Arts Rhode Island

It is a private, nonprofit corporation that gets no government funds. It seats about 3,000 people and is the premiere concert hall in its community, offering regional and touring classical music and dance ensembles along with touring Broadway musicals. Built through efforts led by some of the area's oldest and richest property owners, it is in a market where the dominant city is an hour away. And it allowed neither contemporary pop nor rock music.

It is a private, nonprofit corporation that gets no government funds. It seats about 3,000 people and is the premiere concert hall in its community, offering regional and touring classical music and dance ensembles along with touring Broadway musicals. Built through efforts led by some of the area's oldest and richest property owners, it is in a market where the dominant city is an hour away. And it allowed neither contemporary pop nor rock music.

Josh Brow, a senior at Granada Hills High School, has an uncanny knack for whipping up tasty meals. The 18-year-old won a $40,000 cooking scholarship recently and in the fall he plans to attend the Johnson and Wales College of Culinary Arts in Rhode Island. "I play all the sports, but the thing I love most is cooking," said Brow, who hopes to become a master chef. "It's the most imaginative of art forms and I think of myself as a culinary artist."

Sometimes it seemed as if three out of four art-world conversations in 2007 were about the booming market. How high will it go, is it a bubble, will it burst, is money debasing art? The subject is like real estate chatter for the pretentious -- which is not to say insignificant, only that it's almost never interesting or insightful.

Cartoons have been around so long that there's no reason not to call some classics -- genre-defining high points whose beauty hasn't been surpassed by the new-and-improved versions they've inspired. But few contemporary artists who are interested in cartoons are also interested in classicism -- in the balance, restraint and simplicity that once governed art but have long been replaced by anxiety, excess and complexity.

When booking officials at the most prestigious arts center in the country--Lincoln Center in New York City--had an open date recently on the schedule for Avery Fisher Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic, in came a pop vocal duo from 3,000 miles away: Orange County's Righteous Brothers. The Righteous Brothers have never performed at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, though.