Tracey Emin's "Everyone I Ever Slept With" tent was one of the pieces destroyed.

Monday, May 24 brought a great catastrophe in the world of visual art, when a fire swept through an east London warehouse, destroying "a vast swath of British art spanning the past half century, including more than 50 major works by the great abstract painter Patrick Heron," according to Charlotte Higgins and Vikram Dodd, writing in the Guardian on May 27. The amount of work lost, most of which came from the collection of Charles Saatchi, was at first thought to be somewhat limited; it was in fact quite vast, reported Higgins and Dodd. : "[W]orks by Gillian Ayres, Patrick Caulfield, the Chapman brothers, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Barry Flanagan, Chris Ofili and Paula Rego are all in ashes."

If you didn't hear about this traumatic event, it may be because United States newspapers largely ignored it, probably owing to the fact that, a) it happened in another country and b) it happened to a bunch of weirdo contemporary art. One of the most famous pieces lost, for example, was one by Tracey Emin—last encountered in ArtsLine in a public spat with art critic Philip Hensher, who she called "pervy and creepy" and "from weirdoland."

Entitled "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995," Emin's conceptual art installation consisted of a tent filled with visual representations of all the people Emin had literally slept with, including "Emin's grandmother, her teddy bear, and her (later aborted) foetuses," says the BBC, which created a droll series of online "obituaries" for the lost works of art. The BBC also reported the rather cruel efforts by various newspapers to "recreate the lost masterpiece by visiting a camping supplies shop. It cost one paper £67.50; another got a bargain at £39.99...[though] Saatchi reportedly paid £40,000 for the original."

Also lost was the first work in Chris Ofili's infamous Captain Shit sequence; Ofili was undaunted by the fire, telling the media that "The super hero Captain Shit has in-built protection against the flames of Babylon. He will return...the saga continues." The Damien Hirst sculpture "Charity," originally thought lost, survived the blaze, as did Rachel Whiteread's "Ghost."

The legal repercussions of the warehouse blaze have already begun, as the Telegraph reported on the morning of May 28. A couple of collectors and the artist Gillian Ayres "have instructed a solicitor to put together a case seeking damages for negligence against Momart, the leading art storage company whose warehouse was burnt down," the paper reports, adding that "Insurance claims are expected to be in the region of £50 million."

Tracey Emin, at least, does not seem overly distraught over her lost tent and other works; she told the Independent: "I'm upset ... I'm also very upset about those people whose wedding got bombed last week [in Iraq], and people being dug out from under 400 feet of mud in the Dominican Republic."

DRAMATIC EXIT

Are The Producers begging for audiences in Toronto?

The Producers, one of Broadway's all-time superduper showstopping hits, has failed to light a fire up north. "In a surprising move," wrote Richard Ouzounian in the Toronto Star on May 27, Producers producer "David Mirvish announced yesterday that he would be closing [the] production...on Sept. 5, after only nine months and 331 performances." Part of what makes the move surprising, notes Ouzounian, is that Toronto "has gotten used to being home to long-run shows, with The Lion King closing just shy of four years, Mamma Mia! entering its fifth, and The Phantom Of The Opera lasting for 10."

Note that all those shows are more or less schlock, whereas The Producers can make some claim to real merit. Ouzounian figures that the "short run of the Mel Brooks musical raises the question of whether this city's tourism industry has fully recovered from last summer's SARS epidemic, or whether a surplus of entertainment options has glutted the market." Over at the Globe and Mail, Michael Posner calls the show "the apparent victim of sluggish tourist traffic from the U.S. and a widely noted change in how consumers spend their dollars."

But the end may not be as near as it seems. Mirvish basically admits in the papers that if demand spikes due to the closing announcement, an extension is more than likely.

SUMMERTIME STRIKE?

Folks are talking about the impact of Broadway on New York, and not just because it's Tony season. For one thing, the biannual report on "Broadway's Economic Contribution to New York City" (sponsored by the League of American Theaters and Producers and Americans for the Arts) just came out. For another, the seemingly perpetual conflict between the producers and the Actor's Equity Association has moved into high gear, as negotiators approach the deadline for a new contract.

"The contract between the union and the League...expires June 27 and the two sides have been meeting regularly since April 1 to resolve the touring matter and other issues, most notably, rising health-care costs," reports Michael Kuchwara for the Associated Press.

The negotiations are going really well or really poorly, depending on who you ask.

Ask Jesse McKinley at the New York Times, for example, and he'll tell you that "fears of a summertime strike by Broadway's actors were heightened this week" (the last week in May) "after the chief negotiator for theatre producers accused Actors' Equity, the union for theatre actors and stage managers, of hypocrisy in the contract talks." Ask Gordon Cox, the theatre guy at Newsday, and he'll say  "Contrary to some reports, negotiations between the actors' union and Broadway producers are not at an impasse."

What's funny is that McKinley and Cox were both reporting on the same letter, written by League honcho Jed Bernstein to Equity reps. "Mr. Bernstein's letter...was prompted by a recent decision by Equity to permit a nonleague company, Troika Entertainment, to pay a cheaper rate for a coming tour of the 1979 musical Evita, while offering the league no such concessions in contract talks," writes McKinley.

The problem is that the League is worried about Broadway's health, while Equity is worried about its members' health; according to Playbill, last year Equity's health care plan "ran at a $16 million deficit."

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