York City Ballet’s Balanchine I program (featuring Donizetti Variations, Ballade, and the one-act Swan Lake), BalletX at the Joyce, and Noé Soulier at L’Alliance. Here is my review for program 2 of Fall for Dance and for program 5. More forthcoming.
I’m almost done with Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures, which will be particularly pleasing to the perhaps small percentage of Sally Rooney readers who think Beautiful World, Where Are You is her best novel (me). It is also indisputably Taylor’s most intimate work.
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As we’ve discussed on and off for the past couple months the wide number of museum renovations, expansions, and re-openings, perhaps you’ve had the thought: Is every big museum remodeling itself these days?
The Louvre, of course, announced its plans for renovation in January, and the Centre Pompidou just closed for its five-year renovation. The Picasso Museum in Paris just announced a €50 million expansion, which it expects to finish by 2030, Le Monde reported. The British Museum is working on its Masterplan with architect Lina Ghotmeh. London’s National Gallery reopened its Sainsbury Wing in the spring after a major refurbishment and rehang. The Frick Museum also reopened in New York after a five-year renovation, and the Met announced its plans to update its Modern and Contemporary Art Wing a few months before it debuted the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, showing art of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Harlem’s Studio Museum will reopen in November.
There have also been plenty of new museum openings. Cairo’s Grand Egyptian Museum is expected to open, in full, before the end of the year. The V&A East Storehouse opened in the spring, as did Japan’s Naoshima New Museum of Art and Rotterdam’s Fenix Museum of Migration. Earlier this month, Kazakhstan just opened the Almaty Museum of Arts, the country’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, ArtNews reported. This past weekend, Museo Casa Kahlo—Mexico City’s new museum focused on Frida Kahlo’s family and early life—just opened, the New York Times reported.
This may seem surprising to consider when you think about all the news we’ve seen about funding getting slashed—but the reality is, the vast majority of museum openings and renovations are getting funded primarily through wealthy donors. The Almaty, for instance, is founded by the auto tycoon Nurlan Smagulov, a native to Kazakhstan who, with more than 700 artworks by Kazakh and Central Asian artists, is a veritable patron of the arts.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that these institutions are having an easy time getting the funds they need (hence contentious decisions, like the British Museum’s to accept major gifts from BP). But you do tend to see some of the same names repeating on donor lists—like BlackRock CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, who donated $35 million for the Frick’s renovation and a staggering £185 million to Oxford University to create a new Centre for the Humanities, which will open next month. Oxford chancellor William Hague spoke about the donation recently to The Times in a piece with a very blunt headline: How we got a rich US donor to pay £185m for our new arts centre. It is the single largest gift the university has received in “modern times,” aka, since the Renaissance (it is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, with its earliest records of teaching dating back to 1096).
So, how did Oxford pull it off? Hague doesn’t actually have an answer. But he does suggest that the UK, generally, is important to BlackRock and therefore important to Schwarzman. Though he won’t put words in his donor’s mouth, Hague adds that there’s good reason for philanthropists to support the arts and humanities right now: “I think in this age of rapid technological change and social media we need the humanities more than ever. We need philosophy, linguistics and a knowledge of history if we are to make sense of the huge changes that are taking place.”
The opera continues to be a place of political battles worldwide—most recently, in Milan, where workers at Teatro La Fenice have vowed to go on a permanent strike in response to the appointment of conductor Beatrice Venezi as music director. Venezi, 35, is seen as an ally of hard-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, ANSA reported. The classical music critic Alberto Mattioli put it simply to the New York Times: “Venezi is not a famous conductor who happens to be right wing. She’s famous because she is right wing.”
The conductor has previously pushed against the nickname she earned because of her father’s role in hard-right politics: “fascistella,” or “little fascist.”
While the theater’s board unanimously approved Venezi, a musician told the Times that it is custom for the board to consult with members of the orchestra when making this kind of appointment—a task officials failed to carry out.
It is still a dangerous time for professionals in the art world to express dissent against ruling political factions. Maria Smorzhevskikh-Smirnova, the director of Estonia’s Narva Museum, has been sentenced to 10(!) years in prison for the museum’s decision to hang banners that compare Putin with Hitler, The Moscow Times reported. The official charges are of disseminating “war fakes” and “rehabilitating Nazism.”
The curator of a recent exhibition at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, which criticized authoritarian regimes in China and Myanmar, has fled to London, fearing deportation to his native Myanmar, the New York Times reported. The museum, facing pressure from Chinese authorities, also removed work of four artists from Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang (where most of the country’s Uyghur population lives), as well as two flags: that of Tibet and one used to express Uyghur independence.
At the very least, there is some positive news in the U.S.: A federal court in Rhode Island ruled that the National Endowment for the Arts could not implement its Trump-instated policy of ensuring recipients aligned with the administration’s crackdown on “gender ideology,” the New York Times reported.
More than 50 artists and performers have signed a letter asking the feminist visual artist Judy Chicago to withdraw her exhibition Judy Chicago: What If Women Ruled the World?, which opened earlier this month, from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Many signatories, Hyperallergic reports, are Israeli. It reads, in part: “We believe that Israel’s actions are in violation of the vision of the world that you promote through your art, and ask that you do not use your names and reputations to support those actions.”
The museum, in a statement to Hyperallergic, said that it, too, stood against Israel’s war in Gaza, but did not support the idea of a boycott. Director Tania Coen-Uzzielli wrote:
“We too are horrified by the devastation and pain in Gaza, and we use our platform to call for the end of the war and shine a light on its toll. To cancel this project now would not be an act of solidarity, but of surrender. It would only strengthen the very structures of power, violence, and silencing. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is led by women and has consistently championed the work of women artists across generations, cultures, and identities, including Palestinian artists.”
Pussy Riot founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, who worked with Chicago on the quilt which composes the exhibit, told the publication that she agrees with the letter writers but does not have “any control over ongoing logistics or where [the art] is shown.”
Here’s a nice story: Houston Ballet principal Harper Watters recently shared with Dance Magazine why he dances. He writes, in part: “Dance has given me the courage to embrace my identity, overcome the hurdles, and then celebrate it—fearlessly—onstage….Arthur Mitchell said, ‘What does dance give you? The freedom to be who you are and do what you want to do.’”
Brief dance history note: Arthur Mitchell, who died in 2018 was the first African American dancer to join New York City Ballet, in 1955. The following year, he became a principal. In 1969, he founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem, widely considered the the first Black classical ballet company.
Remember how everyone was so upset about the Bayeux Tapestry potentially getting damaged in the move from France to the UK? Well, it’s been moved! The process, Le Monde reports, took 90 people and 7 hours and 15 minutes.
Below the paywall: Yuja Wang’s new gig, why Harvard’s orchestra just got suspended, a female Flemish painter gets her due, a new Picasso is revealed, and I find myself agreeing, begrudgingly, with Alec Baldwin. And more!
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