Ideas The New Class System "There is a big academic debate on social class as opposed to income. There are sociologists who argue that social class is in decline in regard to lifestyle, consumption factors and politics as coherent, meaningful groups." One study finds that "lumping people into big groups like the 'working' or 'middle' class on the basis of their incomes ultimately had little to do with what they bought, what they watched or whom they voted for. Rather, cultural and political similarities are more likely to be found among people who are in the same profession or do the same type of work, reinforced first by educational training and then by work experiences." The New York Times 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 5:30 pm Putting The NY Public Library On The Web The New York Public Library is testing a database that will put images of much of its collection online. "At its inception, the Image Gate database contains approximately 80,000 images spanning a wide range of subjects. This number will grow as The Library digitizes more images; this phased rollout will end in 2004, when the site will include more than 600,000 images." New York Public Library 01/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 2:11 pm Visual Arts Institution On The Edge The Royal Ontario Museum is undergoing a massive reinvention. But "move inside and dig around for a couple of weeks and you discover an institution at a dramatic point of transformation, teetering on the brink of either spectacular triumph or spectacular failure. Curators decry their inability to fend off embarrassing professional gaffes, and tensions are running high as they contemplate the implications of the museum's dramatic building program." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 1:59 pm Music Rethinking Prokofiev "I think we're on the threshold of a renaissance in Prokofiev's reputation. Five years after his death, there was a Prokofiev memorial evening at the Moscow Conservatory where they spoke of his work only in superlatives. After that, his reputation came to be overshadowed somewhat by that of Dmitri Shostakovich. Now it's coming to be understood that Prokofiev and Shostakovich were equally important; that if Shostakovich was Michelangelo, Prokofiev was Leonardo da Vinci." The Guardian (UK) 01/17/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 2:22 pm British Orchestras - Where Are The Women? So the Vienna Philharmonic has hired its first woman player. Britain has little to be smug about on this issue. "A random sample of five British symphony orchestras suggests that gender ratios vary wildly: the Hallé and the BBC Symphony may not do badly (the Hallé has 45 men and 38 women; the BBCSO 55 men, 37 women), but orchestras such as the London Philharmonic and Bournemouth Symphony trail, splitting at 52-23 and 45-26 respectively. And the London Symphony Orchestra, widely regarded as being the country's most successful, has 77 male members to 22 female. When you start looking at how many women occupy principal positions within the sections, the disparity looks even greater." The Guardian (UK) 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 2:19 pm English National Opera Cuts Chorus The English National Opera is in deep trouble. In its latest move, the company proposes to cut a third of its chorus. "The drastic cut comes a week before the company, which is at least £1.2m in the red, puts a radical restructuring before the Arts Council in the hope of a "once and for all" bail-out. With a showdown with the orchestra looming, and vote of no confidence yesterday in the management by the singers, their union refused to rule out the threat of strikes." The Guardian (UK) 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 2:07 pm Does Pop Music Cause People To Kill? So rap music is responsible for gun violence in the UK? If that's true, what about all sorts of other music and pop influences? "What is concerning is that, in focusing on hip-hop and gun crime, our great and good are overlooking myriad other horrors caused by pop music. Gun culture is only the tip of a vast iceberg of malaises for which pop is responsible - an iceberg upon which the ship of state might very well founder beyond salvage." The Guardian (UK) 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 2:04 pm Opera Babes - Music Vs Image Sony is counting on big sales by the Opera Babes to revive its classical division. "The act carries an us-against-the-world whiff of female empowerment. Some might think the message is undercut by the chests and cheekbones poking out from the CD booklet, and the slinky skirts and animal-print outfits they model in the many photos." Perhaps the marketing is overwhelming the music? The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 1:00 pm Arts Issues The Culture Minister With Lots Of Big Opinions Kim Howells, the UK's minister for tourism, film and broadcasting has been pronouncing on culture - that the Turner Prize winners are a disgrace, and that rap music incites violence. Does he "regret shooting his mouth off so regularly, or does he see it as his role to make challenging statements on cultural themes? "I haven't really been shooting my mouth off. What I'm concerned about is a coarsening of sensibilities. People think that makes me a fuddy-duddy." The Guardian (UK) 01/17/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 2:15 pm Lots Of Buyers But Not Enough Funding - What's Wrong With This Picture? People are lining up to go to Scottish arts events. But there's a funding crisis. "What explains this bizarre paradox? Money is cascading into arts events, yet nothing is more wearisomely familiar at this time of year than ferocious in-fighting among arts organisations and angry rhetoric about 'mean' and 'philistine' politicians starving theatres, opera houses and galleries of vitally needed funds. Yet, all around, more money than ever is going into the arts. So what is going wrong?" The Scotsman 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 12:42 pm Copyright Extension - What We Lose Larewnce Lessig, the attorney arguing to overturn the extension of US copyright before the US Supreme Court, writes about the Court's rejection of his arguement. "Missing from the opinion was any justification for perhaps the most damaging part of Congress's decision to extend existing copyrights for 20 years: the extension unnecessarily stifles freedom of expression by preventing the artistic and educational use even of content that no longer has any commercial value." The New York Times 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 12:36 pm What's Next "Some on the public interest side are tempted to lament what could be called the 'Dred Scott case for culture,' unjustifiably locking up content that deserves to be free. In fact, the ruling gives public interest activists both motivation and ammunition in the continuing battle against the excessive expansion of the power to control information and culture." Salon 01/17/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 11:56 am Truth About Consequences "Who got robbed? You did. I did. Who won? Endlessly greedy media barons will now collect billions from works that should have long since entered the public domain. Like public lands and the oceans, the public domain is controlled by no one - a situation that infuriates people who believe that nothing can have value unless some person or corporation owns it. The public domain is the pool of knowledge from which new art and scholarship have arisen over the centuries." San Jose Mercury-News 01/17/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 11:53 am Theatre Theatre Cancels Show When Critic Decides To Attend Preview When the George Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey found out that the New York Times was sending a critic to review a preview performance for its new show, the director decided to cancel the performance. The theater's staff contacted all 166 ticket holders for the performance to tell them of the cancellation. Says the director: "When it became clear to me that the artistic process was going to be violated and that trust between the press and the theater was going to be violated, I had to put a stop to it. I had no recourse. I could not turn this individual critic away from the performance; that would be discrimination. But I could stop the performance." Home News Tribune (New Jersey) 01/17/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 12:08 pm Publishing How The Book Industry Has Changed "After 20 or more years of consolidation and commercialization, the book publishing industry and most of its components — authors, agents, publishers, marketers and retailers — have resigned themselves to the businesslike, margin-driven culture of the industry today. Even if some still pine for the gentlemanly days of gentlemen editors, most are too busy trying to get the attention of Oprah Winfrey or NBC's 'Today' show to waste time on nostalgia." The New York Times 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 5:29 pm True Lies - The Novelist's Responsibility Do novelists have a responsibility to make their fiction true? That is - is it permissible to change historical dates of events to fit the stories you tell, even if they're the historical dates or events aren't "accurate"? The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/18/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 1:54 pm That's Rich - Frank Goes Back To A&E So is Frank Rich's move from the New York Times' Op-ed page to the A&E section a promotion or a demotion? “Knowing that I had no interest in running a department and never had," Rich says, NYT editor Howell Raines said "he would exploit my ideas to advise him and a new culture editor.” Which makes Erlanger the manager and Rich, essentially kibitzing, a sort of “nanny-in-residence” to the former Berlin bureau chief, as one Times reporter put it. New York Magazine 01/13/03 Posted: 01/18/2003 12:00 pm Previously: Frank Rich Rejoins NYT Culture Pages Frank Rich, considered the most-feared theatre critic in New York during the 1980s when he was theatre critic at the New York Times, is moving back to the NYT culture pages. For the past eight years Rich has been writing an op-ed on the NYT editorial pages. "We plan for his column to be an anchor of the Arts & Leisure section. In addition, he will work closely with Steve Erlanger, our newly appointed cultural news editor, in planning coverage and the overall design of the culture pages." The New York Times 01/08/03