One of the distinctive things about CBS’ 60 Minutes, after its hard-hitting investigative journalism, is its arts reporting. Over the years, the network news magazine — yes, network news magazine — has racked up an impressive line of profiles of artists and stories about the arts, sometimes mixing in the investigative journalism (mention Morley Safer’s 1993 modern art piece to the wrong person, and you will see blood boil).
The clock gets back into the arts this Sunday with a piece on the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager Peter Gelb, and according to a CBS press release, the piece will have a tinge of seriousness as it looks at efforts to keep opera relevant in the 21st century.
“I go in every day to the Met knowing that…there is a battle to be…fought for the survival of this art form,” Gelb says to reporter Bob Simon, according to the release. Gelb, who has been at the Met since 2006 says the Met, “was way behind the times … mired in images of elitism … unless that changed, unless it was prepared to become accessible, as opera had once been, it was going to be very difficult for the Met to survive.”
CBS does have a late football game Sunday — the New York Jets at the Cincinnati Bengals, kicking off at 4 p.m. — so the show probably won’t start right at 7, but it should be close, and a lot of your artsy, operatic friends will probably be talking about it on Monday.
