The Major Cultural Centres in America (1890)

New York is widely known as the financial, business, as news and communication centre of the world. New York, however, is also "the art capital of the world" and the "foremost modern dance and ballet metropolis". It is the "leading book and publishing centre", the "earth's entertainer", and "the home of the world's most famous opera", the Met – the Metropolitan Opera.

In New York there are some 12,000 artists and sculptors, some 400 art galleries and hundreds of exhibitions and shows each season. Then there are the great museums. Among them is the Museum of Modern Art which houses the most complete collection of modern art in the world. There is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in its range comparable only with the British Museum and the Louvre. There is the Guggenheim, the Cloisters with its fine medieval collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of Design, the Museum of the American Indians, the American Craft Museum, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History, etc.

New York's status as the leading art centre is not only based on the number of artists working there, its many galleries and exhibitions, or the museums. Several important trends in modern art have their roots in this city. Among the best known are Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting, Pop-art, Minimal art and Photorealism.

Similarly, Chicago is often associated with modem architecture as the home of Louis Sullivan, sometimes called "the father of the skyscraper" and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Finally, so-called "street art", high-priced subway graffiti and paintings or the wall-and-buildings paintings with their strong ties to Hispanic-American and southern California art, still are most often associated with New York.

Theatre is loved in the hundreds of regional and university groups around the country. But it is Broadway with its some 400 major professional and experimental stages that bring to mind American playwrights such as O'Neill, Miller, Saroyan and others. There are over 15,000 professional actors in New York alone, and another 20,000 or so in the state of California. Over 16,000 professional musicians and composers live in New York, and almost 23,000 more in California. The competition is intense.

Check your comprehension.

1. What kind of city is New York? 2. What is the Met and what is it famous for? 3. Why do the Americans consider New York an "art capital of the world"? 4. What is MOMA and what is housed in it? 5. What can the Metropolitan Museum be comparable with? 6. Who designed the famous Guggenheim? 7. Enumerate some other museums in New York? 8. What modern art trends are represented in New York's Museums and Galleries? 9. What is graffiti? 10. What can New York and California compete in?

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Historical Review (1704)	\|	American Theatre (1997)

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