Everyone Knows Teletubbies Are More Evil Than Sex, Anyway Earlier this week, PBS's Sprout Channel (TV for the under-5 set) dismissed one of its most popular hosts for the heinous crime of having once used a few curse words in a satirical sketch about sex that is now available online. Mark Morford cannot believe we've come to this: "What sort of people are we? What sort of warped and reckless and utterly silly value system do we suck on in this culture? Why are we so wildly, preternaturally terrified of all things sexual while at the same time drawn to it all like fat teenagers to french fries?" San Francisco Chronicle 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 7:01 am
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The Long, Slow Fight For Art Recovery Groups advocating the return of art looted by the Nazis in World War II have made great progress in recent years, but the battle is far from over. Just identifying looted art is a major undertaking: "One thorny issue is just how many looted items could have made their way to American museums. Under scrutiny are objects that were created before 1946 and obtained by a museum after 1932. Other criteria are whether the piece was in Europe at that time and whether ownership changed between 1932 and 1946." Washington Post 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 7:05 am
- Berlin To Return Kirchner Painting The city of Berlin plans to return a 1913 painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the heirs of the Jewish family who lost it to the Nazis in World War II. The painting, which depicts a Berlin street scene, is valued at $12.5 million, and has hung in Berlin's Brücke Museum since 1980. Los Angeles Times (AP) 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 6:45 am
Chelsea's Summer Wars "The summer group show wars are raging in [New York's Chelsea neighborhood.] Over the last few years they have become something of an annual rite. Starting in late June and continuing through August, the solo shows drop off and the group shows — four or more artists — proliferate. The densely packed yet oddly discrete parallel universes in which galleries exist for most of the year lose some of their definition... It is open season for cool hunting and power gathering. Hipness prevails over blue-chipness." The New York Times 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 6:18 am
Boston Museum Sending Loot Back To Italy "The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has agreed to return to the Italian government artifacts long suspected of being looted, according to a tentative agreement announced today. In exchange, Italy will loan the MFA objects from the country's vast holdings of antiquities, and work with the museum to make sure the MFA does not acquire stolen works in the future." Boston Globe 07/27/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 5:17 am
Should A Glance At Greatness Really Cost More In New York? Since going on public display at New York's Neue Gallery, Gustav Klimt's 1907 masterpiece "Adele Bloch-Bauer 1" has been drawing crowds and controversy in roughly equal measures, with the latter sparked by the Neue's quickly abandoned plan to charge visitors $50 to view the Klimt. But despite the Neue's course correction, the outrage over the steep admission price has spread, and a much-needed debate over what it costs to gain admission to New York's various museums and galleries is now well underway. Sydney Morning Herald 07/28/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 6:55 pm
View Askew: Africa, As Seen From Europe "The first Europeans went [to Africa] to exploit the continent and were soon followed by artists excited by the 'primitive'. But, as a new exhibition shows, the images they produced bear the stamp of colonialism with a paint brush... Our view of Africa has been an inheritance of 19th-century colonialism, dominated by biological determinism, by repressed and perverse sexuality, and by paintings and sculptures that ignored the realities of the place and time in favour of a romanticised and polemical vision." The Guardian (UK) 07/28/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 6:16 pm
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You Ain't Got A Thing If You Ain't Done The Ring "Not so long ago, complete performances of the Ring presented within six days, as Wagner intended, were infrequent outside of Bayreuth. (The premiere took place in the span of five days.) But in the last 25 years, producing the Ring has almost become a calling card for any company claiming top-rank status in the opera world." The New York Times 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 6:21 am
Could Full Body Trombone Tackling Be Far Behind? Plenty of orchestras have embraced the trend of performing concert versions of the musical scores to video games, so it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the Houston Symphony is planning a concert of music from the National Football League. You didn't know the NFL produced original music? Silly you. The league has, in fact, had not one but three composers on call over the last 40 years, writing the full orchestral scores you hear under the voice of Harry Kalas on the film-quality highlight reels put out by NFL Films. Houston Chronicle 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 5:36 am
Downloadable Music, Without That Nasty Brimstone Aftertaste A new online music service making use of the motto "We Are Not Evil" is bucking industry trends and bypassing what it sees as an obstructionist recording industry. "Magnatune sets out to be fair and friendly to both artists and consumers. You can listen to any Magnatune album streamed complete for free from its website, download it for a suggested fee of $8, or order it on a finished CD (suggested price $8 a disc, plus $4.97 for duplication costs and postage). Fifty percent of all revenues go directly to the artist(s). All music on Magnatune has been cleared for licensing, so it can be broadcast or used in films or other audiovisual and Web-based productions." And yes, Magnatune has plenty of classical... Boston Globe 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 5:30 am
Proving Once Again That You Can't Cut Your Way To Solvency The West Virginia Symphony has been in debt since the moment it moved into its new home at Charleston's Clay Center three years ago, and the orchestra is hoping a major endowment drive will plug the seemingly permanent hole in its finances. The WVS's accumulated debt stands at nearly $800,000, with $640,000 more on various credit lines. Worse, the orchestra's subscriber base is less than half what it was a decade ago, and cuts to the musicians' roster and the season schedule have done nothing to alleviate the problem. Charleston Gazette (WV) 07/25/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 5:54 pm
Even If You Return It, It's Still Stealing The former president of the Buffalo local of the American Federation of Musicians has pled guilty to embezzling $74,000 from the musicians he purported to represent. Mark Jones "charged items on the local union's credit card, then charged the same items to the parent union and pocketed the money... Jones repaid $21,000 of the amount he had taken before the investigation began, and has since repaid nearly all the rest, according to the United States Attorney's office." Buffalo News 07/27/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 5:41 pm
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Tickets Going Fast In Edinburgh Edinburgh's famed summer festivals are having a great year at the box office. "Some venues are reporting ticket sales up by as much as 100 per cent on this time last year, as Festival-goers vie to book shows before they are sold out." The Edinburgh Fringe, the world's largest Fringe Festival, reports a huge increase in online sales over last summer. Edinburgh Evening News 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 5:22 am
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Walking Away One of the opera world's behind-the-scenes stars is leaving it all behind this summer. Peter Jonas, who has led English National Opera and Munich's Bavarian State Opera over the course of a 21-year career as a general manager, will retire in September at the comparatively young age of 59. "Intellectual rigour and confrontational energy" are terms often used to describe Jonas's management style, and it's no coincidence that his happiest years came with the relatively small and provincial Munich company. The Guardian (UK) 07/28/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 6:20 pm
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West End Booming On The Back Of Song & Dance London's West End is awash in musicals both old and new this season, and a survey of UK ticket buyers suggests that they couldn't be happier. "There were some concerns that musicals were squeezing out 'straight plays'," but some observers have pointed out that full houses for musicals are clearly far preferable to the darkened houses the West End has frequently sported over the last several seasons. The Independent (UK) 07/28/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 6:37 pm
Did Andrew Lloyd Webber Just Accuse Others Of Redundancy? Andrew Lloyd Webber is allowing the audience of a UK reality TV show to choose the leading lady for his new revival of The Sound of Music, causing many in the theatre industry to throw up their hands in exasperation. But Lloyd Webber says he has good reason to trust the people over the experts, "[delivering] a withering assessment of stage schools, which he says are churning out performers of such uniformity that he can almost tell which school they come from." The Guardian (UK) 07/27/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 6:29 pm
New Partnership Promises More Song And Dance For Philly Philadelphia's Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts is teaming up with the New York-based Shubert Organization in a new venture to bring touring Broadway shows to two venerable Philly venues. "Presentations would take place at the Academy of Music or the Forrest Theatre, allowing both organizations 'the chance to perpetuate and enhance the presentation of legitimate theatrical attractions in Philadelphia.'" PlaybillArts 07/27/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 5:34 pm
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Australia's Unique Solution To Illegal Copying An Australian cultural fund called Copyright Agency Limited has been quietly assisting writers and publishers in protecting their work and ideas for more than 20 years, and in this age of digital information access, its work is becoming ever more important. "With digital copying gradually being corralled along with photocopying, the agency's revenues have grown from $72 million in 2003-04 to $86 million in 2004-05 and more than $100 million in the past financial year. This will be distributed in roughly 5000 payments to its members." Sydney Morning Herald 07/28/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 7:00 pm
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Toronto Movie House To Get New Life "After months of theatre closings and speculation that repertory cinemas in Toronto are doomed, some good news for a change: The Royal Theatre, a College Street landmark, has been sold for $2.2-million to a company set on keeping the projector running -- with a modern twist. The buyer is Theatre D Digital, a Toronto-based postproduction film company that plans to restore the theatre's rickety red velvet seats and ornate moulding to their original charm. It will be used as a state-of-the-art production studio by day and movie theatre by night." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 6:42 am
TiVo Tattle The makers of TiVo, the original digital video recorder, is starting a research division which will analyze how its users watch TV, and sell the information to advertisers. Unlike many DVRs, TiVo keeps track of everything a user watches and reports back to the company. Advertisers are interested because the research "could help them understand how to get more people to watch recorded commercials, like changing the content of ads or running them during certain kinds of programming." The New York Times 07/26/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 6:32 am
More Money For The Big Guys, Less Music For Us When Kazaa agreed this week to pay $115 million in damages to the recording industry and relaunch itself as a legal music download service, it perpetuated a business model that many observers see as shortsighted and seriously flawed. "Aside from the fact that there's no clear mechanism for getting this money to the artists who are supposedly losing their livelihoods due to all of this downloading, what's really shocking is how little it all adds up to in comparison with how much the record labels might have made by agreeing to Napster's proposed plan, which would also have solved all of the device compatibility issues that still plague us today." Listening Post (Wired Blogs) 07/27/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 6:12 am
Gandhi Says No (Again) To Biopic Indian politician Sonia Gandhi and her ruling Indian National Congress Party have threatened legal action against the producers of a new biographical film focused on Ms. Gandhi. "Alarmed, the producer [has] halted the project. It was the second time in less than a decade that Gandhi and her political advisers had taken legal action to prevent the making of a film about her life." International Herald Tribune 07/27/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 6:44 pm
Is Kazaa's Capitulation Too Little, Too Late? "The death of Kazaa as an illegal service is notable - the $100m damages payout represents half of the entire value of the European legal download market in 2005... Kazaa is not the people's favourite it was several years ago, and, furthermore, the introduction of various filters to protect illegal downloading on the site could well see a mass migration making the site a has-been anyway. Those that have migrated to the likes of iTunes are the law abiding easy sell. Filesharers are tougher nuts to crack." Organ Grinder (Guardian Blogs) 07/27/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 6:09 pm
Nothing But New The Venice Film Festival is taking a risk this year, presenting nothing but world premieres among the films vying for the fest's top prize. "Twenty one films will compete for the Golden Lion, which was won last year by Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain... Competing films include Bobby, written by actor Emilio Estevez, about the final days leading up to Senator Robert Kennedy's assassination, and Alfonso Cuaron's sci-fi thriller Children of Men. Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, also in competition, will open the 63rd festival." BBC 07/27/06
Posted: 07/27/2006 5:47 pm
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Morris Misstep? When Mark Morris announced plans to choreograph a new version of the Delibes-scored ballet, Sylvia, it immediately became one of the most-anticipated events of the 2006 season. But Clive Barnes isn't the least bit impressed with the results: "Morris, a modern dance master with classic leanings, still approaches ballet like a man talking a foreign language: with a misplaced confidence, a very limited vocabulary and a totally unconvincing accent." New York Post 07/28/06
Posted: 07/28/2006 6:51 am
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