ARTS

New World Symphony

We do, thanks be to God, have the New World Symphony, an island of sanity in a sea of aesthetic carnage.

Art Basel

A cloud was on the mind of men and wailing went the weather Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together. Science announced non-entity, and art admired decay The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.   What passes for art in what passes for our culture […]

The Florida Grand Opera

The arts struggle for funds in Miami. Good theaters have closed.  Even the superlative Miami City Ballet had to part with their beloved Villella over finances. We Miamians are notoriously cheap when not buying bottles at LIV. The Florida Grand Opera is happy, then, to enjoy support from a wealthy group of donors called the […]

Chopin Competition

Miami hosts the most important piano competition in America, and nobody even bothers to charge admission.  Nobody charges because aside from a few hundred stalwarts, nobody bothers to go. The crowds at Art Basel, a week dedicated not so much to culture as to its parody, grow like an outbreak of Ebola Zaire; the crowds at Ultra, a […]

MIAMI CITY BALLET

Not too many years ago, one of Alicia Alonso’s ballerinas ran a school in the Gables. For decades, right up to the time Martha Mahr died, young girls would swarm out of her studio every weekday afternoon on the hour, their mothers and maids and boyfriends clogging Giralda Avenue to whisk the dancers away. I […]