I want to go to the piano Olympics
Plus, brewing controversy over a potentially fake masterpiece.
Hello. I’ve regrettably made my return to the United States of America but please know that for several moments during my Heathrow layover I considered what might happen if I were simply to hop on the tube into the city.
Regardless. I will write some more about my trip and all the art I saw in the Netherlands, but for now, here is the news.
How can you get new audiences to museums / operas / concert halls? This week, we have a few different points of view on this eternal question.
At Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, artistic director Stefan Herheim is doing things a little differently. He took over the post in 2022, and in a recent New York Times profile he discusses what he’s been up to. The first order of business was a $91.1 million renovation, which led the theater’s main stage to reopen in January. The second was developing programming that’s distinct from the usual Figaro fare one might expect at a major opera house. That’s because Theater an der Wien is a stagione theater, which meanss that it puts on just one show at a time for a limited engagement (rather than rotating through existing repertory). “We don’t have to produce something that’ll survive for 10 years in repertoire,” Herheim told the NYT. “We can take more risks. More than half the shows we’re doing are titles people have hardly ever heard of. We go far beyond the classical standards.”
One example of this is its production of Voice Killer, an opera by Miroslav Srnka about the real story of a U.S. soldier based in Australia during WWII who became a serial murderer. Herheim says that storytelling of this nature can help people grapple with big questions about the world and society.
A forthcoming New York City venue called Canyon is rethinking the traditional museum model. The upcoming Lower East Side establishment will be dedicated to “video, sound, and performance,” the New York Times reported. Joseph C. Thompson, who ran Mass MoCA for three decades, and financier Robert Rosenkranz are behind the project, which will be a nonprofit organization. The space has plans for high-tech galleries, through which it will show video art (a medium that generally has not been well-served by traditional institutions), a performance space, a restaurant, and several bars. Critically, visitors will be allowed to carry food and drink into the space (probably because video can’t be damaged in the way a painting can). It will also be open from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.—much more realistic hours for the 9-to-5 set than what most museums offer.
The star pianist Yuja Wang sat down with the Financial Times for their Lunch with the FT series (which, I’ll state publicly, has become a reporting dream of mine), and spoke both about her career and the general state of the classical music world. As it happens, Wang thinks there’s no shortage of audiences—young or old—who want to listen to classical (thanks to streaming, especially). The real issue, she thinks, is the narrowing repertoire of what’s actually being played. Most high-performing working pianists are expected to play popular piano concertos from composers like Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev—which means more under-the-radar pieces go unplayed. Wang (who is indeed playing Tchaikovksy 1 at Carnegie Hall in October) has made it a mission to get these lesser-known compositions heard. “But I couldn’t do that in the beginning, before I made a name,” she adds.
Speaking of piano, did you know about the Olympic-like competition for the instrument that happens in Texas every four years? The Guardian recently reported on this year’s Van Cliburn competition in Fort Worth, which happened May 21 - June 7, explaining how the rather intense competition works; this year’s simulcast drew 20 million viewers across 145 countries, and is also available via Apple Music Classical. Time will tell how winner (and former child prodigy) Aristo Sham proceeds. For now, I am set about the task of memorizing piano concertos so I can immediately tell the difference between Rachmaninoff 1, 2, and 3.
Turnover continues in the dance world. Former New York City Ballet principal Gonzalo Garcia has been appointed artistic director of Miami City Ballet. He starts in August and says he will preserve the company’s history of putting on ample Balanchine and Robbins productions, but also wants to invest in major choreographers like Twyla Tharp and Alexei Ratmansky, produce pieces by other storied dancemakers like Mark Morris, and invest in emerging choreographers, the New York Times reported.
Germany’s Hamburg Ballet, on the other hand, is seeing the departure of of its artistic director, choreographer Demis Volpe, after dancers accused him of creating a toxic work environment, the NYT reported. The Guardian previously reported in May that more than half of the dancers in the 63-person company complained to Hamburg’s minister of culture through a letter, and five of 11 soloists resigned. Inspired by this motion, dancers at Düsseldorf’s Ballet am Rhein, where Volpe was artistic director for four years, released a letter of their own with similar complaints: “During his time with us, we found that Mr Volpi created a work environment characterised by inconsistent communication, a lack of transparency, and an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.”
In other parts of the world, companies are innovating in the realm of storytelling. On Britain’s Channel Islands, the Ballet d’Jèrri—a fairly new company, started in 2022 by Carolyn Rose Ramsay—put on a three-piece program with works by female choreographers inspired by the island Jersey’s history as a witch-hunting capital. Over in Leeds, Phoenix Dance Theatre adapted James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room in a production by choreographer Marcus Jarrell Willis, a former Ailey dancer who has been the company’s artistic director since 2023.
Art fakery is having a moment as London’s National Gallery is alighted in a debate over the authenticity of its “Samson and Delilah” allegedly painted by Peter Paul Rubens, which it acquired in 1980 for £2.5 million. There have been debates about the painting since its acquisition—many have said that the brushwork is too clumsy to be an actual Rubens—and now, the discovery that the museum has installed a new backing on the painting, has reignited the debate. There’s also the fact that the late historian Ludwig Burchard, who found the painting, was discovered by contemporary researchers to have misattributed at least 75 paintings falsely to Rubens, all for commercial gain, The Guardian reported. The museum maintains the painting’s veracity.
On the flip side, a Rodin sculpture that was believed to be a copy—and sat on a family’s piano for years—was discovered to be real and sold for nearly $1 million.
Sotheby’s, meanwhile, is preparing to sell the collection of British socialite Pauline Karpidas in September, which includes Surrealist masterworks by René Magritte, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, and more. It is expected to generate $81 million, which could set a record; already, it is the “the highest estimate ever placed on a single collection at Sotheby’s in Europe,” ARTNews reports.
Will somebody buy me anything from the Frame x Sotheby’s collection?
Sotheby’s also just shared renderings of its new New York City building housed in the Breuer building. Changes are little, largely because of the building’s historic designation, but there are functional additions: museum benches turned into display cases and elevators added, The Art Newspaper reported.
I really don’t think that Trump knows what Les Miserables is about. He received both cheers and boos at the opening night of the Kennedy Center’s production, and when asked on the red carpet if he related more to Jean Valjean or Javert, he turned to Melania and said, “That’s tough. You’d better answer that one, honey, I don’t know.” The First Lady reportedly smiled, the New York Times reported.
After Trump claimed that he fired Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian put out a statement saying that the president does not have authority over the institution’s personnel decisions. Still, Sajet made the decision to resign, saying that she believe the best way to serve the institution at this current moment was by stepping down.
New cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities earlier in June impacted about 100 employees, or two-thirds of its workforce. The Art Newspaper reports that the agency will also offer just half of its typical endowment opportunities, with the rest of its resources going to Trump’s “Garden of Heroes” project which does not yet have a location.
Photographer and activist Nan Goldin is selling prints to raise funds to protect at-risk trans people. Prints cost $250 each, and the sale runs through 5pm ET June 26. Two photo options are available.
Cairo’s much-anticipated Grand Egyptian Museum has postponed its July 3 opening in light of the war between Israel and Iran.
Unionized employees at the Louvre yesterday went on a “wildcat strike”—an unauthorized work stoppage that wasn’t put to a vote by members—in protest of work conditions and overcrowding. President Macron announced, earlier this year, plans to overhaul the museum, but so far, employees say that “nothing has changed,” the New York Times reported.
Nadya Tolokinnokova, the activist, artist, and member of Pussy Riot, just completed a 10-day performance, “POLICE STATE,” at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. She transformed a warehouse at the museum’s Geffen Contemporary location into a recreation of a Russian prison sell, which she stayed in during the museum’s hours, producing soundscapes on a computer—even when MOCA closed Geffen early on June 8 as anti-ICE protests escalated and Trump set the National Guard on the city. “Durational performance is a scary thing to step into: Once you say you’re going to show up, you can’t just leave simply because the National Guard has a whim to occupy the city, so my choice was to stay and continue doing my job as an artist,” Tolokinnokova told Hyperallergic.
Meanwhile Putin’s daughter is allegedly working in a Parisian art gallery that shows the work of Ukrainian artists and Russian dissident artists critical of the president. “…with the war reaching its heights it is inadmissible to allow a person who comes from a family of beneficiaries of [Putin’s] regime to come into confrontation with the victims of that regime. We need to know who we are working with and decide whether we are ready for that,” artist Nastya Rodionova, who fled Moscow in 2022, told The Times.
In April, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and an organization called Art of Recovery Los Angeles hosted free art conservation clinics, which helped Angelenos contending with fire-damaged art and heirlooms to recover their damaged, cherished items, Hyperallegic reported.
But soon, AI could help restore paintings, thanks to a technique developed by MIT student (and art appreciator) Alex Kachkine, ArtNet reported. This technology could be genuinely helpful: according to a study the student published in Nature, 70 percent of paintings in museum collections are kept in storage partly because it is to expensive to restore them for public view. And there is precedent for technology to be used in this way: artificial intelligence was instrumental in the Rijksmuseum’s still ongoing restoration of Rembrandt’s massive masterwork, The Night Watch. This isn’t a tool to replace conservators and art historians—it’s one that could make their work even more effective. ▲
The Cliburn is every 4 years, like a legit Olympics!