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> Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Becoming Human
By DAVID LITTLEJOHN
Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350
The Getty CenterThrough Feb. 10
Los Angeles
Two of the most important art-historical exhibitions in the U.S. this year opened in Los Angeles during the same week last month and will close on the same day next February—I'll describe the second, on Caravaggio & Co., in my next review.
"Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350," at the Getty Museum, displays the brilliant beginnings of the Italian Renaissance, mainly in Christian devotional paintings on wood and in manuscript illuminations on vellum by Giotto, Pacino di Bonaguida and 10 of their contemporaries (seven of whose names we don't know). They were the first artists in centuries who knew how to make paintings of people that looked like real people—if simplified and idealized, and sometimes anatomically incorrect. This exhibition—a six-year labor of love by curator Christine Sciacca of the Getty, who thanks 283 fellow laborers at 76 other institutions in her bounteous catalog and cites 843 published references—will go on to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto after it closes here.
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
'The Peruzzi Altarpiece' (c. 1310-15) by Giotto.
About 100 of them are by Pacino, whom the Getty people would like art lovers to regard as on nearly the same level as Giotto, the only universally known artist of the time and place. Yet they boast that the exhibition gathers together "more works by Giotto" (I counted 11 individual works) than any previous show in the U.S. The best of these are so much better than anyone else's—so much more human and moving in expression, so much more carefully shaded and draped, so much more solid of body, delicately colored and wisely positioned in space—that they're reason enough to make the trip to Bel Air. Giotto's reassembled five-panel Peruzzi Altarpiece is the single best thing here.
It is presumed, says Ms. Sciacca, that most successful early trecento (Italian for "14th century") artists in Florence worked with a studio of assistants. Art historians have just about given up trying to determine how much of a painting was done by the master and how much by his juniors. Concentrating on church frescoes and multipanel altarpieces, Giotto & Co. never painted manuscript illuminations. Pacino & Co., coming on the scene a few years later, painted hundreds. At the Getty are nine bound manuscript volumes Pacino and his team illustrated, including two of their 27 copies of Dante's "Divine Comedy," a best-seller of the day. (Giotto actually painted Dante, a contemporary.)
Other masters here include Bernardo Daddi (a pupil of Giotto's), Taddeo Gaddi (whose great 6-by-8-foot "St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata" is a direct steal from Giotto), and painters known only as "The Master of the Dominican Effigies" and "The Master of the Codex of St. George." Both the Dominican effigies and the St. George codex are in the show.
I'm not sure how best to prepare others for what was to me a sublime, otherworldly experience. (A Catholic upbringing probably helps; I recognized most of the characters and scenes.) Let these sweet, almost recognizable creatures look directly at you, whether hanging on a cross or enthroned in gilded chapels. Admire the gold patterns or natural folds of their robes, the fresh-as-spring colors, the changing expressions, emotions and turns of head between one apostle and another. All the Nativities, Virgins with Christs in their laps (it's not easy to make a naked baby look like God) and Crucifixions do get a bit repetitive in their personnel and staging. But then any artist who breaks the pattern becomes all the more exciting. Wonder at the brilliantly colored tiny portraits and dramatic scenes a manuscript illuminator can fit between (and sometimes outside) the confines of an initial letter, and the extravagant borders he will draw out from it around a page.
My personal favorite in the show is the Master of the Dominican Effigies' "Garden of Virtues," a full-page painting on vellum from an opened manuscript volume. Seven sinuous, gorgeously dressed women (representing the seven virtues) pose languidly atop a millefiori river bank, each bearing a golden water pitcher. Fish swim in, water flows from the river. Over each woman rises a slender tree (which is what they are watering) that bursts into more flowers, at the top of which sit colorful birds. Out of the central pink tree emerges an image of the Trinity, to remind us this isn't all sensuous play.
The final gallery is devoted to what Ms. Sciacca calls "the most beautifully executed and ambitiously designed illuminated manuscript produced at this crucial moment in the history of Florence." "The Laudario of Sant'Agnese" (c. 1324) was originally a collection about 100 hymns of praise, or laude, probably accompanied by as many paintings depicting scenes from the life and death of Christ and the saints through the liturgical year, as well as elegant, populated borders and initial letters.
Of these illuminations, 28 survive, and the Getty, which owns three, was able to track down, borrow and arrange in order 21 more—a total of 20 by Pacino and four by the Master of the Dominican Effigies. They range in size from a 4-by-4-inch miniature of St. John on Patmos inside a capital letter "G" to full-page 18-by-14-inch paintings with elaborate, gilded borders. All are mounted on separate gray backboards arranged in a semicircle. The recording of a calming choir of six male voices (Lionheart, from New York) emerges from behind the wall, intoning a series of laude like those in the original book. All I might have asked for was a more splendid setting for this historic display—perhaps a domed cylindrical chamber, gilded or painted like a trecento Florentine chapel.
Mr. Littlejohn writes about West Coast cultural events for the Journal.
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