TOP ARTS NEWS

• MP3.COM GUILTY: Saying it was necessary to send a strong deterrent to the Internet community, a federal judge found MP3.com guilty Wednesday of “willfully violating” the copyrights of Universal Music Group, whose CDs it offered in its online catalog. The court ordered MP3.com to pay Universal $25,000 in damages per CD (which could amount to between $118 and $250 million). ABC News 09/06/00

  • ABOUT WHO'S GOT THE MONEY: $118 million for Universal but nothing for the artists. Wired 09/07/00

  • AND READY TO APPEAL: “MP3.com plans to challenge the copyright validity of every single Universal CD with a variety of legal gambits. But it's not only Universal's forthcoming jackpot that concerns the digital music company: Rakoff's verdict opens the floodgates for smaller music labels and publishers to file their own suits.” Inside.com 09/06/00

• THE POLITICS OF RETURNING STOLEN ARTWORK: Earlier this year the Seattle Art Museum returned a Matisse painting that had been stolen by the Nazis. Then the museum sued New York's Knoedler Gallery, which had originally sold the painting to some Seattle collectors back in 1954. SAM is trying to reclaim the painting's market value, now estimated at $11 million, from the gallery. "But some legal complications recently led to a court order for the museum to pay $143,000 for part of the gallery's legal fees." Seattle Times 09/04/00

  • COSTLY LITIGATION: The Seattle Art Museum is fined by the court for causing unnecessary litigation expenses for  New York's Knoedler Gallery, whom the museum is suing over a Matisse that the gallery sold to a SAM donor. The painting later turned out to have been stolen by the Nazis, and after deliberation, the Seattle museum returned the painting to the original owners' heirs. The Art Newspaper 09/05/00 

• MOMA STRIKE SETTLED: The Museum of Modern Art and its union of about 250 workers have settled a four-month strike.  The agreement "awards an 18 percent wage increase over five years and promises to give jobs back to any union members furloughed when much of the museum is closed during a five-year, $650 million expansion and renovation. Some employees will be assigned to a temporary museum to be set up in Long Island City, Queens." New York Times 09/10/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

• MORALITY R US: The US Senate is holding hearings next week on violence in the entertainment industry. The buzz is about what Hollywood film executives might be hauled in to testify. Inside.com 09/07/00

  • BIG RETAILERS TO POLICE ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT: This week Congress is due to release a report on violence and the entertainment industry and accompany the report's release with hearings. In advance, retailers are clamping down. "Kmart said Thursday that it will refuse sale of mature-rated games to anyone under age 17, using a bar-code scanner that will prompt cashiers to ask for identification from young people. After Kmart's news conference in Washington, Wal-Mart said it will enact the same policy, and in a letter last month, Toys R Us officials said the practice is in place at their stores." Chicago Sun-Times 09/10/00

• DANCE COMPANY CLOSES: Cleveland San Jose Ballet has canceled its season and terminated the contracts of its dancers. Two weeks ago the company missed its payroll for dancers and staff, and officials said the 2000-2001 season would be canceled unless $1 million was raised by today. Since then, only $60,000 has been raised. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 09/08/00

  • AFTERMATH OF CLEVELAND BALLET FAILURE: The collapse and disbanding of the Cleveland San Jose Ballet was a shock for dancers/staff. Meanwhile, the San Jose board will try to extend a season there. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 09/09/00

• HORTON HEARS A BOO: "Seussical," the much-anticipated musical, opened in Boston this week before its planned fall debut on Broadway. But the show got mixed to bad reviews in Boston, and may need to be reworked before going to New York. "Yesterday, theater sources said 'Seussical' would probably lose more than $1 million in Boston. Had the show opened to good reviews, the producers were prepared to add an extra week to the Boston run. That plan has now been abandoned." New York Post 09/08/00

• GLASGOW ART SUFFERING: "Few cities in the world, let alone the UK, have public displays of old masters and cutting-edge local art to rival the works that can be seen on the walls of the Kelvingrove, or the Burrell collection in Glasgow. But unless a £10 million shortfall in funding can be found, masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt, Botticelli and Turner – some worth far more than the grandiose buildings in which they are housed – will deteriorate beyond the point where they can be restored." The Scotsman 09/01/00

• DEEP DOME DOO-DOO: London's Millennium Dome managers have been covering up the scale of the facility's disaster. Managers knew only 4-5 million people would attend this year while public estimates were 12 million. Public anger over the mismanagement of the dome intensified last week when the commission said it had given £47m to the NMEC to prevent it from going bankrupt. The grant followed a £43m donation only last month after public assurances in July that it would be 'extremely difficult' to give the dome more money." The Sunday Times (London) 09/10/00

  • FULL COVERAGE OF THE DOME DEBACLE: The future of London’s troubled Millennium Dome hangs in the balance after yesterday's announcement that it needs an additional £47 million to stay open until the end of the year. The Guardian (London) 09/07/00

PLUS: Indian government removes painting of small nude figure from exhibition in Delhi; 25 artists withdraw from show in protest ~ London's Soho Theatre goes from bust to boom ~ La Scala closes famous standing-room galleries due to fire-safety regulations ~ The Toronto International Film Festival turns 25 ~ Twenty-six year-old Canadian soprano takes first place in Placido Domingo's $50,000 world opera competition in Los Angeles ~ The 52nd Frankfurt Book Fair's explores new e-alternatives  

TOP ARTS FEATURES

• IS BRITISH THEATRE RACIST? Minority theatre is vanishing in Britain. "So much so that many writers, actors, technicians and directors are driving mini cabs, or have gone into teaching or some other occupation. Some of the best have left the country. It is worth noting there is not a single non-white artistic director in any theatre in the UK. What we have is an industry that is institutionally racist to its very core, yet congratulates itself on being super-liberal." The Observer (London) 09/10/00

  • THE NEW COLOR OF ENGLAND: A new report says that in a few decades whites will be a minority in Britain. "Colonial pomposity and imperial cruelty have been severely undermined to the point of oblivion. There is no economic basis for this phenomenon. National capital has been dissolved into global capital, drawing into its wake an international population now at ease in England." The Observer (London) 09/10/00

• HAMLET THROUGH THE AGES: What is it about Hamlet that makes him the pinnacle of a male actor's career?  "Each generation and each individual actor who takes him on expresses something different. Each Hamlet is unique but of his time; he is everything and so can be anything. All the humanity, suffering, playfulness, imagination, intelligence, philosophical acceptance of mortality, love of others, self-disgust, Renaissance humanism, medieval Christianity, cruelty, wit and neurosis that a director or actor wishes to find is there, but the cocktail of his personality will be differently mixed by each interpreter." The Independent (London) 09/04/00

• IS THE REBUILT GLOBE AUTHENTIC? London's rebuilt Globe Theatre has become one of the city's leading tourist attractions. But an Elizabethan scholar contends that the building is not an authentic replica of the old Globe, as the theatre claims.  "Joy Hancox, who looks a bit like a British Angela Lansbury, has for the last several years waged a kind of crusade, contending that she holds the key to unlock a complex architectural mystery that has the Globe at its center. Indeed, she is beginning to convince others that the new theater is not the precise replica its designers have claimed, and that it is only a matter of time before it will have to be torn down and rebuilt." Architecture Magazine 09/00

• COMMON TONGUE: English is becoming the common language of education worldwide. "The development is unprecedented. Not even Latin, the European scholarly language for almost two millennia, or Greek in the ancient world before it, had the same reach. For the first time, one language, English - a bastard mixture of old French dialects and the tongues of several Germanic tribes living in what is now England - is becoming the lingua franca of business, popular culture, and higher education across the globe." Chronicle of Higher Education 09/05/00

• WINNING FRIENDS... "It's amazing to see - after more than a decade of decimation - one arts leader after another fail to grasp the fact that it's hardball, not the soft sell, that succeeds in Washington." Hartford Courant 09/10/00

• THE AGITATION OF COGITATION: Muddy, brilliantly insightful, and often wildly impenetrable, 18th century German philosopher Hegel has been called the "the hardest to understand of the great philosophers.” But after spending hundreds of hours of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Philosophy of Nature, what do you really have to show for it? A new biography examines the difficulties of reading in a Hegelian world. The New Criterion 09/00

• SO YOU WANT TO BE A SCREENWRITER... A new paper by the Australian Film Commission says that 1,200 to 1,400 feature scripts have been developed here in the past three years. And the number that reach the screen? About 25 to 30 a year." Sydney Morning Herald 09/08/00

• BOWDLERIZING BEETHOVEN: Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony begin their Beethoven-as-reconceived-by Mahler series. Some things work, some don't. "Last night's concert could not have happened at any other time in history but our own, and because of that, it's worth hearing. A century ago, critics would have to have been either fer or agin this sort of thing. Now they can hedge with that best of all hedges: Who knows if Mahler's Beethoven is good or bad, but it's certainly interesting." Washington Post 09/08/00

• MODERN WORTH: Old master paintings come to us with a history of consideration and validation. But what makes a piece of contemporary art a masterpiece? "To find out, ARTnews asked eight people, including art historians, museum directors, curators, and an artist, to discuss what they consider to be the greatest works of three pivotal artists of the last 50 years: Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Andy Warhol (1928-87), and Gerhard Richter (b. 1932). Each focused on one of the artists while sometimes commenting on the others." Artnews 09/00

• THE SEASONS BRING... "According to the literary critic Northrop Frye, each of the four seasons of the Northern Hemisphere has given rise to a correlative genre: satire belongs to winter, comedy to spring, romance to summer and tragedy to fall. Our present civilization has little appetite for tragedy, but a wispy shadow of Frye's theory persists, as the coming of autumn sends children back to school and putatively serious movies back into the multiplexes." New York Times 09/10/00 (one-time registration required for entry)

• THE BOLSHOI THEATRE’S DECLINE, culminating in the Russian president’s recent sacking of its artistic director, mirrors Russia’s countrywide troubles. “The famed opera and ballet company increasingly has become another monument to a bygone era, when the resources of an all-powerful state were poured into the arts.” CNN 09/06/00

• I SOLD IT ON EBAY: Individual artists have discovered eBay as a way to bypass the gallery system. And they're selling their work. "It appears that the practical lessons of Warhol have been absorbed: self promotion is as American as one of Jackson Pollock's apple pies. What ebay artists have learned is to be pragmatic. They can get real and promote themselves or wait forever for a dealer to do it and create a classier veneer." ARTNewsroom.com 09/08/00 

PLUS: Rooms with a view: the mad rush to fill London's skyline with tall towers ~ Modern instrumentalists and the desire to dabble with period instruments ~  47 bottles of paint on the wall: the Bay Area's burgeoning wall mural businesses 

SPECIAL INTEREST

• AWASH IN MASS CULTURE: "Faced, then, with a public that craves variety while it is governed by the familiar, the choice of what cultural products and symbols to produce and reproduce - and what cultural meanings to represent - becomes increasingly a marketing decision of how many ticket sales, book sales, symphony subscriptions, etc., will be generated. In this corporatized, profit-motivated environment, all culture is mass culture, since mass consumption of the highest levels possible is the ultimate goal. Judgments of quality and taste are replaced by a marketing distinction between mainstream and nonmainstream, based primarily on sales figures, what's hot and what's not, and who's 'into' it."  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 09/10/00
  

• DID PICASSO HAVE MIGRAINES? "A Dutch doctor will tell a world congress on headache which begins in London today that Pablo Picasso may have experienced bizarre visual migraine auras. Some people who suffer from migraine experience a disconcerting distortion of their vision. When they look at people or objects, they see them split into two parts, usually on the vertical plane. Others say they see just an illusion of a fractured face." The Guardian (London) 09/04/00

  • SO WHAT? Picasso was dismissive of critics who saw his Cubist paintings as philosophical exercises and tried to understand them through "mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis and whatnot". He was even more dismissive of the idea that he was an abstract artist. Picasso's visual distortions are always poetic. The Guardian (London) 09/04/00

• MYTHS OF THE NEW: One of the dominant myths of our time is that all art that preceded modernism's shock of the new was mediocre, overseen by a dour old-boy network, needlessly preoccupied with realistic representation, calculated to avoid inflaming barely curtailed passions, contrived to ignore simmering class hatreds, and devoutly uninterested in the sort of true truth of human experience, concealed and overt, that had been explored by Sigmund Freud. Feed 09/01/00

• COMIC OPERA: London's Royal Opera House re-opened last winter with a string of technical disasters. But the whole project was ill-fated before the ROH even closed for renovation. "Eighteen months before closure, the ROH had nowhere to go. The right decision would have been to delay closure, and therefore the redevelopment, until clear plans had been crystallised." First of a Three-Part Series The Telegraph (London) 09/09/00

• REINVENTING DANCE: South Africa's major dance companies have closed for lack of funding. A disaster? Perhaps. "The other point of view is that the departure — particularly of the ballet ensemble, the management style of which was characterised by a blatant disregard for the political and artistic realities that came into play from the middle of the 1990s — is a positive move, leaving a gap crying out to be filled by the entrepreneurially and/or artistically minded. Over the next few months that gap is to be solidly plugged by a plethora of local and visiting dance companies, varying in degrees of motivation from art to capitalism." Daily Mail and Guardian 09/08/00

JUST FOR FUN

• TRY TO REMEMBER: US Gulf Coast artist Jane Brokl will create memorial paintings for your loved ones - incorporating their ashes into the paintings. "Brokl's paintings are vivid and colorful, with small lines of the ash and bone pieces incorporated. They are designed to last, with memorial plates attached, and cost under $500." Sun-Herald.com (Mississippi) 09/04/00

• DON’T MAKE ME GO : In France to promote his latest film, director Robert Altman told the French press that he will move to France if George W. Bush is elected president in November. “It would be a catastrophe for the whole world.” Yahoo! News (Reuters) 09/06/00

• OKLAHOMO: So what is it about musicals that makes them 'gay'? After all, heterosexuals have been known to watch them. Even male heterosexuals. There simply aren't enough queens in the world to account for the viewing figures of The Sound of Music. The Independent (London) 09/10/00

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