June 1st-October 7th 2007

Berlin’s hottest ticket this summer is this one-off blockbuster at the Neue Nationalgalerie. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is lending some 150 19th-century French works to Berlin (and nowhere else) while its galleries undergo renovation. Expect the queues to be as impressive as the paintings and sculptures, which include iconic works by Ingres, Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Cézanne, Gaugin, Matisse and Rodin.

“Earlybird” tickets grant admission Tuesdays to Fridays between 8am and 8.30am, or book a VIP ticket in advance (€30, including audio guide).

Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Strasse 50, 10785 Berlin-Tiergarten. Tel: +49 (0)1805 4100. See the exhibition’s website.

Peter Stein has a taste for theatrical marathons: in 2000, he staged a 21-hour production of Goethe’s “Faust”. Now, working with the Berliner Ensemble (a company founded by Bertolt Brecht), the German director is offering a trilogy of dramas by Friedrich Schiller, Goethe’s contemporary. The three plays (“Wallenstein’s Camp”, “The Piccolomini” and “Wallenstein’s Death”) stretch over ten hours at the Kindl-Halle, a former brewery.

The action stems from the betrayal and murder of Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian general, during the Thirty Years War. Mr Stein is clearly mindful of the ways these themes of war and confusion resonate today. Those with the stamina to last through this epic (there are four intervals) will be richly rewarded.

Kindl-Halle, Werbellinstrasse 50, 12053 Berlin-Neukölln. U-Bahn: Boddinstrasse. Tel: +49 (0)30 2840 8155. See the Berliner Ensemble’s website.

A round-up of the latest news in the arts world.

A $27 million creation museum will open in Kentucky on May 28. Scenes include humans and dinosaurs cohabiting and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Many of the exhibits were designed by Patrick Marsh, who also designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

For those who don’t have the time to read “War and Peace”, a new website, dailylit.com, sends daily sections of classic literature to inboxes and hand-held devices for free (you can read Tolstoy’s classic in 675 parts). The website will soon expand to include recent works as well, and will likely then start charging. I wonder if comedian Sasha Baron Cohen’s new travel guides “Borat: Touristic Guidings To Minor Nation of U.S. and A.” and “Borat: Touristic Guidings To Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” will be included in the collection.

At the Lawson-Menzies Aboriginal Art Auction in Sydney, Australia, last night, the Aboriginal painting “Earth’s Creation” by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, sold for just over $1 million, the highest amount ever for a piece of indigenous Australian artwork.

SO, WHAT is to be made by the $72.8m sale of an abstract painting by Mark Rothko last week? The record-breaking bid made it the costliest work of contemporary art ever bought, confirming Sotheby’s confidence “that a Rockefeller Rothko is now the ultimate luxury object,” Christopher Benfey sighs.

I’m reminded of a lecture given by David Hickey, an art critic, years ago (delivered in his compelling Southern Baptist drawl). He was defining the difference between beauty and value: the visceral, mouth-gaping wallop of good art, and its inevitable commodification. Only the first consumer of a work of art truly sees its beauty, he suggested; subsequent buyers merely purchase an icon, a status symbol, at a reassuringly inflated cost. The visual cues morph, and the retail value of a painting inevitably influences how we see it–perhaps to a point where we fail to see the artwork at all.

Naturally, anyone who spends tens of millions of dollars on a painting is not really thinking about the effect of the oils on canvas. Still, such an absurd exhibition of wealth makes this quote from Bonnie Clearwater, author of “The Rothko Book” and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida, oddly apropos: “Rothko wanted painting to be miraculous for the viewer and for himself. They weren’t just colors on a canvas but a mirror of modern fragmented times.”

Mr Benfey writes:

Money was the last thing on Rothko’s mind when he painted White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) in 1950. Clement Greenberg claimed in the mid-1950s that the great achievement of Rothko’s paintings, along with those of his Abstract Expressionist confreres Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, was that “they have escaped the ‘object’ (and luxury-object) associations that attach themselves increasingly to the easel picture.” The irony is that Rothko—which sounds a bit like a brand name—had invented a new kind of aesthetic commodity.

One can’t help but wonder how the artist–who committed suicide in 1970–would have reacted to the sticker price of his boardroom-friendly works. He had been struggling for something more spiritual. Inadvertently, he ended up painting a yet more effective mirror of our fragmented times.

 THIS just in: This week’s Buttonwood column addresses the issue of these record-breaking auction bids.

“BLACKBIRD“, David Harrower’s play about a man and a woman who meet to talk about an affair that took place 15 years earlier (when he was 40 and she was 12), has recently premiered on both American coasts, to critical acclaim. Mr Harrower, a Scottish author of five original plays and several edgy adaptations (including Pirandello’s “Six Characters Looking for an Author” and Chekhov’s ”Ivanov”), took the time to speak with Moreover on the phone from his home in Glasgow.

Listen here to the interview with David Harrower.

A round-up of the latest news in the arts world.

Russian customs has barred the export of six works of art, including two depicting Vladimir Putin, Russian president, on their way to the exhibition “Learning from Moscow” at the Städtische Galerie in Dresden, Germany. The pieces, meant to be part of a 40-work exhibition by contemporary Russian artists (now 34?), were apparently held because they could provoke “international discord”. Meanwhile, a documentary about the murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko entitled “Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case” will be shown as a late entry at the Cannes film festival.

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has already made plans for an all-night autograph session at the Natural History Museum in London in July to celebrate the release of her final Harry Potter book “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” 1,700 children will be chosen by raffle to attend the event.

According to Americans for the Arts, a non-profit organization focused on advancing the arts in America, non-profit arts groups contributed $166.2 billion and 5.7 million jobs to the American economy in 2005.

The trilogy madness continues. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 “At World’s End” will be released in America tomorrow night, and has already received mediocre reviews, most of them complaining that the plot is too complicated. Honestly though, does that really matter? Rumors abound that it will join the likes of Shrek and Austin Powers in adding a fourth installment to the series.

GARRISON KEILLOR, an author and host of ”A Prairie Home Companion“, a radio programme, has some humble and awkwardly soothing words for the hair-tearing writers of the world:

Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not “Huckleberry Finn” but you must finish it anyway because the publisher’s generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has worn a hole in them already, so you press on — on — on — though it strikes you that the world has a great many books already and does it need yours? And the readers you most want (youth) are fixated on screens, not on paper. This is so depressing you want to tie a rock to your ankle and jump in the Mississippi, and if you remembered how to tie the knots that could hold a rock you might, but a long walk can bring you around.

Maybe a little simplistic, and perhaps a touch condescending. But not bad advice. It is spring, after all.

“AUGUST WILSON is America’s best playwright,” says my colleague here at Moreover. “I just love listening to his characters talk.” Arthur Miller? Too didactic. Tennessee Williams? Eugene O’Neill? Their plays haven’t aged well enough. But Wilson, a high-school dropout from Pittsburgh, left a legacy of ten plays (his “Pittsburgh Cycle”) before he died in 2005. Each play, set in a different decade of the 20th century, has a raw and honest poetry. My colleague reviewed “Radio Golf”, Wilson’s last play, in this week’s paper:

To describe the plays as telling the story of the American black experience is true, but it sounds too high-minded. Wilson had a golden ear for the cadence and humour of everyday speech, and the way his characters reveal themselves through language provides a pleasure unmatched on the American stage.

“Radio Golf”, which has been nominated for a Tony award for “Best Play”, may not be Wilson’s finest, but the chance to catch it on Broadway should be seized.

IN LIGHT of all our whinging about the declining space dedicated to books coverage in American newspapers, it is amusing to read this article about the publishing market. David Blum poses some interesting questions about what motivates readers to buy a book. Often (*gulp*) the whims of critics don’t factor in.

“Then We Came to the End,” first-time author Joshua Ferris’s satirical narrative of office life in a Chicago advertising agency, got the sort of universal acclaim from book critics that novelists dream of, and almost never happens….So why did “Then We Came to the End” not become a New York Times bestseller?…   

I’ll concede the point that book review sections don’t deserve to be whacked. But why doesn’t discourse result in sales? …shouldn’t smart, alert readers have been lining up to buy the Ferris novel? Something doesn’t compute.

It is odd when an expensive marketing strategy (Mr Ferris’s book even has its own website) and critical acclaim don’t generate impressive sales figures. And if a book fails to win momentum early on, things only get worse. Authors are left writing long lists of all the people they can send signed copies of remaindered books to.

It used to be that books had the shelf-life of a container of yogurt. Nowadays it seems more like hamburger meat. If a book doesn’t make it to the New York Times bestseller list within the first several days of arrival, it never will… Interestingly — and not coincidentally — much of the commercial fiction that lasts the longest on the Times’s list doesn’t get reviewed at all. Does that mean book buyers are less interested in discourse, and more interested in the latest Jodi Picoult? Apparently.

Sure, Mr Ferris’s book isn’t exactly a failure: Mr Blum reports that the book’s publisher, Little Brown, says it has shipped 50,000 copies. The hardback book is still selling well in its fourth printing. But it is a little surprising that a comely young author with a fistful of critical praise hasn’t yet climbed aboard the Franzen/Foer/Kunkel bandwagon of literary phenoms. Mr Blum suggests the problem may be the novel’s name (it’s cumbersome), or bookstores (which rely on bestseller lists themselves, so “prize positions get awarded to those who’ve already won the horse race”). His solution, in part, is for bookstores to create a special section for that week’s best-reviewed books. Perhaps, like in some wine shops, there should be strategically placed laminated cards of relevant descriptions and praise. The language (”full-bodied”, “robust”, ”strong finish”) can even stay the same.  

Having read “Then We Came to the End”–a clever and fun new novel, but hardly a work of genius–I’m not so sure that the reading public is completely bereft. But bookstores could clearly improve the reader/consumer experience by highlighting acclaimed books, in addition to their best-selling stand-bys. In the meantime, Mr Ferris can pray that his novel about office ennui is one day anointed by Oprah.  (Just check out Cormac McCarthy’s Amazon.com sales rank, and weep.)

A round-up of some of the latest news in the arts world.

John Studzinski of Blackstone LLP has donated £5 million ($9.87 million) to the Tate Modern for the museum’s expansion plans, estimated to cost £215 million ($425 million), which will include the construction of an 11-story glass building on the south side of the gallery.

Joost, a peer-to-peer online application (from the creators of Skype) that allows users to watch streaming TV on their desktops, has just signed a deal with Creative Artists Agency to increase content and distribution. As of now, Joost has 150 content channels and distribution deals with Viacom, CBS and Turner Networks.

Khaled Hosseini, author of the “The Kite Runner”, which has sold almost 5 million copies in the US alone, has released his second novel “A Thousand Splendid Sons”.  Mr Hosseini’s new book tells the story of two very different Afghan women married to the same man, who begin as rivals but soon form a bond as they struggle to live an increasingly perilous Afghanistan.

Employees at the Hilligoss Galleries in Chicago believe that a middle-aged couple is responsible for the theft on Sunday of the 370-year-old Rembrandt etching “Adam and Eve”, worth about $60,000.