This is daft. Every product of imagination is vulnerable whether R & D in medicine, physics, energy technology whatever. How many billions of dollars lost on Nuclear Energy and how many lives lost in R & D into political economic theories? 100 million lives in the 20th century and Quadrillions of dollars. And you complain about a paltry ten million for a National Treasure? Perhaps we should hold the same standard to the businesses as entities and just eliminate them if they lose the same amount. How about Sematech? How about the program on Hoof and Mouth disease or Mad Cow? On and on and on until we get to the economists in Cambodia and three million to add to the ............... Research does not pay for itself except when it hits! Neither does Capitalism as the Enron folks now know. You don't close down the train when it runs half empty.
In the arts it is when you do a little theorizing to bring a masterwork, minor to be sure, into the minds of the current generation then you catch this kind of nonsense. I see urinals on the English TV all the time and anyone who thinks his children are effected by it should have a serious talk with them. Or better send them to France where Godard introduced group commodes into his films years ago. Do you remember that reversal where people came to the table, dropped their pants or raised their skirts to sit and talked about the amount of waste in the world. At a certain point if they were hungry they pulled up pants or dropped the skirt and went to a private room where the ate alone since dealing with eating death was considered one of the more disgusting things humans do. The performance of old art has two issues. Recreation of the form or of the process of intent. In the former you try to make a picture like the original. In the latter you work to create the original impression received by the audience to what was done. One assumes an audience that knows their history from a holistic perspective. The other assumes a semiotic issue and considers it to be an issue of translation. Since Un Ballo is a work that was itself a translation of an event that Verdi couldn't tell the truth about and so moved the whole story from Scandinavia to Boston where it made no sense, it is already an act of translation. It causes interesting artistic questions for the Director recreator. Ask the artistic questions and don't talk peanuts. $10 million is not even a lost investment in a bad movie. If you get a whole season of great Art with a couple of failures with only that loss then you have gotten a bargain. Keith you sound like the trucker who complains that politicians make more money than he does. The relative costs of these things are only big to the little or the poor. You might as well tear down all of those castles because they are windy and are wasteful. Performance is the most delicate of all art forms. An impure thought will destroy it for ever. Ray ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 12:57 PM Subject: Singing on the lavatory > The upper middle-class in England, ever keen to show how utterly > sophisticated they are compared with the hoi pollio are flocking to the > English National Opera's modernised production of Verdi's "Masked Ball". It > opens with the male singers reading a newspaper, sitting on lavatory seats > with their trousers down. (The photo in today's Independent doesn't seem to > show any toilet rolls, and this bothers me.) Apparently, this version is > also replete with drug-fuelled orgies of sex and violence along with > transvestites. > > It also might be added that this production is estimated to add a US$1 > million loss to the English National Opera's existing debt of US$10 million > kindly made up by a grant from the Arts Council of England -- and paid for > by ordinary taxpayers. > > The principal singer, tenor Julian Gavin, withdrew from the leading role > saying he could not appear in a production to which he felt unable to bring > his children. This makes me feel less of a prude when I think back some > years ago to a production in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in > Stratford-on-Avon (also supported by the Arts Council) when I walked out of > a scene in which the actors were performing sex au naturel. > > I don't think we're quite at the point yet of calling the bluff of the > artistic middle classes. It wouldn't be so bad if they paid the full > economic costs of their tickets and didn't sponge on the rest of us. The > Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts was summarily fired from his > post a week or two ago when he described Tracy Emin's "Unmade Bed" (which > won the prestigious Turner Prize two years ago) as 'crap'. > > So we're not quite ready yet to tell the Emperor about his clothes. In due > course, this modern, absurd obeisance to the 'serious arts' will go by the > board, and there'll be another fashion, another way of the 'beautiful > people' showing their natural superiority to the rest of us. And, I > imagine, ordinary people will continue to pay for it, as always. > > Keith Hudson > > __________________________________________________________ > "Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in > order to discover if they have something to say." John D. Barrow > _________________________________________________ > Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > _________________________________________________ >
