Timely Culture Reporting and Arts Industry News

Returning Prospect Park to the People
The New York Times - April 5, 2010
By Kareem Fahim

Drugs were sold at the carousel. Muggers used the cover provided by the park's shrubs and foliage. One year, near the skating rink, a man was found shot to death, and another year, the acting supervisor of the zoo was arrested and charged with shooting animals. In the 1970s, Prospect Park in Brooklyn looked more like a crime scene than the pastoral refuge imagined a century earlier by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. For the full article, click here

More Surgery for Levine, Leaving Met in a Bind
The New York Times - April 5, 2010
By James Barron

Two of the most important classical music institutions in America were scrambling again this weekend because of the fragile health of a stocky 66-year-old man with a baton.The man, of course, is James Levine, the music director of both the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and someone who has missed a lot of time for medical reasons in recent years. Lately a lower-back problem has flared up, only months after he had surgery for a different ailment, a herniated disk closer to his neck. For the full article, click here

Assessing the Future of Modern Dance, a Fragile American Art Form
The Washington Post - April 4, 2010
By Sarah Kaufman

A few weeks ago, Paul Taylor did something no other modern-dance choreographer can do: He watched his company perform for 2 1/2 weeks at New York's City Center, seating nearly 2,000 a night. He's been doing that for years -- and has booked it for next season as well, for a run of 15 different works. Taylor is the only dancemaker who pulls in that kind of audience anymore in the modern-dance world. Look at this indigenous but fragile American art form, and you see fundamental change. There's been a downsizing, a redefining, a splintering into countless small niches. As a result, its very future feels precarious. For the full article, click here