Visual Arts Virtual Marbles The British Museum still doesn't plan to return the Elgin marbles to Greece anytime soon, despite growing support for such a transfer, but a new exhibit in the UK shows what the marbles would look like were both pieces to be reunited in Athens. The exhibit uses virtual reality technology to simulate the joining. BBC 01/02/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 5:10 am WTC Glare - Too Much Publicity? The glare of publicity focused on choosing a building plan for the World Trade Center site is probably greater than on any other project in recent memory. But not all the architects involved are happy about it. "Many have privately expressed reservations about the designs' details, the handling of the competition and even the spotlight in which the contestants now stand." The New York Times 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 8:40 pm Peripheral Matters - Art Of Frames Many artists spend a lot of time agonizing over how their work will be framed. But frames get no respect. "The market in images has no room for frames. Magazines, newspapers, exhibition catalogues and art books act as if they don't exist, cropping them out of reproductions even when the painters saw them as integral parts of their work." The Guardian (UK) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 6:51 pm V&A Attendance Up 111% In 2002 - Free Admission Has UK Museum Visits Soaring In the first year since admission charges at major British museums were dropped, attendance has soared. "The most dramatic increase has been at the V&A, which has seen a 111% increase, helped by the opening of its beautiful £31m British galleries. The effect at the other museums in South Kensington, west London, where a family visit would have cost around £30 in charging days, has been almost as spectacular. Numbers at the Science Museum and Natural History Museum have gone up 100% and 83% respectively." The Guardian (UK) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 6:37 pm Shock Of The Old What's the next big thing in British art? "Prepare yourself to be truly shocked. For the next big thing in modern British art is the New Gentleness. And it involves lots of that supposedly endangered species, the painter. Massed watercolourists are not about to storm Tate Britain and ransack the Turner prize show, but something is stirring, though no one dares to use the word movement." The Guardian (UK) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 6:32 pm The Problems With Museums Christine Temin believes American museums need help. "Museums in this country desperately need not just financial help but help in defining their mission, their audience, their ethics. Over the past couple of decades they've made considerable noise about trading elitism for accessibility, and that's certainly backed up by, among other things, a steep increase in education programs, some more effective than others. But $20 tickets to special exhibitions and $15 general admission - the current fees at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston - don't exactly make the museum more accessible." Boston Globe 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 5:32 pm Music Customizing Your Record Collection Vox Music Group has announced that it will burn individual CD copies of any part of its vast out-of-print catalog through a web site, eliminating the traditional process of a small repeat pressing, which often has been quite unprofitable. The announcement is exciting in part because it may signal a new wave of such 'individual' pressings by other companies, but also because Vox's old recordings are some of the most extensive and sought after in the business. Washington Post 01/02/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 6:45 am Need A Job? Try Pittsburgh. When an orchestra is searching for a new music director or executive director, it can be difficult to maintain a cohesive sound and/or business strategy, since such searches take months to years, and generally involve a general reimagining of the whole organization. So imagine the current stress level at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where they are searching for a new managing director, a new board president, a new music director, a new resident conductor and a new vice president of development. Oh, and don't forget about that pesky deficit, either. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/01/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 6:39 am How To Start A Piano Tuner Riot "Don A. Gilmore, an amateur piano player and professional engineer from Kansas City, Mo, has developed an electronic system that he says could allow pianists to tune their own instruments at the touch of a button." The system relies on heated strings, electricity, and an elaborate computer program which 'remembers' an initial tuning and can replicate it under almost any circumstances. The self-tuning models won't be cheap, but then, neither are piano tuners. The New York Times 01/02/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 6:20 am Bang On A Can The latest fad being embraced by the type of folks who rented tae-bo tapes by the case back in the late '90s, and swore by their carrot juice in the '80s is "taiko, one of the biggest crazes to hit the boomer generation since pilates and green tea." It's not a new idea, really: taiko combines the idea of music as personal therapy with the undeniable truth that it's fun to make a lot of noise and bang on stuff. But this is more than a new-age experiment in self-esteem. Taiko ensembles are springing up all over, and the noise they make is real music, taken very seriously by those who create it. The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 01/02/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 6:07 am No Strads for New Jersey? "New Jersey philanthropist Herbert Axelrod's 2-for-1 challenge grant, issued last Monday to help the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra buy 30 of his rare, 17th- and 18th-century Italian string instruments, has so far only netted a few thousand dollars for the NJSO. For every dollar contributed to the orchestra by today, Axelrod offered to take two dollars off the purchase price of $25 million, to a maximum of a $10 million drop in cost. Yesterday, though, it appeared that only a few thousand would be coming off the price tag," and the orchestra will likely not be able to complete the sale. Newark Star-Ledger 12/31/02 Posted: 01/02/2003 5:16 am Life After The Moscow Conservatory Fire The fire that damaged the venerable Moscow Conservatory has crippled one of the city's great cultural institutions. "As aspiring performers and composers took final exams last week, there was no electricity, limited telephone service and a trickle of heat from an emergency system. A week after the Dec. 17 blaze, 16 precious concert grand pianos sat damaged or destroyed. Bundles of canvas hoses still dangled from the stairwells, and the air stank of soot." San Francisco Chronicle (Baltimore Sun) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 8:45 pm SF Opera - Taking the Bold Road San Francisco Opera has an almost $8 million deficit. But the company doesn't seem particularly worried. Rather than sit back and play it safe, Pamela Rosenberg, the company's general director, has ambitious plans. "We are not going to get through this economic downturn and come out the other end by replacing quality with mediocrity," Ms. Rosenberg, who has set the company on course to becoming America's most adventurous opera house, said in a recent telephone interview." The New York Times 01/01/02 Posted: 01/01/2003 8:35 pm Homeless Choir Packs It In After 1000 Performances A homeless choir formed in Montreal in a men's shelter in 1996 to sing Christmas carols for spare change in the city's subway, has finally disbanded, a thousand performances later. "The group achieved international recognition, including an invitation to sing at Paris's busiest subway stations in 1998. The choir also released two CDs, was the subject of a book and a TV program and performed at the Just for Laughs comedy festival as a free street act." Why quit? Many of the singers found jobs and their lives became more stable. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 6:25 pm The Man Who's Building A Concert Hall Glenn KnicKrehm is builing a performing arts complex in Boston. He's putting $20 million of his own into the project, is raising the rest, and is steeping himself in acoustic theory. "He was a transplanted Californian who loved the Boston area but believed there was a hole in the cultural scene. There weren't many prime spots for performance. And those that did exist, Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall, were run by massive cultural institutions. Smaller arts groups scrambled for open dates in second-tier spaces." Boston Globe 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 5:27 pm People More Than Just The 'Wrapping Artist' A new exhibit at a private estate in Florida is providing a unique look into the process and development of one of the world's best-known and most controversial artists. Christo, the large-scale installation artist who is reportedly in talks to mount a massive work in New York's Central Park, may be best-known for wrapping the Reichstag, but he and his collaborator insist that they are neither one-trick ponies nor cultural commentators. They believe in letting art just be art, even if their work occasionally causes political firestorms. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/02/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 5:57 am Who Was Shakespeare? The debate over who wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare has spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists, with Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Queen Elizabeth I all contenders as the ultimate pretender. But some Shakespeare devotees think there's some pretty shoddy detective work behind the drive to discredit the Bard. "For example, elaborate scenarios have to be concocted for the lives of Marlowe, Rutland, Oxford, and Elizabeth I because they all died many years before the final play was written." Boston Globe 01/02/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 5:31 am Trapnell Quits As Guthrie Managing Director Susan Trapnell, who came to Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre a year ago as managing director, has quit the theatre, citing personal reasons. "By the time the announcement was made Tuesday, Trapnell already had returned to Seattle, where she was executive director of the Seattle Arts Commission and managing director of the nonprofit playhouse A Contemporary Theatre." The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 9:13 pm Theatre Broadway's Newfound Success Historically, Broadway's success as a national theatre district has come from the tremendous number of tourists it draws to its glitzy, glittering shows. But new figures show that Broadway has rebounded from its post-9/11 largely by targeting New York audiences - in fact, New Yorkers accounted for a majority of tickets sold for the first time in recent years. BBC 01/02/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 5:03 am Crystal Ball gazing On Broadway Which hit show will fold this year without returning its investment? Who's the next big star on Broadway? Michael Riedel makes his predictions about the bright lights of Broadway... New York Post 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 8:31 pm Practice Makes Perfect? (Or Is It A Myth?) How long does it take to produce good work in the theatre? "Cash-strapped Canadian theatres have often complained that they can't afford enough time to do their best work, but this long-held grievance got a particularly vigorous airing in 2002 as directors hotly debated whether they were facing a crisis - or a myth." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 6:14 pm Publishing A "20 Best" List To Watch For Given Its Track Record Granta is naming its "20 Best of Young British Novelists," an exercise it indulges in every ten years. So what's the Grant track record? "When you look at the names on the original 1983 and follow-up 1993 lists, the hit-rate was impressive: Amis, Barker, Barnes, Boyd, McEwan, Rushdie, Swift, Tremain on the former; Banks, de Bernières, AL Kennedy, Kureishi, Phillips, Self and Winterson on the latter; with Ishiguro and Mars-Jones, by virtue of their early-flowering promise, on both." The Guardian (UK) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 6:44 pm Speak This - Controversy of the Spoken Word "So what if Vancouver has become one of the hottest venues on the North American spoken-word circuit? Is there any correlation between the groundswell of so-called 'street poetry' in Vancouver and the West Coast's domination of all those august literary prizes?" Perhaps... but perhaps not. Even those who practice the art can't agree. Some of them don't even like one another. And they don't like the publicity. Or even necessarily the artform. "To treat poetry as performance is crude and extremely revolting." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 6:20 pm Media Redefining 'Hero' in Beijing Every nation has had its tyrants, and China had a doozy 2,200 years ago in the emperor Qin Shihuang, whom historians have compared to Stalin in his ruthlessness and diregard for his people. But a new film by acclaimed director Zhang Yimou is making waves in modern China for its sympathetic portrayal of the emperor. The film, Hero, "despite its complicated subject, has delighted Beijing's mandarins, who are submitting it as China's nominee for best foreign film at the Academy Awards. And it has infuriated some Chinese critics, who have panned Mr. Zhang's plot for promoting a philosophy of servitude."The New York Times 01/02/03 Posted: 01/02/2003 6:27 am Movie Musicals That Never Went Away Many are touting the movie "Chicago" as a return to movie musicals. But in truth, the movie musical never really went away, it adapted. "Though Broadway adaptations have largely fallen on their dancing feet since 'Grease' became a $378 million hit in 1978, the spirit of the musical is alive and well on film, from 'Moulin Rogue' to 'Billy Eliot'."Denver Post 01/01/03 Posted: 01/01/2003 5:48 pm