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Your support makes all the difference.Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, has prepared a time-capsule to bury in the foundations of the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art at Bankside. The ceremony will be attended by Chris Smith, Secretary of State for Culture, next Tuesday.
Maggi Hambling has designed a brooch for the capsule, which will also contain Paula Rego tiles and a David Hockney poster. It will even have a piece of Swiss mountain crystal chosen by the architects to bring "good karma" to the building.
Even more mystifying to future generations (and visiting Martians) will be Mr Serota's fountain pen. But perhaps they will see what we may not: that this is the pen that signed the sponsorship deal for the Turner Prize and signalled the rise of installation art over painting. It is a piece of conceptualism all by itself.
The autobiography of the late Sir Georg Solti has been rushed out following the conductor's death last month. It is described as "candid". But, for the most candid revelations, we may have to wait for the out-takes. As publishers Chatto admit: "He was much more candid about his love life originally. But he, his wife Valerie and the editor read the proofs and took some pieces out."
The musical vignettes, however, remain intact. Solti recalls how he once asked Stravinsky why he had changed the orchestration and simplified the score of The Rite of Spring 30 years after it was first published. Igor candidly replied: "Because I couldn't conduct the original - it was too difficult for me."
Solti also met Sybil, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, who'd been at the 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite - a real riot, by her account: "Such fun! We jumped on stage and attacked the dancers with our umbrellas." An excellent means of heckling - demonstrative and painful, yet refined in the classical manner.
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