RJ Rushmore: “A year inside of ‘Philadelphia’s community-engagement juggernaut'” – that’s the city’s famous Mural Arts Program – “has taught me a lot. It’s made me fall deeper in love with street art than ever before, and it’s also helped me to better understand the medium’s shortcomings. Here are a few observations.”
Quincy Jones: The Music Industry Doesn’t Exist Anymore
“Honey, we have no music industry. There’s 90% piracy everywhere in the world. They take everything. At the recent South by Southwest [an annual music festival in Austin], they had over 1,900 musicians, but fans didn’t know where to go. You can’t get an album out because nobody buys an album anymore.”
How Did Art Auctions Become “Curated Shows?”
“In a market where getting the best material for a sale is essential, the formula has obvious attractions: it is a new story to tell clients, and the inclusion of some masterpieces in a sale can persuade other consignors to give up their treasures.”
Why Summer Isn’t For Reading
It’s for re-reading instead: “I pull this or that beat-up, food-spattered volume off a shelf, whimsically hopeful that this time around it will be a different story: Anna Karenina will skip the train tracks and Sydney Carton will avoid the guillotine. Nothing has changed. But of course everything has changed.”
What Is Lincoln Center’s Place In The Arts World?
“If a new generation of middle-class Americans chooses to move back into the inner cities, large-scale performing-arts centers might start to make fiscal and artistic sense. But even if that should happen, Lincoln Center will never again be culturally influential in the way that it was in the ’70s and ’80s.”
A Contradictory Story About When (And How) Harper Lee’s Novel Was Found
“The discrepancy between the two accounts raises questions about whether the book was lost and accidentally recovered, and about why Ms. Lee would not have sought to publish it earlier.”
In Its Most Challenging Year, Whitworth Museum Wins £100,00 Art Fund Prize As UK Museum Of The Year
“The Whitworth underwent the largest physical transformation in its 125-year history in 2014. The project doubled its size and connected the building with its surrounding park. During its redevelopment the Whitworth continued to offer pop-up projects all over the city, maintaining established audiences and building new ones ahead of its February reopening.”
Did Smooth Jazz Die On The Radio Because Of Bad Ratings Data?
“Smooth jazz was at the edge of a cliff. The Portable People Meter could have helped pull the format back or push it over. It turns out PPM gave it a swift kick right over the edge.”
Misty Copeland’s Promotion At ABT Signals New Era For Company
“Along with Ms. Copeland’s ascendance, the company’s other, less-heralded promotions announced Tuesday suggest a new era at Ballet Theatre—one with a stronger emphasis on promoting dancers who have made a commitment to the company, especially in the early stages of their training.”
Sotheby’s Just Had Its Biggest Ever Sale Of Contemporary Art
“Warhol’s ‘One Dollar Bill (Silver Certificate)’ fetched £20.9m, smashing its pre-sale estimate of £13-18m. This was Warhol’s first such work of a dollar, painted by hand in 1962. A bidding frenzy powered Lucien Freud’s 2002 work ‘Four Eggs on a Plate’, which was originally a gift to the late Duchess of Devonshire, to sell for £989,000, nearly ten times the pre-sale estimate of £100-£150,000.”
Big Changes Ahead For American Public Media? (An Ominous Memo Leaks)
“Some inside the public-radio walls are speculating that the reason for the siren has to do with the struggle to get institutional funding, a fairly common problem these days. An APM spokesperson denies that is the case. In fact, this person says, APM is growing and is working under a balanced budget.”
Paris Okays Its First Skyscraper In 40 Years – A Giant Pyramid
“A common sight in most major capitals, skyscrapers have faced deep opposition in Paris ever since the 300-metre high Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 Universal Exposition. Paris’s socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, diluted opposition to the new Tour Triangle last November after some of its planned office space was sacrificed for childcare and cultural centres.”
The Smithsonian’s Air And Space Museum Is Falling Apart (Here’s Why)
“The Air and Space Museum, designed by Hellmuth Obata and Kassabaum Architects (HOK), is marked by its four marble-clad pavilions, separated by three recessed steel-and-glass atria. Construction started in 1972 and continued until the museum opened on July 1, 1976. It has undergone basic repairs since, but the systems and materials are running on borrowed time in part because certain building components were “downgraded” as part of the original construction to reduce cost and hit the stunningly low $40 million budget.”
So This Is The End Of iTunes
“Apple still makes billions per year on iTunes downloads. But Spotify, Pandora, and other startups have eroded that business, first with their free streaming services and more recently with a paid subscription model. It’s been clear for a while now that streaming is the music industry’s future: iTunes Store sales dropped an alarming 14 percent in 2014 while revenue in the streaming sector jumped 28 percent. So Apple had a choice: Hold fast to a fading business model, or hasten the transition by getting out in front of it. It made the only sensible call.”
Russian Wins Tchaikovsky Piano Competition
“Russian Dmitry Masleyev on Wednesday won first prize for the piano at the prestigious Tchaikovsky international music competition in Moscow.”
Are The Arts Dying Because Of Indifference?
“For while the fine arts can survive a hostile or ignorant public, or even a fanatically prudish one, they cannot long survive an indifferent one. And that is the nature of the present Western response to art, visual and otherwise: indifference.”
Most Expensive West End Theatre Ticket Tops £200 (A Complete List Of Ticket Prices)
“Top price seats for The Book of Mormon have reached a record-high of £202.25. This is an increase of a third on last year’s most expensive seat in the survey, which came in at £152.25 and was also The Book of Mormon.”
The Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto We All Know And Love? Turns Out It’s Not The Version The Composer Intended
“You can hear the differences immediately. Those massive chords we’re all so used to at the start of the piano part? They’re supposed to be arpeggiated as lyrical, harp-like consecrations of the harmony, not bashed out like military hammer-blows, and they were marked to be played at a lower dynamic than they are in the Siloti version, and they’re also an octave lower.”
Why Do Songwriters Use The Same Titles Over And Over Again?
Copyright law doesn’t stop songwriters picking song titles that have already been used, unless that title has acquired a “secondary meaning”. So, if you decided to publish a song called “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, a court would probably rule that you were trying to cause deliberate confusion.
A Havana Biennial Of Change And What Art Can Still Do
“There is much we can learn from the 12th Havana Biennial — a performed, dematerialized show — about what art can be, where it can exist and who it is for. From Tania Bruguera’s performance, we are learning what art can do — risky, truth-revealing things — for artist and audience alike. It may well be that her performance, end not in sight, is the one for which this biennial will be remembered.”