The End, Finished, Done Everyone talks about the importance of first lines in novels. "But they aren't really as important to a novel as the last lines. From a terrible first line, a novel may recover; the last line is what it leaves a reader with." The Telegraph (UK) 12/21/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:00 am
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Is Aboriginal Art Any Good? "Aboriginal art generates exponential profit for all those who touch it - even, though perhaps not proportionately, for the people who make it. The rules are now very strict: Aboriginal artists retain all their intellectual and moral rights in the work after it has been rolled up and tucked into a backpack or bolted to the wall of a banking hall, in perpetuity. Amid the frenzied buying and selling, with important Aboriginal art objects changing hands as often as several times a year, there is still a pervasive anxiety that Aboriginal art might be a con." The Age (Melbourne) 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 11:20 am
Latin-American Art Takes On World "Latin American art, which used to be collected mainly by Latin American buyers, is now reaching a broader audience than ever before. US, European and Southeast Asian collectors make-up 50% of the market today.” The Art Newspaper 12/02/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 10:52 am
Uncovering Britain's Art Only one in every five paintings in public art collections is on display. One man is assembling catalogues in an attempt to bring the art to light. "The catalogues are both wonderful social histories and crammed full of small-scale artistic discoveries. You find yourself building little stories up about both painters and subjects; armchair travelling around places you might normally only drive through. It is like flicking through Pevsner's counties without the small print; as English as the shipping forecast or Marmite." The Observer (UK) 12/04/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 10:02 am
Hugo Boss Finalists The Guggenheim Foundation announces six finalists for this year's Hugo Boss Prize. "This year's finalists are an international sampling of today's trendiest artists. The group is heavily tipped toward performance art; none of the finalists are painters." The New York Times 12/02/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:42 am
Building Threatens Watts Towers? A new municipal building is being erected in the parking lot next to LA's Watts Towers. "Neighbors are concerned about congestion, and preservationists who cherish Simon Rodia's fantasia of folk-art sculpture worry that the new building, which would augment the smaller, existing arts center nearby, will obstruct views of the towers. They question why officials decided to place a new, $4.7-million youth arts center near the towers, rather than on city-owned property around the corner that originally was designated for the project." Los Angeles Times 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:18 am
Court Case: A Threat To Museum Art Loans? "Museum directors are watching as a case pitting the heirs of Kazimir Malevich against an Amsterdam museum winds its way through the U.S. courts. At its core is a novel bid to get around a federal law protecting loaned art from seizure. 'If there isn't some guarantee, I don't know why anyone would lend anything...especially given the litigious nature of the art world right now'." Wall Street Journal 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 8:25 am
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Was Magazine Music Poll Fixed? Did the popular music magazine NME manipulate the results of its top 50 albums poll? "The allegations, first published by the blog Londonist.com on Wednesday, suggested that an early version of the poll, which is compiled each year by the magazine's editors and writers, had been radically overhauled prior to publication. It was alleged that artists including Beck and Patrick Wolf had disappeared from the top 50 entirely, while others, among them high-profile names such as Babyshambles, Oasis and Kate Bush, had seen their ratings significantly boosted." the Guardian (UK) 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 10:59 am
Jazz In Crisis? Maybe Not... "Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that jazz is in crisis. It tootles along perfectly respectably, but inevitably lacks the resonance of its pioneering days. The same thing has been happening, for a couple of decades, to pop music too. The early 21st century has other wonders, so we should not worry unduly. An appreciation society is as good a way of saying it as any: this music is a magnificent part of our cultural history. Let us not be ashamed of looking back, and revelling in it." Financial Times (UK) 12/02/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 10:47 am
Why Naxos Rules The World "Klaus Heymann runs a lean global empire that in some countries has gobbled up half the retail market for classical CDs in numbers of discs sold. The catalogue for his Naxos label now lists about 3,000 recordings, many of unusual repertoire, all still available at prices well below those charged by classical labels at EMI, Sony/BMG and Universal. Naxos also seems to have outrun its rivals on the Internet. Last month, Naxos's entire recorded output of 75,000 tracks went on sale on eMusic, a U.S. subscription service that claims to shift 2.4 million downloads per month." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 10:11 am
Minnesota Orchestra Sees Red The Minnesota Orchestra posts a $1.19 million deficit. "In most respects, the report Friday was upbeat, even turning a bit zany at one point when music director Osmo Vänskä and orchestra president Tony Woodcock played "If I Were a Rich Man" on clarinet and piano. Expenses were cut by $2 million during 2004-05, which brought on a rare occurrence in the orchestra world: a budget actually being less than it was the year before, $27 million, down from $28.6 million. A key cost-cutting measure came when the musicians agreed to a one-year wage freeze." The Star-Tribune (Mpls) 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:38 am
Deep Cover - The Singers Who Save "Cover singers are opera's equivalent of the Broadway understudy, and like replacement artists in most forms of live performance, they are an essential but unseen part of the process. Without them, an incapacitated star can send a production scrambling. Even worse, they can bring it to a grinding halt." The New York Times 12/04/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:21 am
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Battle For The Architectural Soul Of The South America's Gulf Coast is rebuilding. But a battle has broken out about what rebuilding will look like. "The idea that New Urbanists may be helping to write plans for the new Gulf Coast has horrified many architects and left-leaning cultural critics — revealing, in the process, quite a bit about the ambitions and anxieties that mark contemporary architectural practice in this country." Los Angeles Times 12/04/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:26 am
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Lord Archer Returns Out of prison and writing. "The disgraced Conservative politician has chosen Australia to launch his first novel since his release from prison in 2003, and he declared his comeback at a literary lunch in a plush hotel overlooking Sydney harbour in front of 410 avid fans." The Guardian (UK) 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 10:26 am
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Hamlet's Role In The Revolution In Romania in the early 80s censorship in the theatre had stiffened and all plays had to be approved by the Councillor of Culture and Social Education. However, the suggestion of a play by Shakespeare went unchallenged: like Beethoven and Tolstoy, Shakespeare was a Universal Artist - to dispute this would be to expose the apparatchiks, always keen to defend their amour-propre, to charges of stupidity.They were enraptured. Line after line was greeted with the applause of recognition: this was their story. Hamlet's oppression by Claudius mirrored theirs by Ceausescu, and if Hamlet vacillated, accused himself of cowardice, cursed himself for his inaction, it only reflected their own frailty and submissiveness. Allegory and metaphor are part of any theatre syntax but at that time in Romania they were its essential core." The Guardian (UK) 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 10:19 am
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Fiction Sales Plummet? "International demand for English-language literary fiction has gone seriously south. Although hard numbers for the fall season won't be available until January, the anecdotal evidence is not encouraging. Agents and retailers are complaining that sales for new fiction are soft, that orders for reprints and back-listed books are down, and that publishing houses from Berlin to Boston are becoming choosier about what novels they buy, when they are willing to buy them, and what they are willing to pay." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:45 am
A Month Of Novels November was National Novel-Writing Month. "Nearly 60,000 people around the world set out Nov. 1 to reach the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. About one in six made it. Students could enter under less-strict guidelines." Boston Globe 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:10 am
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Minority Report: TV Networks Doing (A Bit) Better Minority groups report that American TV networks have "made some strides in increasing ethnic diversity in front of and behind the camera, but still have fallen short in demonstrating an overall commitment to multiculturalism." Los Angeles Times 12/03/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 10:35 am
Sundance - Swamped By Movies The Sundance Festival has chosen 64 movies for this season's event. "The festival has become so famous it is practically synonymous with independent film. In a rare discussion of the festival's inner workings, the programmers said they were suffering not only from the sheer volume of images cascading into their heads, but the pressure of discriminating among them. Five people combed through 1,004 American and 936 international features (up from last year's 761 and 843, respectively) and 760 American and 448 international documentaries (up from 624 and 385). Then there were the shorts: 4,311 of them (3,887 last year)." The New York Times 12/04/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:50 am
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The Reinvented Baryshnikov "It would be difficult to find a better exemplar of career reinvention than Mikhail Baryshnikov. Of course, he started with a few little advantages, like being one of the most idolized ballet dancers of all time, like being seductively handsome, like having multiple talents and the fame to capitalize on them. He has starred on film and on Broadway and on television. He has choreographed and been artistic director of American Ballet Theater, and founded and starred in his own White Oak Dance Project. But most of his efforts so far have been extensions of his dance career, rather than a transition from it. Now he is overseeing something else, the much-bruited, still almost stealthy Baryshnikov Arts Center." The New York Times 12/04/05
Posted: 12/04/2005 9:55 am
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