He’s Scott Altman, currently ED of Ballet West. “The executive director position has been vacant since Paul Kaine left the company in April 2008. Soon after, Victoria Morgan added the CEO role to her artistic responsibilities. In the course of one year, Morgan, working with staff and board, eliminated an $800,000 deficit. Since then, the company’s annual ticket revenue has grown more than 70 percent, while attendance has climbed nearly 30 percent. The company’s endowment, just $1 million when Morgan became CEO, is now $11 million.”
Archives for July 2016
Musician Payments For Streaming Are A Mess. So Apple Has A Plan (But…)
“Apple recently made a proposal that could fundamentally transform the way streaming services pay songwriters and music publishers. As part of a government rate-setting process known as the Copyright Royalty Board tribunal (CRB), Apple recommended that services pay a fixed penny rate per stream. This structure is a major departure from the way streaming services have traditionally paid royalties. Moving to a penny rate would be a tremendous step toward transparency in music publishing. But be careful of the fine print.”
Prominent de Young Museum Board Chair Resigns Over Investigations Into Museum Spending
Dede Wilsey, longtime head of the board that runs the de Young Museum and Legion of Honor in San Francisco, is giving up her top spot after the museums paid a $2 million settlement to a former high-ranking executive who said Wilsey had her ousted for revealing alleged misspending of museum money.
Unmentionables: Euphemisms Are Like Underwear, Best Changed Frequently
John McWhorter: “What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion.”
Many Of Us Are Trying To Improve Ourselves. Scientists Wonder It It’s Possible…
“Each year, Americans spend billions of dollars on self-improvement books, CDs, seminars, coaching, and stress-management programs to become better, more sociable, effective, compassionate, and charismatic versions of themselves. But beneath theories on what drives people to change, there’s a more fundamental question debated by psychologists: Can personality even be changed in the first place?”
What Should You Wear To A Classical Concert? Advice For Guys
The beginning and end of this article really do offer some useful counsel for the unsure. But then there’s this:
“I’m terrible at giving dress advice to women. So I asked one.
‘I don’t know, wear a shirt I guess. Why are you asking me this … ?'”
Libraries Are Changing Quickly. And To Be A Librarian These Days Is To Imagine A New Role
“Though the occupation is only expected to grow by 2 percent from 2014 to 2024, many librarians have forgone bookkeeping and cataloging for specializing in multimedia and taking on research- and technology-oriented projects such as digitizing archives.”
Is Watching Women’s Gymnastics As Morally Fraught As With Boxing And NFL Football?
Boxing and (especially) American football have long histories and devoted fans, but there’s more and more unease as awareness grows of the brain damage athletes in those sports can sustain. Since gymnastics became popular in the 1970s, “we know more … the sport’s history of sexual and emotional abuse, its amplifications of adolescent body-image problems, and its complicated coach-gymnast relationships. The sport’s obsessive focus on the body and self-presentation is like kerosene poured on the flame of female adolescent self-scrutiny.”
What Are The Most Popular Songs Right Now? It’s Increasingly Difficult To Tell
Stream, steal, or buy: Those are your choices. The premium streaming services represent just one batch of countless channels by which consumers can hear music. And so Billboard now bears the complex task of incorporating traffic from an ever-widening variety of platforms — YouTube, Vevo, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Pandora, Vine, Twitter, etc. — into a standardized accounting that ranks all these songs together.
Diversity-In-Casting Arguments Crop Up Again, This Time Over A Concert Performance
The project in question is the in-progress stage adaptation of the 1998 Dreamworks animated feature The Prince of Egypt, about the life of Moses. The script and score will get their first public reading in a free outdoor performance next month on Long Island, and a social media fracas broke out over the false impression that the cast for the reading is all-white. (In fact, five out of the 15 Equity performers currently engaged are nonwhite.)
St. Louis Symphony Reports Rise In Ticket Sales And Attendance
Total ticket sales for all performances reached $6.87 million, up 3.8 percent compared with last season. Even though there are three fewer concerts this year, attendance rose more than 1 percent to 190,817, officials said.
Composer For Blue Man Group’s Early Shows Sues For $150M In Royalties
“[Ian] Pai, who helped compose many of the show’s wordless songs and served as the musical director for shows in several cities, … [is] asserting that he only recently learned that he’s been underpaid for decades for contributions integral to Blue Man’s success.”
Photographer Puts Her Images In Public Domain; Getty Picks Them Up And Charges Others To License Them; Photographer Sues Getty For $1 Billion
“In December, documentary photographer Carol Highsmith received a letter from Getty Images accusing her of copyright infringement for featuring one of her own photographs on her own website. It demanded payment of $120. This was how Highsmith came to learn that stock photo agencies Getty and Alamy had been sending similar threat letters and charging fees to users of her images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress for use by the general public at no charge.”
The Women Of Abstract Expressionism – Why Were They Written Out Of Art History?
“We talk to Denver Art Museum curator Gwen Chanzit about her important exhibition, speak with the artist Judith Godwin – an Abstract Expressionist who has largely been ignored in the history books, I travel to the Upper West Side to get feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s thoughts on the matter, and finally I chat with curator and critic Karen Wilkin, who was friends with Helen Frankenthaler.” (podcast)
The Problem With Yahoo: The Snapchat Generation Barely Even Knows What It Is
Om Malik: “The $4.8-billion acquisition of Yahoo … by a telephone company, Verizon, is a watershed moment in the history of the Internet. It caps off an era – Web 1.0, for lack of a better term – that will soon be remembered much like telegraphs and rotary phones.”
The Real Problem With Playing Pokémon Go At The Holocaust Museum Isn’t (Just) A Lack Of Respect
“The museum, like the video game, relies on careful curation to furnish an alternate experience of reality. Playing Pokémon Go at a memorial isn’t just disrespectful – it interferes with the augmented reality you’re already in.”
Why Are Zombies Scary? It’s Not Because They Want To Eat Your Brains, Even Metaphorically
“Zombies belong to the realm of horror stories that reappear over and over throughout history – from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day sci-fi – because they raise a more terrifying fear than merely that of a gory death: the threat of eternal life.”
Here Comes The First Feature Film (Co-)Written By Artificial Intelligence Software
Perhaps fittingly, it will be a horror film. “Impossible Things will be partly written by software that has analysed successes in the genre [and] uses that data to formulate a script that [incorporates] successful plot points. The goal: engineer a hit film.”
Einojuhani Rautavaara, Dean Of Finnish Composers, Dead At 87
He was, after Sibelius, “the most famous and popular of Finnish composers … In an output running to over 150 compositions, with dozens of orchestral pieces, Rautavaara’s eight symphonies are one of his important contributions to 20th-century music.” The Seventh, titled Angel of Light, “marked a new breakthrough for Rautavaara to a newer, wider audience, his music no longer the preserve of the critics and cognoscenti.”
Pope Julius III’s Nymphaeum Restored By Mysterious Japanese Donors (What’s A Nymphaeum?)
A nymphaeum is a type of old Roman monument meant to honor nymphs, and this 16th-century version in the Villa Giulia (Julius’s palace) was moldy and monochromatic and overgrown until these anonymous Far Eastern donors came forward.
New Boss Has Big Plans For Texas Ballet Theater
Incoming executive director Vanessa Logan’s goals include “joining the national touring circuit and expanding the group’s presence in Dallas … [as well as making TBT] a tier-one ballet company within the next 10 years. For that, the organization will have to reach an annual budget of at least $14 million.”
The Big Plans For Cambodia’s Floating Arts Center
“The arts are an integral part of the fabric of [Phnom Penh], but, most days, art isn’t a major priority for those scraping by in one of the world’s poorest countries. That’s just one reason why The Boat is so important.”
We Need To Think About Anger – And Philosophy Can (Really!) Help Us Do It
Martha Nussbaum looks at two of anger’s main drivers, loss of status and the desire for payback, and looks to Aristotle and Nelson Mandela for examples of how to deal with them.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.27.16
Recent Listening In Brief: Zeitlin On Shorter
Denny Zeitlin, Solo Piano: Early Wayne (Sunnyside) Over the years, Zeitlin has made clear his affinity for Wayne Shorter’s compositions. In previous Sunnyside albums he explored … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-07-27
Community within
As a community artist, I operate with the philosophy that creativity is a pledge to embrace and value one’s own existence and self-reflection is a process for changing awareness and behavior. … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2016-07-27
A misshapen Venn Diagram
Erin Salazar, is an artist, muralist, seamstress, public art curator and Creative Community Fellow. She shares what community means to her in this time lapse video: … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2016-07-27
Actively making a place better
I’d like to share these images of what Community means to me. These images were taken recently outside the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York. The Reformed Protestant congregation hung 49 rainbow flags along … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2016-07-27
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US Tourist Mistakenly Locked On Roof Of Milan Cathedral Overnight
“Police said the 23-year-old man told them that he was in the bathroom when security made a final pass, and found himself locked inside the landmark cathedral when he went to leave on Monday night. He decided not to create alarm and spent the night on the spired rooftop, reporting himself to authorities when they reopened on Tuesday.”