Ideas Revolution - How Digital Will Create A New World Order A new book from Sweden says the digital revolution - "the move from a society controlled by printed and broadcast mass media to an information age that provides interactivity is 'at least as dramatic as the move from feudalism to capitalism'. The more information technology dominates, the more culture, society and the economy change. It’s the birth of a 'whole new world' — a world undergoing a paradigm shift right under our noses. Say goodbye to the nation state and governments. Capitalism will be no more and its chief proponent, the bourgeoisie, will gradually lose power and become a mere 'underclass'." Mail & Guardian (South Africa) 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 11:02 am Visual Arts A Hundred Years Of Buying Art "A century after it began with 53 members paying one guinea a year each, the National Art Collections Fund, now often known as the Art Fund, is Britain's leading independent arts charity with 90,000 members paying a minimum of £32 annually. During those 100 years, it has bought or helped to buy 477,384 objects for British museums and art galleries with grants totalling almost £38 million. If past funding is converted into today's equivalent sums, the NACF has helped public collections to the tune of £84,173,626." The Telegraph (UK) 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 4:26 pm Are Easter Island Stone Heads Authentic? Are two large Easter Island stone heads for sale in a Miami gallery really 1000 years old? "The Chilean government, which claimed the Pacific island in 1888, is investigating whether the pieces are genuine antiques smuggled from Chile or skillful reproductions. An expert on the island's archaeology says they seem to be carved from island stone with modern tools." Archeologists are on their way to investigate... The Guardian (UK) 01/11/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 1:05 pm Dallas Museum At 100 The Dallas Museum of Art is 100 years old. "The museum has grown enormously over the past century. From a tiny handful of paintings occupying one corner of a room in the Dallas Public Library, the collection has grown to 22,000 objects filling a building of 340,000 square feet." Dallas Morning News 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 11:33 am Music HipHopping To Ubiquity "Hip-hop is everywhere these days, dictating fashion and music, rewriting opera and hawking products from Sprite to Budweiser on TV. Even the Pillsbury Dough Boy tried rapping out a beat in a recent commercial. The mass media is now so full of hip-hop idioms like 'stankin' (which means good) and 'mo betta' (sex) and beeper codes like '1812' (war) that the average Joe is having a real hard time, basically, getting jiggy wit it all." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/11/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 12:53 pm For Hire - Boston Symphony Hires Without Levine Hiring musicians is one of an orchestra music director's biggest responsibilities. "A music director has to put his stamp on the orchestra." But James Levine, chosen to be the Boston Symphony's next music director, wasn't able to begin the job for three years. In the meantime, what about hiring players? Surprisingly, Levine isn't part of the process - the players themselves will choose who gets hired. It's an unusual arrangement - only one other US orchestra chooses players this way - Levine's Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Boston Globe 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 9:54 am How Police Recovered Stolen Beatles Tapes Five hundred tapes of the Beatles' recording sessions from 1969 that were stolen in 1970 have been recovered in a warehouse near Amsterdam. "While the tapes, enough to fill 15 CDs, will be returned to their legal owner, record company EMI, they could prove to be a source of further tension between the two surviving band members and the estates of their former colleagues, Harrison and Lennon. The Get Back sessions were dark, tense days for the Beatles and the tapes display the most intimate, and potentially embarrassing, details of that tension." The Age (Melbourne) 01/13/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 9:09 am Arts Issues The Right Sort Of Audience (How Absurd!) National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner thanks the British government for its generous funding. But it's time to stop asking artists to do the heavy lifting for social good, he writes. "There's evidently a thing called the young audience and everybody accepts that it's a good thing. And there's also a white, middle class, middle-aged audience and it's a very, very bad thing indeed. Until recently, the National Theatre's audience was getting worse reviews than some of its shows. Then somebody noticed some kids in the house with studs through their noses, and the reviews looked up. We have to call a halt to this. There's nothing inherently good about any particular audience. We mustn't judge the success of an artistic enterprise by its ability to pull in an Officially Approved Crowd." The Observer (UK) 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 1:18 pm Chicago's New Performing Arts Center - Will It Be Used? (Will It Be Paid For?) Chicago's new $53-million, 1,500-seat Music and Dance Theater Chicago is under construction despite a shortfall of $13 million. The theatre is designed to be a home to many of the city's mid-size arts groups, but there's some debate about how many of them will really use it. "Many of the groups lack the financial resources to make a go of it in this new space without a lot of new financial help. Some of them have struggled to pay their bills at the Athenaeum, which charges about as much per week as the new theater will charge per day." Says one critic: "I don't think we need that theater. But it's not about need. It's about being downtown and building a monument. So what can you do?" Chicago Tribune 01/12/02 Posted: 01/12/2003 10:38 am People Love Resigns From Dallas Theatre Edith Love, credited with stabilizing the Dallas Theatre Center's finances as the theatre's managing director, has resigned. "Before the Theater Center hired Ms. Love, it faced a $1.75 million deficit. By the 1999-2000 season, the company was in the black. Though the recent economic slump has caused a drop in donations and cancellation of some productions, the Theater Center's finances have remained stable as the annual budget has grown, from $3.9 million in 1996 to $5.5 million this year." Dallas Morning News 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 11:47 am Theatre Grandage Takes Over Donmar Michael Grandage is succeeding Sam Mendes running the Donmar Theatre. A scary prospect following a legend? No. "There’s a myth that it’s better for a director to inherit a theatre on its knees and build it up so that, when you leave, you can say ‘Look what I’ve done!’. But to inherit a theatre with an international brand name and a legacy of excellence means that the sky’s your limit. We already have an audience and actors wanting to come. I could never put on Camus in the first season in an unsuccessful theatre, but here I can, and that’s brilliant.” The Times (UK) 01/11/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 5:03 pm Mackintosh To Invest £20 million In London Theatres Producer Cameron Mackintosh says he'll invest £20 million in fixing up West End theatres in London. "We have a unique treasury of Edwardian and Victorian theatres designed by great architects and we are committed to improving the UK and overseas public's experience of visiting our theatres and the West End. These are important buildings." The Telegraph (UK) 01/10/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 4:51 pm Previously: London's Sick Theatre District Who wants to go to London's West End theatre district anymore? "Whether you travel by car or train, it is a nightmare to get there, and when you arrive the place is squalid. The streets are filthy and poorly lit, there are horribly persistent beggars everywhere, and the place is overrun by groups of marauding yoof, out on the booze and aggressive and foul-mouthed with it. Drug-dealing takes place more or less openly, and the atmosphere is deeply depressing when it isn't downright threatening. Of a policeman on the beat there is hardly ever a sign." The Telegraph (UK) 01/07/03 The New Movie Musical - No Julie Andrews Here... Does the success of "Chicago" and "Moulin Rouge" mean movie musicals are making a comeback? "It wouldn't be the strangest trend to ever sweep through pop culture, but it wasn't that long ago when talking about a revival of movie musicals would have been akin to speculating on the horse-and-buggy craze that was just around the corner. In fact, today's 18-34 crowd has been watching musicals since they were kids, in the form of all the Disney movies that got popped into the VCR whenever mom and dad needed a break." Dallas Morning News 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 11:26 am Publishing Are Literary Prizes Wasted On The Young? Should Granta's list of best young novelists have used age as a criterion? What, after all, does youth have to do with promise when it comes to writing? "Is it pinpointing the best writers of this year alone, or attempting to predict who will cast a shadow over the literary landscape until the announcement of the next list in 2013? The Observer (UK) 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 4:13 pm Married To Competition Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn are married to one another, but they're also finalists for a Whitbread Award and competing. "Perhaps the most startling thing the Frayn/Tomalin news has brought to light is the suspicion - or perhaps it's even a schadenfreudian certainty - that writers must not get on. They are, we seem to imagine, selfish, competitive and vampiric by nature - sucking real life and friendships dry for the sake of fiction." The Observer (UK) 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 1:11 pm University Press Editors - Gatekeepers To Academia To get tenure at a big university, a young professor must publish books. "Recently, chief academic administrators have begun to demand that candidates for tenure publish two books, not just one, because more is somehow better; they actually don't give a damn which presses churn out all these unreadable, uninspiring volumes." But if books are the admittance pass, the book gatekeepers - editors of the university presses - have amazing power over the careers of academics. Is this a good development? Boston Globe 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 10:22 am Art Of Collecting Books Book collectors are book lovers. And book lovers love libraries, right? Uh uh. "Collectors abominate lending libraries. They are graveyards of good books. Everything a librarian does to prepare a book for lending disqualifies it as collectable. Stamps are slammed on the title page, label pockets gummed to the rear pastedown, dust wrappers discarded, covers vulcanised in plastic - or, in those days, a toffee-brown buckram tough enough to withstand acid. Restoring a library book to collectable condition is like trying to return a Kentucky Fried Chicken to the state of health where it can lay an egg." The Age 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 9:29 am Media TV Programming As Ads (Or Is It The Other Way Around?) So viewers are skipping TV ads with their Tivos? Okay, let's just do away with the pretense that programming is anything more than filler between commercials. The WB network is planning a new show in which the ads will be built right into the show itself - product placement on steroids...Los Angeles Times 01/11/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 5:07 pm Violent, Violenter, Violentest A new genre of movie features extreme violence and gore. "The Big Disturbing Set-Piece Scene Of Violence has become its very own raison d'être, irrespective of its place in any supposed narrative order. It's the one scene that will have them running for the exits, the one that will kick-start the controversy, and the one that will ultimately immortalise the movie. 'We've reached a point where there is excessive pressure to show us what we haven't seen before, with or without - but increasingly, without - dramatic or narrative support'." What's behind it?The Observer (UK) 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 1:23 pm Does BBC Play Music Encouraging Violence? Does the BBC play music that "glorifies the gun, homophobic aggression, male chauvinism and drug culture?" The founder of a London recording studio thinks so. "There is no programme of positive black awareness, and there are no music programmes reflecting the large influence roots, lovers' rock, jazz and dub had on Britain." He added that "the producers of certain music shows should share some of the guilt every time a black youth dies by the gun in Britain". The BBC denies the charges.The Guardian (UK) 01/11/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 1:00 pm Is New "Rings" Installment Racist? Is the latest movie installment of the "Lord of the Rings" racist? "In the nearly five decades since "Lord of the Rings" was first published, Tolkien fans were willing to overlook parts of the text some condemned as racially insensitive. In "Rings," it was argued, race was never directly addressed in the book, and physical descriptions of enemy humans were rare. Better to focus on the "Rings'" main themes: of courage, hope and love, of friendship, loyalty and spiritual strength, in the face of a fearsome threat. But like the ghostly faces in the Dead Marshes, that irritating issue of race always lingered just beneath the surface" and with the new movie, some critics are raising the issue.Chicago Tribune 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 10:49 am Dance Getting A Handle On The Financial Choreography Do dance company artistic directors need to know their ways around the balance sheets? Absolutely, says the new generation of AD's. If not, you risk being under the thrall of the business side of the operation. "The infrastructure demands ballets that sell enough tickets to pay the salaries of the staff who sell the ballets. To break that cycle, an artistic director has to have a vision and a strategy. Otherwise, you're trapped into doing 95 Romeo and Juliet's to pay for one new work." The Observer (UK) 01/12/03 Posted: 01/12/2003 1:26 pm