There is an article in today's NY Times regarding the newly refurbished Koch Theater, and the relationship between City Opera and NYCB. The article mentions that NYCB may waive $9 million owed by City Opera for the construction project if the opera will "give the ballet some performance weeks in the fall." This raises some interesting possibilities. I always thought it was detrimental for NYCB and ABT to have competing seasons in the Spring.

Here's the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/arts/22k...ref=todayspaper

Don't the extra fall weeks amount to a way for NYCB to increase its box office take to compensate for NYCO's $9 M default? It doesn't say anything about NYCB losing spring weeks.

The body language in the photo is interesting. Steel sits compactly in his seat, hands folded over his lap, each elbow resting on the armrest on either side of this seat, neatly contained. Martins, across the aisle, has his non-aisle arm draped authoritatively over the seatback beside him, a foot sticking well out into the aisle. There's more to the disparity than Martins' height. Despite the article's suggestion of amicable relations, the photo suggests a very unequal balance of power.

I think what's been done to the theatre is detrimental -- some of the better seats have been removed, and I wonder how those bare, hard aisles are going to sound under peoples' feet, especially latecomers' (or early leavers'). Removing some carpet will liven the acoustics of the place, but remove it from the aisles? The new Four Seasons Center in Toronto has surprisingly lively acoustics, given the marginal sightlines, apparently in part by having no carpet (on the main floor at least) except in the aisles, where it softens footsteps and prevents slipping.

But I'm glad the 40-inch row depth has been maintained -- in my day, we had little trouble getting to the center seats from the ends of the rows, thanks to that.

So, abatt, what do you think will happen in the Spring? Will NYCB move some of its programs into a lengthened Fall season in "competition" with the Met Opera? And do you see the NYCO opposite ABT? Will that make everyone happier? (A few of us were happy running back and forth across the plaza at intermission in the Spring, but we were the exceptions!)

Very good, carbro! I was just thinking that, far from posing side-by-side as the article says, the two were across the aisle, like opposed political parties!

Hmm, I had not considered the body language issue. Steel certainly has a lot to be nervous about, which may explain his body language. There are frequently reports in the press that City Opera cannot survive because its financial picture is too bleak. I had assumed that NYC Ballet, with its 8 week spring season, 8 winter season plus 5 weeks of Nuts, had already maxed-out its capacity. I don't think there is enough audience interest for adding even more weeks of performances by NYCB. That's why I assumed that there might be a swap of a few weeks of winter or spring performances for a few weeks of fall performances. While I certainly don't have any ill feelings toward City Opera, I hope that the Koch Theater has more free weeks in the future so that international ballet companies can visit us here in New York. We are now by-passed because of the lack of availability of an appropriate theater for companies like Kirov, Bolshoi and Royal Ballet in which to perform. If you want to see these major companies, you now have to go to Washington, D.C.

By the way, Jack, I too have done the shuttle between NYCB and ABT on certain evenings to catch portions of each company's performance on a single night. I thought I was the only person who was avid (nutty) enough to do that! I'm happy to hear I'm in good company.

Here's a link on another piece from the NYTimes Art Beat.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/...ra-this-season/

This is some more info on the renovations at the Koch Theater, although it really pertains to the NYCO.

After years of controversy, and in light of (hopefully) some acoustical improvements, the sound enhancement system (read "amplification" ) used for City Opera performances has been done away with!

Ding , dong, the witch is dead!

My first thought was the same -- how could NYCB justify adding more performances? A seasonal switch may work, if that makes sense for the musicians, stagehands, etc. , and the union contracts can be worked out.

In a recent "Opera News" article, I think it was Patricia Racette who said that the Met was dropping it's long book-ahead dates, and was starting to schedule not so far in advance, like in Europe. A season shift might not impact NYCO, if the global trend is booking later.

I remember not only shifting between ballet performances, but also between NYCB and the Met Opera or Avery Fisher Hall.

Thanks, richard53dog, for that link. It's short, so I thought it was worth posting in full.

Everything has a political component. This one is appears to be toxic.

I would urge those who would consider attending any performance at this theater to consider the resume of the David Koch and his extreme right wing political views. I find it very troubling that Martins and the owners of the Building would accept money from someone who has aligned himself with some of the following:

"In 1984, Koch founded Citizens for a Sound Economy. Koch also funds Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group that has recently used new media technologies and other efforts to create opposition to President Barack Obama's proposed health care reforms."

"Americans for Prosperity is led by Tim Phillips, who was a former partner with Ralph Reed's Century Strategies. That organization became well-known when it was revealed in a US Senate investigation that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff was laundering money through Century Strategies and Americans for Tax Reform to oppose legislation that his Indian tribe clients wanted to defeat.[8][9] From 2003 to 2007 AFP was led by Nancy Pfotenhauer (Koch Industries' chief lobbyist from 1996 to 2001), who left to become an adviser for the 2008 John McCain presidential campaign."

"Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation (CSEF). According to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post, 85 percent of CSE's 1998 revenues of CSE's $16.2 million came not from its 250,000 members, but from contributions of $250,000 and more from large corporations.

Between 1985 and 2001, CSE received $15,993,712 in 104 separate grants from twelve foundations:

* Castle Rock Foundation[citation needed]
* Earhart Foundation[citation needed]
* JM Foundation[citation needed][2]
* Koch Family Foundations (David H. Koch Foundation, Charles G. Koch Foundation, Claude R. Lambe Foundation)[citation needed]
* John M. Olin Foundation[citation needed]
* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation[citation needed]
* Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc.[citation needed]
* Scaife Foundations (Scaife Family, Sarah Mellon Scaife, Carthage)[citation needed]

Other CSE funders (not included in above funding total) have included:

* Archer Daniels Midland[citation needed]
* DaimlerChrysler[citation needed]
* Enron[citation needed]
* General Electric[citation needed]
* F.M. Kirby Foundation[citation needed]
* Philip Morris[citation needed]
* US West[citation needed]
* $380,250 from ExxonMobil (1998 - 2001)[1]

I was originally upset about the Koch renaming, but a Marxist friend -- and a great Balanchine fan -- has said it's alright. Anyway it's better it goes to NYCB & the Opera than to a football stadium or a presidential library. In "The Recognitions" I think one of the benefactors, or someone like one, has happily confused Das Rheingold with Miss Rheingold.

He (or his foundation) also support a lot of PBS programming. (Kind of odd, if he really is a right-wing conservative?)

He really is a right wing conservative. You'll notice that giving money to anyone who has some sort of power or influence is the name of the game. If you have plenty of money you spread it around and blunt the attacks of those who oppose you. Wall Street, Pharma, Insurance etc all do it to congress critters. it works!

They all, left and right alike, also do it to achieve a favorable balance come tax time.

I'm sure that Koch's donations in the poliitical sphere have influence on the parties receiving donations. I'm not sure that's necessarily true with respect to donations to the arts. Koch (far right) and Caroline Kennedy (left/center) are both influential donors to ABT. However, I would doubt that either of them influence Kevin McKenzie regarding what ballets to present, or who to hire. With respect to Peter Martins, there is no indication that Koch has in any way influenced programming or hiring. The bigger problem w. Peter Martins is not that his decisions are influenced by big money donors, but that his decisions are clouded by nepotism.

The arts are built on oil money, tobacco money, slave money, indentured servitude money, broken backs of labor money, serf money, etc. Why is this different?

I believe you are exactly right regarding the traditional history of financial support for the arts.

What is a bit different is the level of public awareness. We have so much more information available to us today via the media and the internet and people are able to make connections that would have been much more difficult, say, twenty years ago.

Take for instance Alberto Vilar, who was a philanthropic icon in the 90s. Would he have seemed like such an unbelievable gift from the stars today? Perhaps but perhaps not.

Note , I'm not making any kind of a comparsion about the political/economic position of either individual but both seemed to get things named after them!

I don't like the concept of wealthy people supporting the arts. I think it is an unfortunate consequence of how this society has structured itself.

Rather than have the arts supported by the "people" (the government) they are largely dependent on private wealthy people who receive a tax credit for their charitable donations.

If you look back at the Guilded Age, Carnegie et all made enormous wealth on the backs of working class and then gave money for the construction of libraries, museums, theaters and so forth hardly any of which the tired, poor over worked working class had the time or the education to enjoy. They are gifts to themselves and the middle class who are their "managers". (I graduated from one of "his" universities)

And so goes noblesse oblige. I suppose it's better than hoarding, but what why out these crooks on a pedestal because they give away some of their ill gotten or unearned or inherited wealth, which of course is excess money they can't find something to spend it on anyway as they've mostly bought everything they want in spades for themselves and their entire family.

Bill Gates is full of so much guilt about his wealth that he is now devoted all his time to assuaging that guilt by trying to help the less fortunate.

Marie Antoinette had human emotions too. hahaha

The question of what wealth is ill-gotten and what is hard-earned aside, there is at least something democratic about private individuals supporting artists and arts organizations they like, rather than all funding being doled out by unelected officials. I think we need both.

It's always been hard to achieve a balance between public and private financing of the arts.

The political reality in the U.S., however, is currently decidedly against serious government spending in this area, preferring to rely on tax incentives. (Efforts to demonize "socialism" and "elitism" -- whether or not these terms have any relevance to the projects at hand -- have been remarkably successful since the 1980s.)

Given that, we have very little choice in the matter nowadays. So, what practicable alternatives are there to what we have now?: that is, dependence on private philanthropy and its hand maidens, big Tax Deductions and serious Social Climbing?

It's wonderful to support the arts... everyone should do it, but the arts should not be in private hands. The arts belong to the society, in a sense, and society should take care of them. The arts are what we have of our history, are our culture and as such belong to and should be accessible to all people, not those who can afford to experience art.

Money ruins everything it touches.

Who but the rich could afford opera and ballet if not for private philanthropy or, if you prefer, private "donations?

Oh, I think there must be a few exceptions. It didn't seem to ruin Lincoln Kerstein.

Unfortunately, lack of money ruins things too. Especially in something so costly as the performing arts.

Isn't the goal, in the end, to have a strong, artistically independent NYCO as well as NYCB operating on relatively equal terms at Lincoln Center? That certainly seems the best way to assure both private (individual and corporate) and public funding in the future.

For those who missed the article, here's the NY Times report/review of the NY City Opera opening at the Koch. (God, it's hard to say "Koch" instead of State Theater.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/arts/mus...fGZIALslHm9TnBw

I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily more democratic.The officials may be unelected but we may generally assume they were appointed because they have the appropriate expertise to make informed judgments, not something they would acquire by spending time and money running for office and attempting to ingratiate themselves with voters.



The state could do more.. Private money tends to follow public money and when the government takes a leading role in promoting and funding the arts it provides an example to follow.



Considering that private donations have fallen sharply for obvious reasons, more stimulus for the arts would have been helpful. (There was some, but probably not enough.) I know this will not happen.

.

He should feel guilty about all that lousy software. Still, Gates is a poor example of the undeserving rich. His generosity goes far, far beyond the usual even for a man with his money and at least he didn’t make his dough exploiting cheap labor and destroying the environment.

If the rich want to give, that’s splendid, as long as I’m not expected to tug my forelock and gurgle about how wonderful they are for doing it. (Lincoln Kirstein was an outlier; there are few rich folks with his commitment, expertise, and dedication.)



Quite right.

They have informed judgments, but then we have our own. We can vote for politicians whom we hope will appoint officials whose taste we share, but the more direct and therefore democratic route is to support artists and institutions with our own money.

Theoretically state can always do more, but as to Sander O's assertion that "the arts [ . . . ] should be accessible to all people," private philanthropists are people for whom it is accessible, who choose to make it accessible to others. We might say they are people who walk the talk. Their money might follow the state's, but the state in this regard often can't do without them.

Unbelievable thing to have to hear.



He's no such thing, and is just as generous as dirac pointed out. There needs to be all sorts of funding, and that means MONEY. This always includes wealthy private individuals, and it has always needed them. This is so obvious it really seems ridiculous to even have to say it. For one thing, they even want to fund these things. We are not at some ashram with 'living off the land', and most of us who even made a little bow to such things gave that collective crap up long ago.

Bill Gates' parents were philanthropists long before he as a college freshman borrowed $75K from his father to start Microsoft, and it should come as no surprise that he followed in their footsteps. Long before he became mega-wealthy, Gates started a corporate matching program for any 501-c-3 organizations to encourage all employees who gained wealth through stock options to give back to their communities, knowing that in general it takes three generations for charitable giving to take hold and that many of his employees did not come from families that had a history of giving. Through the company program, he encouraged them to start. It wasn't just the Porsche dealers and general contractors who benefited from the Microsoft millionaires and thousands of Microsoft employees who never came close to being millionaires.

It's interesting that Gates who has developed the devilish software system is so publicly generous and that Apple which has developed the angelic software system has a rather obscure philanthropic program -- one of "America's Least Philanthropic Companies" :Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Even more devilish than DOS is Slajov Zizek's London Books riff on "Liberal [in the old fashioned economic-liberalism sense] Communists":



"Nobody Has to be Vile"

Zizek is IMO an ultimate charlatan and fraud. He's shrewd, but he's always got his eye on the trends and will say anything With a little change in the materials 'Soros' has 'given' or 'lives ruined' and slight change to a smaller audience, what he says of Soros is surely true of him. His followers spend all their time guessing what tricks are up his sleeve now, because he is a master illusionist and I don't think serious at all, just very media-savvy and well-educated. His old theses on the 'virtual' are repellent beyond belief, like the stupidest caricature of the much better work done by Baudrillard, and with none of the science of even a nut like Ray Kurzweil, with his Singularity and desire to live 5000 years. Zizek exaggerates everything until it's worn out, then notes that it's worn out, and figures out something else 'the entertaining philosopher' would find profitable.

Of course, the comparision ends there. He doesn't consider himself 'rich', so his 'philanthropic contributions' don't even need to be written up. He makes plenty of money from his lectures and has a minor audience for his new books, churned out yearly. They even let him write terrible op-eds in the NYTimes. This is mostly off-topic, but I think that, even though goods ought not to 'ill-gotten' (everybody would say that), almost all of them can be traced back to some kind of exploitation, so it's not worth giving to much credence to except in the most extreme cases. Maybe Phyllis McGuire's Sam Giancana money put into her Las Vegas mansion was not exactly a philanthropic use of funds, but lots of the big industrialists are entirely responsible for enormous giving to the Arts, and this is just part of how life works. The imperial and royal courts throughlut history all stole and exploited from poorer souls, but there would be no ballet without them.

So, I'd say 'Everybody has to somewhat vile'. this surely includes ALL property owners, but I'm not the one that has a problem with that. If others do, then they ought not to have houses, etc.

Thanks for the link to that article, Quiggin. He has a point, although it's always been easier to make fun of rich men with a vestigial conscience instead of those who happily gorge and exploit without a qualm. The former occupy a hopelessly false position and the latter at least have the virtue of consistency. I will say that the public probably got more from the likes of Carnegie and Frick than we have from the robber barons of today.



It does follow the state's. It's generally understood that the support of the NEA, for example, often acts as sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval, encouraging private funding.

Zizek was being playful, but his point was that the movement of fast capital of the last ten years -- totally untethered from any reality or responsibility, almost a pure abstraction -- has caused turbulence for lots of poor countries.

John Maynard Keynes -- hardly a Zizek (and married to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopovoka!) -- has pointed out roughly the same thing in his image likening capital to a school of goldfish lying in a pond in peaceful suspension at one corner. Then suddenly, in the flash of on eye, they are in another corner for no good reason. Keynes was for some sort of tethering of capital (one imagines Roman goldfish on chains).

Today's Financial Times "Long View" is, in the same way, nervous that the nervous capital of hedge and other hair-trigger funds -- the "dollar carry trade" -- will not stay in place long enough for solid "long-term buy-and-hold investors to put more more money into markets." Lots of everyday lives are tied to these marionette movements of money.

Zizek has made lots of complicated ideas fairly accessible -- Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson have some quibbles but have given him good marks -- and he spoke at the same forum Jane Jacobs and Joan Didion do here in San Francisco and also at a small down-at-the-heels book store on Valencia Street. At least in that context, he did look like someone having taken something of a of vow of poverty -- and genuine in his concerns about the loss of culture, in the broadest sense.

One of Z's themes was about fast middle class normalization of previous dangerous ideas and zones -- which as someone interested in city planning these days, I see in the shockingly rapid assimilation of the Meat Packing District in Manhattan into grand hipness, without a even decent period of mourning for the old.

Hopefully Mr. Koch's nervous capital is at finally at rest in its new seats, viewing Opera & Ballet.

John Maynard & Lydia lighting up

He's taken no such vow, but is a poseur. I've been reading him and discussing him with theorists and philosophers for over 10 years--but once in a while he'll have an idea. He's primarily a good 'intellectual trendy'. After 9/11, there were three Verso books commissioned by big 'cyber-names' and philosophers--Virilio, Zizek, and Baudrillard. Zizek's was easily the most appalling. With every new book, he grabs attention by contradicting himself and saying, more or less 'isn't that adorable the way I can play with my own foibles, or whaever you'd call them?' In making things more 'accessible', he often just makes them different and therefore false. I liked him at first, but by now I don't believe a word he says. It's just posturing. Baudrillard did a lot of posturing too, but the method by which you make huge messes in order to find some diamond in the garbage would work for him; he was not the careful and fastidious type of thinker, but every now and then he's come of with something. Zizek stole tons of his ideas and cheapened all of them, especially as regards the hyperreal. Then he contradicts what he last said because he hadn't believed it to begin with. Anybody can 'look theyv'e taken a vow of poverty'. I can assure he has taken no such vow, and feels free to polemicize everybody and his brother. He also has no decent understanding of art, and one of his most idiotic fugues is crap about how art outside its original organic context no longer has any value--typical, because of course it lacks some of its original environmental power, but Zizekians will often tell you that Micheleangelo doesn't mean anything anymore. He's on his way out, though. The 'object-oriented philosophers' are the buzz by now, and they're not paying much attention to Zizek, he's paying attention to them. And what's so great about a 'vow of poverty' anyway? So he can criticize rich people? The point is, I know he's got dough anyway, and can always get more very easily. He's way beyond some ordinary tenured academic like even Jameson (thought I don't mean he's wiser.)

Also, talk about 'the loss of culture' is about as convincing to me by now as 'the end of history'. This is just the 'darkening tones' talk of the leftist media theorist, and they've been doing that for decades. I dont' buy it.

Been there -- to the lobby, anyway.

I don't know whether this is permanent or not, but there are no tables in the lobby -- either the folding tables under the casting sheets or the red marble tables near the steps. This is a problem, because after the ladies have bought their tickets, there's no surface for us to rest our bags while placing our ticket/s and credit card

Other than that -- and the ugly, backlit, accordion-pleated shower curtain that covers the wall of box office windows -- not much looks changed.

Photo here.

The Get 'em in, Get 'em out theme continues in the revamped
ladies rooms too. At least the one I visited at the City Opera Gala.
The vanity area is gone, replaced by more stalls. There's mirrors
over the individual sinks but no area to check out one's hair and
make-up. I hope the dancer's dressing rooms are more comfortable.

But that box office looks intimidating. As you approached it, could
you hear Darth Vader's theme music?

this sounds as if more of the ladies' rooms have been renovated as the first circle one was some years back. and if so, yippee; i hated the long lines that all the other ones had. four stalls is not enough.