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Monday, March 17




Ideas

Wake Up... Now How Did You Do That? A new book examines the properties of human consciousness. "Scientists tend to concentrate on the locations, mechanisms and functions of consciousness. Philosophers, meanwhile, worry away at problems that used to be very old but, thanks to neuroscience, are now very new again. What has the mind to do with the brain? Is it true, as Descartes argued, that if I think, therefore I am? If so, what precisely does the thinking?" The Telegraph (UK) 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 4:27 pm

Visual Arts

Spectator Sport - Surveiling This Year's Vennice Biennale This summer's Vennice Biennale carries the subtitle of “The dictatorship of the spectator.” So what does it mean? "Is it that the spectator is the artist’s enemy, distanced by a different viewpoint? How important is the spectator anyway at the Biennale? Apparently not enough. One of the stated aims of this year’s show is to increase the number of visitors, which usually nose-dives after the initial crush of the opening week. The last Biennale attracted 243,498 in six months, 30,000 of whom were press who visited in the first three days." The Art Newspaper 03/14/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 10:12 pm

San Francisco's New Asian Palace This week the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco opens in a new home. "The building - the old Main Library in Civic Center - has been deftly restructured inside by Italian architect Gae Aulenti, famous for having transformed the 1900 Gare d'Orsay train station in Paris into the tremendously popular Musee d'Orsay. The overall cost will be $160.5 million, and it gives the Asian Art Museum the kind of prestige and stature to which it has aspired." San Francisco Chronicle 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 7:19 pm

  • Just What Is "Asian" Art Anyway? "At its crudest, 'Asia' as a concept betokens the 'orientalism' that Edward Said famously redefined in terms of Western colonizers' need to understand themselves by contrast with a mysterious - potentially dehumanized - other. The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has a collection deep and extensive enough to awaken glimmers of imagination for the complex material culture of Eastern societies across six millennia." San Francisco Chronicle 03/16/03
    Posted: 03/16/2003 7:14 pm

  • Much To Offer "Modern architects need to develop a more imaginative bag of tricks when they are working alongside the ornate architecture of the past. The Asian Art Museum's new glass-enclosed light courts are dramatic, but they shunt the grand beaux-arts spaces of the old building onto a sidetrack. The rhythms of the original structure are largely ignored by the new, when they should have blended." San Jose Mercury-News 03/16/03
    Posted: 03/16/2003 7:12 pm

Miami Heat - South Florida Steps Up To Latin American Art "A new wave of artists and curators have relocated to South Florida. Dealers and fairs have followed suit and infused Miami with the promise of becoming a capital of contemporary Latin American art." Miami Herald 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 5:51 pm

War Fears As Maastrict Fair Opens The European Fine Art Fair opens in Maastricht with 200 of the world's most prestigious galleries in attendance. "The art and antiques for sale are breathtaking, and are estimated to be worth a total of about £600 million this year. Some 60 per cent of the world's currently available supply of good-quality Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings are on show." But dealers are worried what impact an Iraq war will have. "Maastricht airport once famously ran out of parking space for private jets during the fair, but this year there are fears that there may be plenty of spare tarmac alongside the runway." The Telegraph (UK) 03/17/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 4:21 pm

Music

You Can't Legislate Manners, But Really...It's A Concert... Between ringing cell phones, program rustling and yahoos screaming bravo before the last notes have a chance to die out, concert manners seem to be at an all time low. Peter Dobrin offers a code of conduct he wishes could be adopted by audience members. "It's obviously time to find some pleasant way of reminding visitors how to act. This is not one of those disapproving tsk-tsk reprimands. I'm not in favor of tradition for tradition's sake. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad. On the contrary, I'm trying to make everyone at the concert feel good." Philadelphia Inquirer 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 6:29 pm

Out Of The Garage - Dominating This Year's SXSW Fest This year's SXSW conference in Austin Texas found "many of the acts that generated the most buzz during the five-day lineup of 1,000-plus bands came from outside the country." This year's dominant music: "Garage bands were definitely the rage this year, a trend that felt like overkill by the end of the week. Many of the groups came up through the same Detroit scene that spawned the Stripes, which led to a quip by the singer of the black-clad Motor City band the Electric Six: 'If this were the Olympics, [Detroit] would be like Russia'." Los Angeles Times 03/17/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 5:34 pm

Bob Moog's Back With The World's Greatest Synthesizer - But What's It Called? Forty years ago Bob Moog invented the first synthesizer. It defined electronic music in the 1960s. Now Moog is back with what he calls the greatest synthesizer ever made. It's his first instrument in decades. Only one problem: "British trademark law means that the 70-year-old creative genius cannot sell his synth under the internationally recognised brands of Moog Music or Minimoog, because they have been appropriated by an entrepreneur in Wales." The Independent (UK) 03/14/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 4:13 pm

Why Sarah Vaughan Was One Of The 20th Century's Great Voices A reissue of Sarah Vaughan's recordings give insight into what made her one of the great singers of the 20th Century. Yet she was also careless about protecting her musical gifts. "Essentially, she was correct in her belief that miracles, like her voice itself, not only happen but, like diamonds, are forever. Or, at least, they should come with a lifetime guarantee. Her voice, which ripened with age into plummier, darker depths, really was a like a precious gift from heaven that just kept on giving. It kept on giving, in fact, right up until the lifelong, two-pack-a-day smoker died from lung cancer at 66 in 1990." Hartford Courant 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 3:54 pm

Arts Issues

Cleveland County May Propose Arts Tax Levy Vote The economy might be down, but Cleveland-area politicians are talking about putting a new tax of the arts on a Novermber ballot, hoping to raise $14 million to $18 million per year for the arts. "I think it's definitely time that we have to put our money where our mouth is with this particular industry. We're trying to team up the arts-levy request with another popular issue. We thought a combination request would be an easier sell." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 6:35 pm

Theatre

Virtually Yours - Touring Broadway Offers An E-Ticket Broadway might have fended off the virtual orchestra, but what about traveling Broadway shows? Sure there's a pit and it's got 10-15 musicians working away. But the electronic juice is liberally applied. "It's rare that you don't see a pit orchestra with two if not three synthesizer players, because there's just a whole world of string parts, percussion parts (supplied by the synthesizers)." Rocky Mountain News 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 6:51 pm

What Are We Gonna Do? Cleveland Theatre Struggles With Its Schedule Cleveland Play House said it would announce next season's lineup of plays this Monday. Trouble is, the company began this season with a $3.5 million deficit, and its last two productions haven't done well. And...well...it hasn't exactly figured out what plays will be on next year's lineup. When you start putting play X with play Y and balance it with how many tickets you need to sell, but then you want to accomplish this artistically but can only afford that much risk and...well... there'll be a season... The Plain Dealer 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 6:41 pm

Still Trouble Ahead For The Good Ship Broadway The Broadway musicians strike may be over, but Broadway is facing a number of other headaches. Like more trouble over broadcasting the Tony Awards. And those pesky "theatre restoration" fees theatres have been tacking on to the cast of tickets - turns out the fees are "a violation of New York's Arts and Cultural Affairs Law 25.29." Newsday 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 6:17 pm

Lessons I learned From the Broadway Musicians Strike So what are the lessons from last week's Broadway musicians strike? Frank Rizzo has made a list. At the top is respect for the stagehands union. The stagehands work and musicians lose. The stagehands walk and there's no show. Say it again - the stagehands rule. Other lessons: people inherently like musicians, but distrust producers... Hartford Courant 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 4:02 pm

Publishing

Serious Magazines Get Circulation Boost "Concerned over terrorism, a looming war in Iraq, and a sputtering economy, magazine readers are showing a new gravitas, boosting the circulations of text-intensive, highbrow magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and the New Yorker. Serious magazines saw circulations soar in the second half of 2002, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The Atlantic Monthly, published 10 times a year, saw a 5.1 percent increase to 529,834, and single-copy sales spiked 52.4 percent, the second-largest percentage increase in newsstand sales for general-interest magazines behind celebrity suck-up Us Weekly." Philadelphia Inquirer 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 6:25 pm

Media

Political Cartoons That Move "While many editorial cartoonists use the Internet to exhibit their printed drawings to a broader audience, the Internet's audio and video capabilities have also inspired a few cartoonists to create animated political cartoons for the Web. During the dot-com boom, cartoonists of all kinds, lured by the promise of Internet riches, tried producing online work, both static and animated. When the money stopped flowing, most abandoned the medium. But it may be time for renewed interest in the genre." The New York Times 03/17/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 10:22 pm

Hollywood Makes A Discovery: There's Life After 40 Older actresses are finding better roles in Hollywood these days. "Actresses used to lament that turning 40 was a fast train from playing leading ladies to playing mothers. It still is, frankly, but forward-thinking screenwriters and sexually vital actresses are crafting complex mother characters more reminiscent of Grace Slick than Donna Reed." San Francisco Chronicle 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 10:16 pm

More Cuts For CBC? According to a lobbiest group, Canada's CBC faces "layoffs in journalistic and production staff of between 400 and 1,200 are being predicted All in all, the public broadcaster would suffer nearly $30 million in cuts in fiscal 2003-2004, says the lobby." Toronto Star 03/16/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 7:44 pm

Dance

A New Home For British Dance The new $40 million Laban Center for dance opens in London. "It was nonetheless a daring gamble for a small, relatively unknown institution to embark on building what it claims is the world's largest purpose-built dance center. In the design competition Herzog & de Meuron was apparently chosen because it heeded the demands of the school. "We told them that the heart of our work is theater so the theater should be at the center. Of the six short-listed firms, Herzog & de Meuron was the only one to place the theater in the center of the building." The New York Times 03/17/03
Posted: 03/16/2003 9:23 pm


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