An Intellectual Property Economy "In recent years intellectual property has received a lot more attention because ideas and innovations have become the most important resource, replacing land, energy and raw materials. As much as three-quarters of the value of publicly traded companies in America comes from intangible assets, up from around 40% in the early 1980s. In information technology and telecoms in particular, the role of intellectual property has changed radically. What used to be the preserve of corporate lawyers and engineers in R&D labs has been speedily embraced by the boardroom..." The Economist 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:23 pm
Click here for more Ideas stories...
Calatrava Towers Santiago Calatrava is "the most crowd-pleasing architect since Frank Gehry. His work, too, is dazzling and emotionally engaging. And, just as Gehry exploited the trend of museum building in the nineteen-nineties, Calatrava has aligned himself with the latest architectural fashion: bespoke luxury-apartment towers." The New Yorker 10/24/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 9:02 am
Of Art And A Cult Of Celebrity "Celebrity demands a suspension of judgment; there are no objective criteria and it is meaningless. Famous for being famous is circular and nowhere does that circle touch the real world. Art, though, demands judgment, belongs in the real world and promises meaning. For that reason, contemporary art has developed an industry of spurious commentary." The Scotsman 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:45 am
Munitz On Things Getty Getty president Barry Munitz sits down to address the controversies swirling around the institution - the Italian artifacts case, morale, his salary and the infamous Porsche. Are staff jumping ship? "There hasn't been a massive outflow. There hasn't even been a major outflow of people. The museum director resigned and one other person who was her closest partner and colleague went at the same time. Not a single person left the museum in the year since she left. Everybody stayed. We went from a search (for a new curator) and hired the No. 1 candidate on everybody's list, Michael Brand." Los Angeles Daily News 10/24/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:21 am
Scream: A Museum That's Kept Its Sense Of Humor The Munch Museum in Oslo, which lost its "The Scream" painting last year in a dramatic theft, is selling a board game in its gift shop based on the incident. "Players of The Mystery of the Scream, a game aimed at the family market, must hunt down the robber before he reaches a criminal paradise." The Guardian (UK) 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 6:15 pm
Greeks Want Getty To Return Art The Greek government is demanding that the Getty return four artifacts it says were illegally exported. "The Greeks have presented archeological evidence that they say proves the Greek origin of three objects the Getty purchased in 1993: a gold funerary wreath, an inscribed tombstone and a marble torso of a young woman. The three artifacts, which date from about 400 BC, are ranked among the masterpieces of the Getty's antiquities collection. The fourth object that Greek officials are seeking to recover is an archaic votive relief bought in 1955 by J. Paul Getty himself." Los Angeles Times 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:06 pm
Click here for more Visual Arts stories...
Montreal Symphony Back On Stage The Montreal Symphony plays its first concert since ending a strike that started last May. "Montreal's Salle Wilfred-Pelletier seemed to be bathed in the warmth of a great big homecoming. After a long and bitter feud it was forgiveness and laughter, and even a few teary eyes in the audience, as Montrealers roundly applauded their orchestra even before Kent Nagano had taken the stage." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 8:48 am
The Next Threat To Recording Industry - Magazines? "As if the record business doesn't have enough problems, the coming trend in magazine publishing may be free CDs. While magazine publishers tout the arrival of authentic interactivity and deeper connections with readers by adding free CDs to every issue, the music industry worries that yet another route has been found around buying records to obtain music, even though most of the free magazine CDs are compilations." San Francisco Chronicle 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:48 am
Online Music - Who Gets The Money? The online music business is booming. But there's a fight between producers and musicians about how to divy up the new income. "Thanks to the success of iPod and iTunes, online music sales are growing at a healthy clip. But record labels complain they aren't recouping expenses, while musicians say they're being squeezed to take a pay cut." Wired 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:27 pm
Click here for more Music stories...
Miami PAC: Designed In Public It has taken 27 years to get a performing arts center built in Miami. The building is still under construction, late, and $100 million over budget. Designing the project was a particularly public process. "The competition process was very unusual. We moved a whole design team into the host hotel for nearly a week. We had one of the conference rooms downstairs as our design studio, we moved our desks, our lamps, our materials, our supplies, and essentially designed the building in front of the community. It was almost completely open to the public." Miami Herald 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 8:42 am
A Go For $326-Million Kansas City Performing Arts Center Arts backers in Kansas City say they're going ahead with plans to build a $326-million performing arts center designed by Moshe Safdie. The project has been in the planning since spring 2002. "The board of the center has approved groundbreaking for fall 2006 contingent upon reaching an interim funding goal of $45 million prior to Feb.1, 2006. The plan calls for two 1,600-seat halls, one for symphonic music, the other for opera and ballet. Backers have raised $228.5 million so far, leaving them $97.5 million short of their goal." Kansas City Star 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:46 pm
Click here for more Arts Issues stories...
Why Is Damien Hirst Living In Mexico? "I suppose the whole thing really is death. I think that the way that I deal with death is a bit Mexican. In England people hide or shy away from death and ideas about it, whereas Mexicans seem to walk hand in hand with it. In that way I feel a bit liberated here." The Guardian (UK) 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 6:12 pm
Norman Foster World Architect Norman Foster is at the top of his profession. "He has always wanted to create buildings informed by the structure, logic and beauty of bridges and machinery. One of the first architectural prizes he won was for a working drawing of a windmill. In designing an ultramodern building for a modernising China, he has no intention of drawing on that country's antique design traditions, but on its young industrial crafts, technologies and engineering processes." The Guardian (UK) 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 6:11 pm
Click here for more People stories...
Reinventing Ottawa's National Peter Hinton is the new director of Ottawa's National Arts Centre Theatre. "A new artistic director should be an opportunity for a theatre to look at itself, to re-examine what it's doing. My appointment to the place begged a lot of questions about what kind of future there would be." Since it opened in 1969, the NAC has never done an all-Canadian season, notes Hinton. "That's really interesting to me. It speaks to the brevity of our history and the way new-play development has grown and reached its own ceiling." The Globe & mail (Canada) 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 8:54 am
Are West End Ticket Prices Too High? "The West End doesn't allow you to try because tickets are £55. Then you have to take a taxi and pay the baby-sitter, and there is no change out of £200. 'If we charge £10, or on our public dress rehearsals, £1 - you might not like it, but at least you can afford to come back next week. Nonetheless, theatre attendance is on the increase." BBC 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:10 am
Click here for more Theatre stories...
Looking At This Year's Canadian Poetry Award Shortlist Traditionally, the Canada's Governor General's Award poetry shortlist "offers a mix of old hands and new faces, a modest range of styles and at least one what-were-they-thinking title. Extravagantly experimental work seldom gets a mention, but inventively tweaking the standard lyrical narrative often helps a book stand out from the crowd. (And it is a crowd: the 2005 jury read 144 collections.) This year’s list follows suit, though there’s neither an oddball choice nor a brand-new “It” poet to be found." CBC 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:26 am
Death Of Writing And Other Old Battles Is Ben Marcus right that experimental writing is dying? He's "justified in criticizing a publishing industry, and a culture, that often recycles the same ideas and stories while ignoring writers whose work is too unpleasant, or destabilizing, or unsympathetic to be absorbed at a glance. His list of writers who "interrogate the assumptions of realism and bend the habitual gestures around new shapes" is one many readers would embrace, and his contention that The New Yorker doesn't publish enough challenging fiction is absolutely on the mark. But ultimately he's pantomiming a battle that, if it ever really existed, ended decades ago." Slate 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:57 pm
- Previously: The Great Experimenters (And Why) "Even while popular writing has quietly glided into the realm of the culturally elite, doling out its severe judgment of fiction that has not sold well, and we have entered a time when book sales and artistic merit can be neatly equated without much of a fuss, Jonathan Franzen has argued that complex writing, as practiced by writers such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and their descendants, is being forced upon readers by powerful cultural institutions (this is me scanning the horizon for even the slightest evidence of this) and that this less approachable literature, or at least its esteemed reputation, is doing serious damage to the commercial prospects of the literary industry." So where is the evidence? Harper's 10/05
A Big Advance In Preserving Documents? Paper rots, even in books, and preserving documents has long bedeviled librarians. Now "conservationists are buzzing about a new technique developed by Ink Cor, a research group concerned with neutralizing the wasting effect of corrosive inks without damaging the underlying paper. The group recently completed a prototype treatment using halide salts, a colorless antioxidant that can prolong the life span of paper containing corrosive ink by a factor of 10." Wired 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:34 pm
Click here for more Publishing stories...
Do-Over TV Time Warner Cable is offering its customers the ability to "rewind" shows. "With Start Over, digital cable customers who miss the beginning of certain shows, but who tune in before the end, can push a button and go back to the start. They also can pause and rewind the show — but can't fast-forward through commercials. The service lets viewers act on impulse or because of unexpected delays. They don't have to plan ahead to record a show, as they do with digital video recorders." USAToday 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:41 am
Cuban: Studios Have To Change How They Deliver Movies CMark uban believes that Hollywood's distribution system requires radical change. He wants to do away with artificial windows so that consumers can buy a movie 'how they want it, when they want it, where they want it.' He argues that movies should be made available simultaneously on cable television, DVD, and in movie theaters, letting consumers decide whether they prefer to see it at home (even if it means paying a premium for a new release) or in the theater. This is not mere theory." Slate 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 6:06 pm
British Film Industry Is Ailing "A report commissioned by the U.K. Film Council this month found that industry jobs dropped 20 percent last year and predicted that investment would fall to $570 million in 2005, down 70 percent from last year. More movies shot elsewhere would have a devastating effect on a sector that contributes about $5.5 billion annually to British gross domestic product, the report added. Tourism officials are also worried. They estimate that around one-fifth of the 28 million people who come to Britain each year do so after seeing the country depicted on screen." Yahoo! (AP) 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:40 pm
Tiny Seattle Radio Station Becomes National Indie Force Seattle radio station KEXP has a puny transmitter. But the station is becoming a force in the indie music world through its popularity on the web. "In spring 2004, about 26,000 people listened to KEXP online every week -- more than any other radio station in the country, according to Arbitron's now-defunct Internet broadcasting service. This year, that number has jumped to 50,000, with large clusters of listeners in New York, where KEXP broadcasts live twice a year; Chicago; San Francisco; and Washington, D.C. Listeners are giving the non-profit station a projected $1.7 million this year, nearly $1 million more than they gave in 2003." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10/22/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:18 pm
Hollywood's Great Divide "In a town full of dirty little secrets, the composition of writers in Hollywood rises to the level of scandal. Though Tinseltown pays lip service to liberalism and equality, women and minority film and television writers get work and get paid with a disparity that is striking. The 2005 Hollywood Writers Report found that among film writers, women represented just 18% of employment while minorities combined stood at 6%. The median earnings gap between men and women, and minorities and white men in film work widened from $12,500 to $19,000 since the WGA's last report was released in 1998." OpinionJournal.com 10/25/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:13 pm
Video Games, Movies Blur The Lines "Video games are among the fastest-growing, most-profitable businesses in the entertainment world. In the United States, domestic sales of video games and consoles generated $10 billion in revenue last year, compared with movie ticket sales of $9.4 billion. But with the exception of a few well-known directors - like George Lucas, who created a series of Star Wars video games, and Andy and Larry Wachowski, who wrote and directed "The Matrix" movies and helped create Matrix games - few in Hollywood have been able to successfully operate in both worlds. But that seems to be changing." The New York Times 10/24/05
Posted: 10/24/2005 5:09 pm
Click here for more Media stories...
