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WEEKLY ARTSBEAT NEWSLETTER
December 23-29, 2002





IDEAS
http://www.artsjournal.com/ideas
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Swarming Onto What's Happening Used to be you went someplace where people were to find out what was going on. Now "swarming" makes it more efficient. People broadcast text or cell phone messages to get people to a location where something is happening. "Swarming reverses the idea that geography, in an Internet age, has become irrelevant. The whole point is to bring people together in one location for face-to-face contact. Swarming also is leading to such social developments as 'time-softening,' 'cell dancing' and 'smart mobs'."
The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)
12/29/02

The Ideas (Best & Worst) Of 2002 What were the most underrated ideas of the year? The most overrated? From baseball stadiums to spas to war and propaganda, leading adademics and scholars made their nominations to the New York Times. The New York Times 12/28/02

The Accidents Waiting To Happen Are we more prone to accidents than in the past? A French philosopher believes so. "Technology and communications have made accidents more global in their impact. In his view, if an accident was long defined as chance, today only its timing and consequences are hard to predict; the accident itself is already bound to occur. To underline the importance of this unwelcome variable to modern society, Paul Virilio is promoting the creation of a Museum of Accidents. 'The museum's purpose would not be to 'spread fear' but to confront what is no longer a chance event'."
The New York Times
12/26/02

Hip Hop Nations... "Hip hop has become one of the most influential U.S. cultural exports. In virtually every city on the planet, there are hip hop communities that not only have adopted the percussion-heavy music and spoken-word vocals, but have appropriated the sartorial and attitudinal style of the black and Latino youth who created the genre. Some 25 years after its birth, the genre has become a $5 billion industry but remains troubled at home." In These Times 12/20/02

Why Philosophy Has Lost Its Grip On The World There was a time philosophy was thought a lofty pursuit - a calling that tried to explain the world. But "despite important developments in recent decades in philosophical accounts of thought and meaning, law and ethics, and knowledge and consciousness, the enterprise of philosophy is no longer taken very seriously nor accorded any special status in the broader culture." Why? "Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of the democratic res publica. Boston Review 12/02


ARTS ISSUES
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Lumped Together - How Do You Reduce A Culture to "Latino"? "Latino" art and artists are hot right now in the US. But what is "Latino" art? "The gross American simplification of grouping into one ethnic and cultural qualifier the nearly 30 New World nationalities and two European ones that currently make up the uniquely American term 'Latin' or 'Latino' is beyond me." Cultureflux 12/02

Thwarting The Artistic Inmate The Australia Arts Council awarded $26,000 to inmates of a regional prison to perform an opera and cabaret. But the state's justice minister, who found out about the grant after it was made, says he'll have the money returned, saying "the money would be better spent on victim support services, or programmes aimed at reducing re-offending." ABCNews 12/28/02

Why The Performing Arts Are In Danger Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser warns that the performing arts are in danger, and issues a five-point call to action. "We have been scared into thinking small. And small thinking begets smaller revenue that begets even smaller institutions and reduced public excitement and involvement. No wonder so many arts organizations are announcing record deficits." Washington Post 12/28/02

The Year In Arts The top arts stories of 2002? ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan writes in the London Evening Standard that money seemed to be the theme flowing through more than its share of arts stories this year. London Evening Standard 12/27/02

Take The Arts Quiz Time for the Guardian's annual arts quiz. How closely were you paying attention to what was going on in the arts this year? We thought we were pretty on top of things, but ArtsJournal's editor only scored 18 of 25... The Guardian (UK) 12/26/02

WTC - Think Art & Culture, Not Offices While most of the architects imagining new structures for the World Trade Center site focused on office space, one suggests culture as the driving idea. "The mission of reconstructing the skyline is one that is proposed at a cultural level. Should we reconstruct it with the offices of Merrill Lynch? We don't think so. The need is a cultural need. Almost in the same way, the Eiffel Tower became the symbol of Paris, and it is an empty building. This is an empty building." Village Voice 12/24/02

Education For All! (Is It Really Such A Good Idea?) "In the past 20 years, Britain has stumbled into a system of mass higher education. It is enrolling larger percentages of young people than most other comparable countries." But is mass education compatible with quality education? And how do you possibly pay for it? Is elite education desirable in a mass system? Prospect 01/03

America's Major Culture Groups To Meet For First Time For the first time, America's major arts service organizations will gather together. The American Symphony Orchestra League, Opera America, Dance USA, Theatre Communications Group, Chamber Music America, Chorus America, Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Meet the Composer, American Music Center, American Composers Forum and Music Critics Association of North America will hold conferences in June 2004 in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 12/20/02


DANCE
http://www.artsjournal.com/dance
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Where Are The New Stars? Where are dance's new stars? "A new century has come, but where are the new voices? Where is a Nijinsky, with his blocky new look, echoing the fresh perspectives that were also energizing Picasso, Braque and Stravinsky? Where are the new pairs of eyes, the new synergies, the new conversations? Granted, it is more difficult - and costly - to break through the static nowadays than when Duncan and Graham and the like were embarking on their exploratory ventures. Yet surely artists of 100 years ago were as bound by their constraints as we are by ours. It is up to the artists of today to overcome the constraints, to claim their place in the pantheon of the greats." Washington Post 12/29/02


MEDIA
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Spanish-Language TV Up In US Growth in the American TV audience is being driven by Hispanic Americans. "Hispanics, it turns out, are driving the overall growth of the country's television audience, and according to the latest Nielsen research, account for 18 percent of viewers who are 18 to 34, and 15 percent of those 18 to 49, the most desirable groups for advertisers." The New York Times 12/30/02

Can LA Live Without TV Car Chases? Since OJ's low-speed freeway chase, the car chase has been a staple of LA's TV news shows. Local stations often devote large chunks of their shows to police car pursuits. But the LA Police Department is "considering asking television stations to eliminate or significantly reduce their coverage of live police chases. The broadcast of police pursuits is more entertainment than informative, [police chief William] Bratton has said publicly and in informal discussions with local news executives, and could be interpreted as encouraging criminal activity. Such a change would mark a distinct shift for local TV stations." Los Angeles Times 12/28/02

New York Kills Film Studio Plan A proposed movie studio complex, to be built in New York's Staten Island, has been been killed. "A year after then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave Aiello's firm, Stapleton Studios, a permit to build on the old Staten Island Homeport, the deal has collapsed amid charges of incompetence and fraud. The city evicted the studio owners; the group refused to go and is suing." Toronto Star (AP) 12/27/02

Movieplexes Bulged With People In 2002 More people went to the movies this year in the US than any year since 1959. "By some estimates, admissions could climb more than 10% over last year's record levels, with folks flocking to theaters more than 1.5 billion times." Why? Paricularly with all the competition for the entertainment dollar from DVD's TV etc....? "The real world is probably more terrifying than Americans have ever known. It's the same kind of desire for escape we also saw during the Depression in the '30s." Los Angeles Times 12/26/02

French Movies Making Comeback French movies are enjoying a record year, and look likely to eclipse the record 37.4 million admissions set last year. "The past two years 'have been the best that French films have had for at least 10 years' in foreign theatres." Toronto Star 12/24/02

The Global Localization of TV (What The World's Poor Watch) There are about 2 billion people who have access to a television set. What are they watching? Not the global fare produced by Western networks. "The trend in many television markets is to localise the global, to take a western format, juggle with it, and produce a Hindi or a Mandarin version. There is, for instance, a Saudi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire called Who Will Win the Million? which is one of Saudi Arabia's most popular programmes." Prospect 01/03

Where Rudeness Is A Status Symbol? Bad behavior among Hollywood execs who have any power, is rarely punished. "This is Hollywood, the only business in the world where people seem to confuse rudeness with power. People think that being rude and demeaning is somehow a show of importance when, to me, it just suggests that you're dealing with a lot of spoiled brats whose mommies didn't give them enough time-outs." Los Angeles Times 12/23/02


MUSIC
http://www.artsjournal.com/music
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Dumbing Down Music On TV Make classical music "relevant"? "Hip"? "Glamorous"? The new Classic FM TV packages classical music into three-minute MTV-style videos, but far from making it attractive, it succeeds in "creating bland 'easy listening' versions that are impossible for any serious musician to listen to." London Evening Standard 12/27/02

Anyone Can Conduct, Right? Punk Rocker Leads Royal Philharmonic A British TV show called "Faking It" picked a punk rocker out of a pub and spent four weeks teaching him how to conduct a symphony orchestra - the Royal Philharmonic. "His first hurdle was learning to read music: 'I didn't do that well at school. So at first I just saw little black dots. The experts said, 'There's no right way to conduct but there's a wrong way.' I found it incredibly confusing." London Evening Standard 12/23/02

When Violins Are Played Only As "Investment Opportunities" Owners of a 1718 Stradivarius violin have loaned it to the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But only for two-and-a-half weeks. Then it's back to the vault in which it lives. Why? The instrument is for sale, and it's good publicity to get it played. But the instruments are so expensive - this one valued at about $3 million - that very few musicians could ever afford to play, let alone own one. Detroit Free Press 12/29/02

Langston Hughes Opera Recovered A long lost blues opera by Lanston Hughes and James P. Johnson performed only three times in 1940 has been reconstructed and performed. "The music is a combination of jazz, swing, blues and ragtime, all set within a classical structure. At various points it recalls the work of Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin and Dvorak. Some of the numbers set spectators to tapping their fingers and toes in rhythm." The New York Times 12/28/02

Year Of The Blues The US Congress has declared 2003 the "Year of the Blues." "If hip-hop is 'the black CNN,' as Chuck D. famously suggested, blues music was a running news bulletin from the earliest days of radio. The blues, as the Congress noted, have documented the Great Depression, 'race relations, pop culture and the migration of the United States from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrialized nation'." San Francisco Chronicle 12/27/02

Vintage Sound On Vintage Machines Melbourne's Vintage Sound Association is into old recordings. Not CD's. Nopt even LP's. "The club, which has 20 members, meets once a month at the South Camberwell Tennis Club to play their old music on their old machines. Some use cylinders, which, before records, were the original sound source. Later examples, the gramophones, often feature the big conical horns, which in the vintage era acted as speakers. Some units have two horns as an early example of 'stereo'." The Age (Melbourne) 12/27/02

Classical Gas - Stuck In The Past? Why do people constantly dump on classical music? Justin Davidson writes that "those who are most passionate about the art are also people with a strong allegiance to the past - often stronger, in fact, than their affection for the present. Connoisseurs believe in a golden age, when composers really knew how to write, performers knew how to play and music lovers knew how to listen. To members of this cult of bygones, John Adams is a puny figure hopping alongside the colossus of Beethoven, and the violinist Maxim Vengerov a flickering shade in the brilliance of Nathan Milstein. The present is degraded precisely because it can never be the past." Chicago Tribune (Newsday) 12/24/02

"Silent Night" Restored to Original Version Think you know "Silent Night? You don't know the "real" "Silent Night." "The modern version comprises only the first two and the last of six original verses." And there has been a minor musical revision. Now "the Silent Night Association, an Austrian-based appreciation society, has now released a CD containing all the words, sung in 15 languages, in time for Christmas. The music differs subtly in two bars but the change is barely noticeable." The Telegraph (UK) 12/22/02

Explaining The Glenn Gould Phenomenon Glenn Gould was (and remains) a phenomenon of the music world - a figure taken up in the broader culture to a remarkable degree. Why?"What made Gould’s Goldbergs so popular that they could be plausibly incorporated into the cultural décor of The Silence of the Lambs? Why are they still so popular today? The answers, not surprisingly, have almost as much to do with extra-musical factors as with purely musical ones." Commentary 12/02

Rome's New Center For Music Rome's first new concert hall in 70 years opens. "Designed by Genoese architect Renzo Piano, who also worked on the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the three concert halls, open-air arena and recording studios in 20 acres of parkland replace the city's previous auditorium, the Augusteo, destroyed by dictator Benito Mussolini in 1934." Gramophone 12/23/02

We Dig World Music - Just One Question...What Is It? World Music is hot. Yet the genre is so broad, defining it leads to all sorts of disagreements. "Such acute diversity can be bewildering. If you’ve ever thought that the term 'world music' is one of convenience, you are right. It was, according to Radio 3’s most sturdily-accented presenter, Andy Kershaw, coined by 'six independent record companies in a room above a pub in Islington in 1986'." The Scotsman 12/24/02


PEOPLE
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Rowling Tops Income List JK Rowling was the UK's highest-earning woman in 2002, earning £48 million "through the phenomenal success of her creation in book sales and the subsequent cinema box office hits." That's about six times more than Queen Elizabeth. Sydney Morning Herald 12/30/02

Business Titan Quits Museum George David has quit as president of the board of Connecticut's Wadsworth Atheneum. "He is one of the corporate world's top executives [CEO of United Technologies], running a business that has thousands of employees, tens of billions of dollars in assets and a global reach of staggering proportions. In short, David is a master of his universe who took a personal interest in a state arts treasure, wanting it to grow in profound ways, to be a major player in the world art arena. He put his money - and his company's money - behind that vision. But David didn't feel he had the unanimous support of the Atheneum board he led for the last four years, a leadership position that was seemingly his for as long as he wanted it..." Hartford Courant 12/29/02

JK Rowling's Kindness To A Dying Girl JK Rowling is famously protective of her privacy. But when the mother of a little girl dying of cancer wrote to the author telling Rowling of her daughter's love of Harry Potter, Rowling contected the girl and struck up a friendship, even revealing details of her next book to the girl before she died. The Observer (UK) 12/29/02

Produce This! Famously Fired Actor Returns To Broadway It's been eight months since actor Henry Goodman wqas fired after taking over Nathan Lane's role in "The Producers." "One minute, I was in the shower singing, thinking, `I just played to 60,000 people in a month, nobody's asked for their money back, this thing is cooking. I knew I was different from Nathan, but I didn't know difference was a sackable offense." Now, after months of soul-searching, he's back on Broadway in a big way... The New York Times 12/22/02

Remembering a Visionary Of American Opera "John Crosby, who died Dec. 15 at age 76, after a brief illness, was one of the great visionaries of American opera. Back in the 1950s he imagined a summer opera festival in what struck plenty of people as the very last place on Earth. He borrowed money from his father, a New York lawyer, to buy a 76-acre ranch on a hilltop just north of Santa Fe, N.M. And in July 1957, in a primitive hillside amphitheater, he inaugurated Santa Fe Opera by conducting 'Madama Butterfly'." Dallas Morning News 12/22/02

PUBLISHING
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Fighting Saddam, Reading Shakespeare "According to the Pentagon, war — at least the impending war in Iraq — is Shakespeare, the 5th-century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and two modern bestsellers about heroism and wartime correspondence. Before Christmas the US Defence Department began distributing free, pocket-sized copies of these books to its troops, to ensure that soldiers are improving their minds while removing Saddam. More than 100,000 copies have been given away so far." The Times (UK) 12/28/02

The Poet As Suicide Bomber? Was 17th Century poet John Milton a terrorist? Since September, the pages of a venerable British Times Literary Supplement have rung with the charge: "that Milton's verse play 'Samson Agonistes' is 'an incitement to terrorism' and that its hero, the blind Israelite champion, who pulled down the pillars of the Philistines' temple, killing himself along with thousands of citizens, 'is, in effect, a suicide bomber'." The New York Times 12/28/02

What Ever Possessed Them - Tales Of Bad Publishing Choices The way it works is this - people get paid by publishing houses to sort through the crap and figure out which book ideas are good and which aren't. Paid real money. To have judgment. Make informed choices. And then, books like these always seem to end up in print... What were they thinking? Toronto Star 12/28/02

Crusading For Classics Harold Bloom has written another book crusading for literature's days of yore. "The reason he sells books in their tens of thousands is that he has set himself against the tendency of universities to talk in relativist terms about literature, to promote cultural studies and to analyse books as part of a progressivist political project. Bloom loathes all this and in the past few years has done everything he can to reclaim the classics of literature for the general reader. This has involved a paradoxical restatement of the need for tradition and literary evaluation." Sydney Morning Herald 12/27/02

What Kinds of Books Were Published Last Year - A List... The book industry published almost 115,000 titles last year. Fiction was by far the biggest genre - accounting for almost 16,000 of those titles. But the next biggest category is a bit of a surprise - Sociology and Economics - accounting for almost 13,000 titles. Here's a chart that breaks down what was published... Bookwire 12/02

Frankfurt Book Fair's Big Changes The Frankfurt Book Fair is under new management. And new management has plenty of ideas about making changes. Among the biggest would be moving the fair to Munich, in part to thwart Frankfurt hotels who gouge attendees with jacked-up rates. "A move would be revolutionary—the book fair has been in Frankfurt for more than 50 years. 'It's not our goal to make that move. But if it's necessary, we would not back off from it'." Publishers Weekly 12/23/02


THEATRE
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Broadway Perks Up For much of 2002, Broadway seemed caught in a downdraft. But "for the fall and winter, Broadway ticket sales have been running 15% ahead of last year's levels, says Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theatres & Producers. Sales could even surpass 2000's record-setting figures. Thanksgiving week alone racked up $18.6 million, vs. $16 million for the same week in 2000. Now, with 33 shows on the boards, Broadway is wrapping up its holiday season, traditionally the strongest time of the year. What happened?" BusinessWeek 12/27/02

The Incredible Shrinking Play One of the phenomenons of Broadway in recent years has been that "you can now sell the public a 70- or 90-minute play on Broadway for $75 and they swallow it as readily as they do spaghetti in oil and garlic, though it may be far less nourishing or tasty. This only becomes a problem when Tony nominations loom and there aren't enough American plays to fill the Best Play category. Filling the category these days is a more important question than the quality of the work." New York Daily News 12/29/02

Gehry To Redesign Lisbon Theatre District? Is Frank Gehry going to redesign a rundown theatre district in Lisbon? "According to Associated Press, Lisbon officials want to build two modern theaters, a film complex, a museum, stores and offices. 'I'm just going to see what they're up to. If it's real, it's a wonderful project'." Los Angeles Times 12/28/02

UK Theatre - A Changing Of The Guard Many of the UK's biggest theatres are getting new leadership this year. "The appointments have been common currency for some time, but it's only now, with an unprecedented flurry of handovers just around the corner, that mouths are beginning to water at what lies ahead. The players who dominated the scene during the 1990s are making way for fresh blood." The Telegraph (UK) 12/28/02


VISUAL ARTS
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The Theme-Parking Of Our Museums "So it’s boom time for British art. As cultural projects continue to appropriate sites left derelict by the decline of hard industry, there has never been so much museum space available." Never so much pressure to mount that blockbuster show. Are our museums turning into entertainment theme parks of little substance? The Times 12/30/02

Mies - Are You Fer or Agin' Him? A new retrospective of the work of architect Mies van der Rohe asks a critic to takes sides. How odd. "You can ask whether Mies was a good architect or a bad architect, an influential architect or not. You can ask whether he has been properly understood and whether he is still relevant today. But to ask whether you are for or against him seems strangely irrelevant, a harking back to half-forgotten battles of an earlier generation." The Telegraph (UK) 12/30/02

Corporations - Collectors For Our Times Why do corporations collect art? "Apart from the profits and tax relief such sales and donations generate for companies, they also produce what social theorist Pierre Bourdieu has called "cultural capital," the prestige and importance that come with a reputation for high-mindedness and civic responsibility. Cultural capital is especially important for companies that make things that can hurt people, such as tobacco and alcohol. It's no accident Philip Morris and Seagram have two of the most respected corporate art collections." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 12/29/02

The Surrealist's Library - A Record Surrealist artist Andre Breton's collection of art - to be sold next year - provides "the most complete history of the evolution of an iconoclastic group which opposed all forms of moral and social convention and replaced them by the 'values of dreams, instinct, desire and revolt'." The 400 paintings, 1,500 photographs and 3,500 documents are an invaluable record. The Surrealists "1924 manifesto laid the ground for some of Europe's most devastating artistic quarrels, often turning on a love-hate relationship with Marxism, including Breton's falling out with the communist poet Louis Aragon." The Guardian (UK) 12/28/02

Chinese Artist Owns Rights To Mao Yes, China is still a Communist state. But the country's leadership is anxious to show the rest of the world that it respects property rights. So that might explain a ruling by the Beijing Higher People's Court, that ordered the Museum of the Chinese Revolution - a major landmark in central Beijing - to pay an artist's family the equivalent of $31,000 for selling copies of a picture of Mao Zedong without permission. The court ruled "that while the museum is allowed to display Dong's painting, reproduction rights are still held by his widow and children. The verdict would likely have horrified Mao, leader of the 1949 revolution that eliminated most private property." New Jersey Online (AP) 12/28/02

Toronto's New Star Potential Toronto is on the verge of a building boom - and billions of dollars are being spent. "After more than a decade of devastation, Toronto's cultural institutions have regrouped into a position of civic leadership. By the time the cranes are down, Toronto will have works by some of the world's leading architects, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Will Alsop among them. Already, controversy is swirling." Toronto Star 12/28/02

The Picture That Started It all The world's first photograph was taken in 1826. Is it a great picture? "It's all too easy to think that an interesting picture is a picture of an interesting thing—this is the power of photojournalism, some snapshots, certain forms of portraiture, and so on. But the truth is trickier: The quality of a photograph lies not in its subject matter but in the irreducible entanglement of photographer, apparatus, and image." Slate 12/27/02

Grandson Sues to Get Looted Picasso Back A 1922 Picasso painting valued at $10 million is under dispute in the US - the grandson of the woman who had owned the painting before the Nazis stole it in World War II is suing the Illinois woman whose family bought the painting and is now trying to sell it. San Francisco Chronicle 12/27/02

Why The LA County Museum Put On The Brakes How did the LA County Museum of Art go from huge enthusiasm for an exciting $200 million project to rebuild proposed by Rem Koolhaas, to shelving the project indefinitely? M-O-N-E-Y. Los Angeles Times 12/26/02

Australia To Investigate National Museum Is Australia's National Museum too "politically correct?" The country's government suspects so, and has appointed an academic to incerstigate and report back. "The review follows a recent decision by the board to reduce the term of museum director Dawn Casey - an Aborigine - to a one-year contract and brings to a head the conflict between the museum's council and its curatorial staff over the institution's direction." The Age (Melbourne) 12/27/02

San Francisco's Poor Record of Public Art Why is San Francisco's public art so mediocre? In an arguably arts-oriented town, the level of public art that gets up is timid, cautious, or just plain mediocre. San Francisco Chronicle 12/23/02

Another Chance To Get It Right But maybe the 60-foot-high monumental new outdoor sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen can reverse the city's "embarrassing record" on choices of art in public places... San Francisco Chronicle 12/23/02

The Outsider Who Came In (And Wants To Get Out Again) What is outsider art? "It is eccentric, engaging, and often apocalyptic. It stands outside the standard schools and movements, and is produced by artists who are usually self-taught and often judged insane. It includes some of the most compelling, disturbing, and/or simply strange painting, sculpture, and even literature and music being produced today. Whatever outsider art might be, Joe Coleman is one of its biggest stars, with vivid paintings of riots, demons, serial killers, and sideshow geeks, all rendered in an instantly recognizable style. Yet New York's annual Outsider Art Fair, has decided not to include him when it reopens its doors next month." The problem? Coleman has been to art school, "thus removing him from the ranks of the self-taught." Reason 12/19/02

Guggenheim To Close In Las Vegas The Guggenheim budget is roughly half what it was at the end of the 1990s. So the museum has been cutting back programs and staff. And, as long rumored, the Goog is closing its Rem Koolhaas-designed Las Vegas branch while it looks for more money... The New York Times 12/24/02

Christo In New York Close to Approval It looks like the Christo and Jeanne Claude project to cover New York's Central Parki with banners might go ahead, after years of trying. "Charlatans? Shamans? With their hard-sell tactics, their followers trailing them like Deadheads from one gig to the next, their feel-good populism and phenomenally expensive, grandiose ambitions, it's no wonder Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made skeptics of people who haven't seen their work, don't understand it or don't want to, and who won't take them seriously." And yet... The New York Times 12 24/02

Will Tate Use Profit to Save Painting? Last week the Tate was mounting a campaign to raise money to prevent the sale and eexport of Joshua Reynolds' "Portrait of Omai". Then the museum came into a £14.6 million profit in a deal that recovered two Turners stolen from the museum in 1994. So will Tate use the money to rescue the Reynolds? Er... The Guardian (UK) 12/23/02

Access To Art - Requiring A Commitment To Buy... The artist you like doesn't produce much work. And people are clamoring for it. So how do you get a piece of the action? "A gallery's waiting list is no first-come, first-served, restaurant-type arrangement. Getting on the list requires collectors to demonstrate a 'commitment' to the dealer's gallery in the form of consistent, long-term buying." That takes a certain amount of work... Christian Science Monitor 12/23/02


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