Art dreams for a happy new year
Art festivals are exciting: International art festivals are glorious.
The Spoleto Festi-val in Charleston, S.C., may be the most popular art gathering in this country. Its original intent was transparently honorable – to draw appreciative masses of interested citizens from America’s eastern seaboard states to Charleston and showcase the city’s historic elegance, the ease of Southern panache, the very jazzy cuisine and dazzling music.
Its success was brilliantly secured by "starting at the top," not with Charleston’s own artists, painters, playwrights and musicians (who are mostly excellent) but with Gian Carlo Menotti the prominent Italian-born American composer from Spoleto, Italy, and some international stars of music and theatre. Don’t think for one unsound moment those thousands of recurring visitors to Spoleto Charleston – the art-interested public – come to see and hear the local artists whom they know they can enjoy all year long. They come to a big arts festival for the stars – for the new, the as yet unseen and unheard, the provocative and unforgettable.
An arts festival of star talent and material is one of the ways we can recharge our engines, tap into untapped reactions, re-meet ideas. Revving-up is tantalizing reinvolvement of the intellect and often the heart.
Sarasosta’s recent international arts festival this past October, a collaboration between the Ringling Museum and the Baryshnikov Center in N.Y., enthralled all of its viewers to the point where all music, dance, cabaret and theatre pieces were sold out 95 percent for all day and night performances as full-houses repeatedly rose to their feet roaring "Bravo!" for the presentations that were so much of the moment.
That uncanny cadence of the American present was possibly the greatest gift, catching the heartbeat of the times. Stars in the arts can do that; city and county commissioners rarely can, although Commissioner Joe Barbetta acknowledged that, saying the festival was a success and "Baryshnikov was key..."
Now that funds are secured, Sarasota’s new arts festival wants to continue its immense success, but to do that a knowledgeable board of directors is required – artists connected to the wider contemporary art world.
A suggested starting line-up might be; Mark Ormond (Ringling College of Art); Joe Locasanno (State College of Florida, formerly MCC); Maestro Leif Bjaland; Pamela Sumner (art designer of Whole Foods interiors); Toby Albright (artist, gallery owner), the Ringling Museum, the Asolo theatres, and the Baryshnikov Center.
Wishing you a happy, peaceful and fullfilling new year.