See Color Through Music A blind student who needed to read colored maps has developed software that helps him see the colors by translating them into musical notes. The software "assigns one of 88 piano notes to individually coloured pixels - ranging from blue at the lower end of this scale to red at the upper end." BBC 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:32 am
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Iraqi Artifacts Recovered In US Eight priceless Iraqi stone seals are recovered by the FBI in the US. An "ex-Marine bought the seals from a vendor on a U.S. military base in southern Iraq in late 2003. He returned with them to the United States in early 2004 and took them to show Zainab Bahrani, a Columbia University professor of ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology. "I think he just looked me up on the Internet. He was in New York and looking for an expert. His goal was to return them right from the start. The reason he did it was that he was trying to show how easy it is to remove cultural artifacts out of Iraq. This is not a unique example. These objects are being taken out of the country by the thousands, and we are fortunate he brought the issue to the forefront." Philadelphia Inquirer 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 8:42 am
Would Olmstead Have Liked Central Park's "Gates"? What would the architects of Central Park have thought of the Christo and Jeanne Claude Gates? Probably not much. "From the beginning, Olmsted and Vaux strenuously opposed all attempts to introduce art into the park. In their Greensward Plan of 1858—the competition entry that won them the commission—they wrote that while it would be possible to build elegant buildings in the park, "we conceive that all such architectural structures should be confessedly subservient to the main idea, and that nothing artificial should be obtruded on the view." They considered art a similar distraction from the restorative purpose of the landscape and kept statues out of the park." Slate 02/14/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:59 am
Lincoln On Historical Steroids It's three months before the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum is supposed to open in Springfield, Illinois. "Museum officials say they're blending scholarship and showmanship on a scale never attempted before, without undermining the accuracy of the history they present. If they succeed, they contend, museums all over the world will imitate them. If they fail, they know -- because it's started to happen already -- they'll be savaged for Disneyfying the past." Washington Post 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:49 am
Will New Law Chase Art Sellers Out Of UK? Next year the UK will require that artists (or their heirs) get a portion of the resale price of an art work. "Many fear the levy, which comes in on 1 January 2006, will force vendors out of the UK in favour of non-EU countries like Switzerland and the US." BBC 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:11 am
Is Palm Beach The Next Maastricht? Art Basel Miami has become an art sensation in Florida for contemporary collectors. Now Palm Beach wants to the same for Old Masters. First though, to settle on a name: The fair has "changed its name twice in the past two years, the latest version being Palm Beach! America's International Fine Art & Antique Fair. The exclamation mark caused some hilarity in the art market and there were rumours that an outside consultant had been paid $500,000 to come up with the idea. The fair's organisers deny the latter suggestion and say that it was dreamed up in-house, but there is no doubt about their strategy." The Telegraph (UK) 02/14/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 4:11 pm
Hidden City's Remains Uncovered By Tsunami Parts of a long-lost port city in India were uncovered by last year's tsunami. "Archaeologists say they have discovered some stone remains from the coast close to India's famous beachfront Mahabalipuram temple in Tamil Nadu state following the 26 December tsunami. They believe that the "structures" could be the remains of an ancient and once-flourishing port city in the area housing the famous 1200-year-old rock-hewn temple." BBC 02/13/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 4:11 pm
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Taruskin And His Thematic Music History Richard Taruskin’s new 3,800-page, 1.25-million-word history of classical music is a thematic telling of the story. "This notion – that even the most “transcendent” music is at the same time part of the complex political and social currents of its time – is Taruskin’s great theme. All that stuff we grew up with about composers being autonomous, divinely inspired geniuses is one of many shopworn intellectual heirlooms from German romanticism that Taruskin turfs out. In his book, composers take their place as “collaborative participants, along with patrons, performers, scribes, editors, publishers, critics, audiences and many others, in what the sociologist Howard Becker calls an ‘art world.’” CBC 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:16 am
What's Wrong With Orchestras What's wrong with modern-day symphony orchestras? How about "icompetence, naivety, venality, snobbishness, dishonesty and amateurishness"? (and those are just the mean things they say about themselves) The Guardian (UK) 02/14/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 4:36 pm
Grammy Ratings Dive - Have We Lost Interest? Ratings plummeted for Sunday night's Grammy show. "An estimated 18.8 million people watched Ray Charles' swan song clean up with eight awards Sunday night, a startling 28 percent drop from the 2004 Grammys. After two years on an upswing, Grammy ratings sunk to their lowest level since 1995." Yahoo! (AP) 02/14/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 4:01 pm
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Top Ten Anything (Why Do We Care?) Andrew O'Hagan wonders if competition is good for the arts. "We are addicted to the concept of winners and losers. Last week alone, I was asked to nominate the Best Top 10 British Bands, write something about the Top 100 Scottish Novels of All Time, and I attended a lavish awards ceremony, sponsored by The Daily Telegraph, to name several Great Britons. The assumption, not a bad one in itself, seems to be that life is more exciting the more rivalry it involves, as if competition was the food of endeavour. I'm not entirely sure that competition is good for art. There is the danger that it can create a uniformity of thought and aim." The Telegraph (UK) 02/14/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 4:51 pm
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Conductor Sixten Ehrling, 86 Sixten Ehrling, Sweden's most prominent conductor who ran the Stockholm Royal Opera and Detroit Symphony Orchestra and conducted the "Ring" at the New York Metropolitan, has died aged 86 Yahoo! (Reuters) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:25 am
Teachout: Not Liking Arthur Miller Terry Teachout was not an Arthur Miller fan. "He was, literally, pretentious: He pretended to have big ideas and the ability to express them with a touch of poetry, when in fact he had neither. His final play, "Finishing the Picture," was yet another rehash of the Monroe-Miller ménage in which he resorted one last time to what I referred to in this space last fall as "pseudo-poetic burble" ("What we had that was alive and crazy has been pounded into some hateful, ordinary dust")." OpinionJournal.com 02/15/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 3:53 pm
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Tracing A Play's Tangled Ancestry (Is It A Movie? A Play?) Movie adaptations are everywhere in London's West End. So a new "Days of Wine and Roses" seems straightforward - a new version of the 1962 Blake Edwards movie. And yet - this "world première" is a riff off the 1973 stage version. That in turn was based on the first Days of Wine and Roses, a play for television, broadcast live in 1958. The Telegraph (UK) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 8:08 am
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The Book Club Phenomenon There may be as many as 50,000 book clubs in the UK. "What is clear is that the book club is now a near-ubiquitous feature of bourgeois life. If you are not in one, you will know someone who is. There are reading groups devoted to football, horror, and crime books. There groups in prisons, groups for men, groups who dress up in clothing appropriate to the book, groups who cook for each other, lesbian groups and radical groups." The Guardian (UK) 02/12/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 4:32 pm
Where Is The Canadian Literary Sex? Where is the sex in Canadian literature? Even when there is sex, it "is rarely a pleasurable event. Instead, it is often used as a metaphor for politics, identity, globalization, consumerism – almost everything but sex itself." CBC 02/14/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 6:59 am
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Radio In A Downloadable World Is music downloading going to kill traditional radio? A Berlin station thinks so. MotorFM, launched Feb. 1, "abandons on-air commercials in favor of generating revenue from MP3 downloads and targeted sponsoring of its programming. The next step will be streaming audio directly to 3G cell phones and letting listeners pay for downloads by SMS text message." Wired 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:27 am
Carib Indians Protest Disney Movie Plans "The Carib Indians of Dominica are upset over a Walt Disney film that would portray them as cannibals. The film is a sequel to 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which starred Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom." CBC 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:20 am
A Hollywood Giant And His Progeny "As Harvey Weinstein and Miramax prepare to go their separate ways - the Walt Disney Company, which now owns the company, has said it does not plan to renew the contract of Mr. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, to run the unit - more than a few power players in Hollywood have been tallying up their debt to a 52-year-old entrepreneur who often started them in the business, and sent many on their way with lessons that did not always come easy." The New York Times 02/15/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 5:14 pm
TV Shows For Your Cell Phone Producers are starting to create shows for mobile phones. The producers of the hit TV show "24" have jumped in with a spin-off. "Each of the one-minute mobile episodes (referred to as mobisodes) is specially shot and edited for the small, small screen. 'Conspiracy,' produced by Twentieth Century Fox Television, a division of the News Corporation, is one of three original series making their debut on Verizon's V Cast, a high-speed cellular phone network that delivers broadband Internet-quality video." The New York Times 02/15/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 5:09 pm
The Aussie Director Drain "Back in the heyday of the Australian film industry - some 20 years ago now - Australian directors sweated out a solid slate of local films before going Stateside. Today, however, the film industry's talent drain to the US has accelerated to an alarming degree. Directors make only one or two films here before being presented with creative opportunities that have them reaching for their passports." The question is why? The Age (Melbourne) 02/11/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 4:19 pm
Will Musical Phones Knock Off The iPod? Cell phone makers are incorporating music players into their new generations of phones. "Music is the next big thing in mobile multimedia. Mobile phone makers and networks are looking for ways to boost their revenue given difficulties finding new customers in saturated industrialized markets and even in some developing countries. Free voice calls over the Internet pose a further threat to revenues, forcing mobile operators to look to entertainment and data services for their future profitability." Yahoo! (AP) 02/14/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 4:04 pm
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Reinventing Ohio Ballet Ohio Ballet is picking up speed lately after a "rough transition since 1999, when founding artistic director Heinz Poll retired and his successor, Jeffrey Graham Hughes, took the company's reins. Turnover in personnel has been high, attendance at performances low. But such problems are not unusual for a dance company that makes dramatic changes in leadership style and artistic product." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:44 am
La Traviata As Dance? With stage plays being adapted from movies, dance is being adapted from... opera. Ismene Brown isn't impressed with Northern Ballet's latest effort. "This is the way the art of ballet will end, with a sentimental whimper, an easy tear in its eye, and not a squeak of true life as theatrical dance. If the novelisation of successful movies is thought a pretty bogus form of literature, how much worse is a balletisation of an opera masterpiece such as Verdi's La traviata." The Telegraph (UK) 02/15/05
Posted: 02/15/2005 7:07 am
Russian Choreographer Missing, Presumed Dead Dmitri Briantsev, 57, the artistic director of Moscow's Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Ballet (considered the city's second-best dance company after the Bolshoi), stepped out of his hotel near Wenceslas Square in Prague last June 28 and has not been seen since. He presumed to be a victim of crime. The New York Times 02/15/05
Posted: 02/14/2005 5:06 pm
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