Is Conservation Killing Culture? "It's no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)." Orion 11/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 3:47 pm
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Artist Ordered To Remove Art From Park City officials in Edmonton, Canada, have ordered a prominent aboriginal artist to take down art in a park. "The sculpture by Jane Ash Poitras included artificial severed moose legs and four bison skulls, along with boulders, stones, flowers and an eagle feather. A City spokesman said there were several calls of complaint and about two-thirds of residents in the area who responded to a letter asking their opinion on the sculpture opposed it." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/04/05
Posted: 11/04/2005 7:17 am
Italians Bring Antiquities Theft Charges Italian prosecutors detail significant thefts of antiquities. "The global scale of the alleged ring's trade -- worth tens of millions of dollars and involving museums from Tokyo to Toledo, Ohio -- is outlined in a series of cases that Italian prosecutors are bringing, in part to keep looted archaeological artifacts from auction houses and museums, the papers obtained by Bloomberg News show. 'A critical point has been reached, where the laxness, and sometimes the complicity of some museums in the U.S., and elsewhere, has been exposed'." Bloomberg.com 11/04/05
Posted: 11/04/2005 6:58 am
Las Vegas Mayor: Graffiti? Off With Their Thumbs! "You know, we have a beautiful highway landscaping redevelopment in our downtown. We have desert tortoises and beautiful paintings of flora and fauna. These punks come along and deface it. 'I'm saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb. That may be the right thing to do'." San Francisco Chronicle 11/04/05
Posted: 11/04/2005 6:33 am
Italians: We have Proof MFA Has Stolen Art Italian officials are said to have pictures of antiquities being pulled from the ground that they say is documentary proof that Boston's Museum of Fine Art has stolen art. "It is the smoking gun. It means they came out of the ground; they were looted and cleaned up and sold. That's about as strong a case as you're going to find." MFA officials said yesterday they have yet to hear from Italian authorities. The museum has long disputed that works in its collection were stolen, an assertion underscored yesterday." Boston Globe 11/04/05
Posted: 11/04/2005 6:11 am
US To Investigate Plundering Of Tibetan Artifacts "Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican representative in the United States Congress and a long-standing critic of China’s human rights record, has announced he will lead an investigation into what he suspects was the systematic looting of Tibetan art and objects by Chinese authorities since the 1949 Communist revolution. The inquiry has coincided with a high profile auction in Beijing of artefacts that previously belonged to Tibetan monasteries, and which seeped out into international markets sometime last century before being bought by the leading Taiwan-based collector Wang Du." The Art Newspaper 11/02/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 11:31 pm
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St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Finds A Home In Chicago "Touring has become punishingly expensive for small orchestras, and the days of a concert or two each year in downtown Chicago are long gone for the Saint Paul musicians. But the ensemble, founded nearly 50 years ago, has always been eager to experiment. Tonight, with a concert at the University of Chicago's Mandel Hall, they are trying something completely different, a three-year Chicago residency that will take them into South Side elementary schools and the university's music classrooms as well as Mandel." Chicago Sun-Times 11/04/05
Posted: 11/04/2005 7:06 am
The Place To Become An Opera Star "All you have to do is consult the list of gold-medal winners from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s opera course to know that this programme is the real deal. Bryn Terfel scooped it in 1989; this year’s winner, Anna Stéphany, has already made her mark by winning the highly regarded Kathleen Ferrier Award. In between, the number of distinguished graduates from recent years is more than impressive." The Times (UK) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:31 pm
How Recording Has Changed Music "Recording has directed performance style into a search for greater precision and perfection, with a consequent loss of spontaneity and warmth. Various expressive devices once common in the early twentieth century have been almost outlawed: "portamento" (sliding from one note to another on a stringed instrument); playing the piano with the hands not quite together (Philip calls this dislocation); arpeggiating chords (not playing all the notes of the chord at the same time but one after another), and flexibility of tempo." New York Review of Books 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 4:50 pm
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Richmond Mayor Ponders Takeover Of Performing Arts Center Richmond (VA Mayor Douglas Wilder is considering buying the closed downtown Carpenter Center and reopen it as is as a home for city arts groups. "The concept, which involves an eminent-domain-style takeover of the 2,000-seat complex, immediately drew cautious responses from leaders of the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation, another arts organization and City Council." The move is the latest in a complicated road to building a new performing arts center. Richmond Times-Dispatch 11/04/05
Posted: 11/04/2005 6:23 am
A Biennale For Performance Art "At the moment, it seems to be the art world's medium of choice. Admired for its purity and subversive spirit, it is ubiquitous in gallery and museum exhibitions, whether on its own or as an active ingredient in video, installation art, sound art and photography. And performance art - also known as performance - is often the ghost in the machine in even the most static of objects; there is hardly a work of art with a scratchable surface that can't be assigned so-called performative aspects. The biennial has emerged - without corporate sponsorship or even a sponsoring institution - seemingly out of thin air, hard work and fortuitous timing."
The New York Times 11/04/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 11:04 pm
San Antonio Pol Questions Arts Funding A San Antonio city councilman wants to rethink all the city's grants to the arts. "I think there's a lot of other things that the city ought to be concentrating on first, before we start looking at the arts." Councilman Kevin Wolff said "the process for awarding arts grants is 'flawed' and 'too politicized'." WOAI-TV, (San Antonio) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 4:03 pm
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Picasso Of American Indian Art Dies R.C. Gorman was 74. "His work and personality exerted an indelible presence on the Taos and Northern New Mexico arts scenes. Internationally, he was one of the foremost Native American artists working today." Santa Fe New Mexican 11/04/05
Posted: 11/04/2005 6:16 am
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Where Is The UK's Cutting-Edge Theatre? Plymouth, that's where, as increasingly the Theatre Royal pushes the envelope. "Plymouth may be geographically isolated, but London theatre gets stuck in its own cultural ghettoes. Because we are not metropolitan and fashionable, we have to look very hard at what we can give artists, and one of the things we can offer and develop is a collaborative rather than a competitive culture. I think one of the reasons that writers and companies keep coming back is because we actually talk to them, discuss what they want and how we can help them do it. It is not about the vanity of creating the next big thing but about creating a culture where people can thrive." The Guardian (UK) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:21 pm
Strike Over, Radio City Locks Out Musicians A day after musicians went on strike against Radio City Music Hall, they decided to go back to work. But they were locked out as management replaced them with recorded music. "The musicians, their instruments in hand, pulled down their picket line and returned to work Thursday morning after a one-day strike. But they wound up stranded outside Radio City as thousands of ticket-holders streamed past to attend the first show of the season." Backstage 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 4:15 pm
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British Library Puts Its Books Online With the help of Microsoft, the British Library is digitizing its books that are out of copyright. "The Microsoft deal means that 25 million pages from the British Library's collections will be put online and made searchable for anyone. More works will be scanned in the future. 'This is great news for research and scholarship and will give unparalleled access to our vast collections to people all over the world: they will be available to anyone, anywhere and at anytime'." BBC 11/04/05
Posted: 11/04/2005 6:55 am
Amazon: Books By The Page Amazon says it will start selling some books by the page. "The Amazon Pages service will let customers buy portions of a book online, as little as a single page. The cost for most books would be a few cents a page, though it might be higher for more specialized works." CBC 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 11:26 pm
For Poets - A Question Of Audience? If you're a poet, would you prefer "a beautifully produced physical book, with the guarantee that it would find two thousand engaged readers?" Or "no physical book, but the guarantee that, through various means of publication—anthologies, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and so on—the poems would find an audience of twenty thousand engaged readers?" Poets & Writers 11/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:35 pm
The Open Library, Open For All Brewster Kahle "made his name indexing and storing the web in his Internet Archive. His non-profit organisation, stationed in an unassuming colonial home in San Francisco's Presidio, has moved on to grab and upload all kinds of media: public domain films, audio archives, and amateur endeavours such as Project Gutenberg, which has been painstakingly hand-typing public domain texts since the 70s. Now he has taken the idea of digitising the text of books one step further, and is storing not just the text, but, incredibly, high-resolution snapshots of book pages, good enough to reproduce every fold, blotch and texture of the world's catalogue of public domain works on your screen." The Guardian (UK) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 5:25 pm
Google Print Debuts The book digitizing project throws texts of books up on the web in searchable form. eWeek 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 4:27 pm
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The Pesky Meddling Artist Who Can't Leave Well Enough Alone The release of the complete Star Wars series on DVD has revived a "long-standing debate about the right of artists to alter their work. George Lucas, who never made a movie he couldn’t touch up years later, has become a living symbol of this debate since he seems unable to leave his creations alone." London Free Press (Canada) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:02 pm
Tomlinson Resigns From CPB Board, Disputes Auditor's Report Former Corporation for Public Broadcasting board chairman Ken Tomlinson has resigned from the board. "The board has been reviewing a CPB Inspector General's report--called for by a pair of congressmen--on Tomlinson's relationship with the board stemming from Tomlinson's attempts to add more conservative programming. The board said in a statement: "[F]ormer chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson has resigned from the CPB board. The board does not believe that Mr. Tomlinson acted maliciously or with any intent to harm CPB or public broadcasting, and the board recognizes that Mr. Tomlinson strongly disputes the findings in the soon-to-be-released Inspector General’s report." Wire & Cable 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 4:19 pm
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A Dallas Project To Preserve Choreography "Unlike scripts for plays or scores for symphonies, ballets have no physical record for choreography. This is a relatively new concern for the dance world. Coming into the 21st century and losing many of the choreographers - the great geniuses of the 20th century - made it more apparent to us that we must conserve our heritage and do everything in our power to pass that legacy on to the next generation. Financed through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the project will attempt to preserve all aspects of a ballet." Fort Worth Star-Telegram (AP) 11/03/05
Posted: 11/03/2005 6:11 pm
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