An Older Appreciation Of Music You might think - given the youth-obsession of marketers, that music buyers are almost all in their 20s. Far from it. "The most powerful record buying bloc in America is made up of people over 40. And they're buying a wide variety of music - from newcomers such as Norah Jones and John Mayer, to new work by veteran artists such as James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen. There's more to the story than Baby Boomers flexing their demographic muscles yet again, though America's 81 million 35-to-54-year-olds do outnumber the country's 75 million 15-to-34-year-olds, according to 2000 Census figures. Boomers not only have the critical mass and the cash, they also have an entirely different relationship to music than young people do." Chicago Tribune 03/30/03
Posted: 03/30/2003 7:22 am
More Women Moving Into Museum Leadership As recently as 1989 there were fewer than a dozen women directing American museums. Now there are more than 50. "While there has been an increase in the number of women museum directors, the largest increase has been in the small museums." But for the most part, women haven't cracked the top jobs at larger museums. Boston Herald 03/30/03
Posted: 03/30/2003 7:00 am
Michelangelo "Doodles" being Restored For six weeks in 1530, Michelangelo hid in a little cell-like room while the Medicis wanted him dead. While there, he drew on the walls. "The collection of around 50 'doodles', first discovered by Paolo dal Poggetto in 1975, include a self-portrait, a life-size risen Christ and some sketches experts believe are copies of figures the artist had painted earlier on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel." The drawings are being restored after having badly deteriorated. The Guardian (UK) 03/29/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 6:16 pm
Moshie Safdie And The "Anti-Bilbao" Since the Bilbao Guggenheim opened, no museum can afford to be blase about getting bigger. "Today, no museum Web site worth its salt is without a section on its imminent, or just completed, 'expansion,' 'renovation,' 'renaissance' or 'transformation.' The rhetoric is eerie in its uniformity: The new building will display the museum collection in a 'fundamentally new way.' It will provide the public with a 'richer and deeper experience.' It will be an 'exciting new public space.' And, of course, the café and bookstore will be expanded." Architect Moshe Safdie has come along with a kind of "anti-Bilbao" approach to museum-building. National Post (Canada) 03/30/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 5:40 pm
Bay Area Museum "De-Merger" Hires Some Help A year ago Berkeley's Judah L. Magnes Museum and the Jewish Museum San Francisco decided to merge. But it didn't work out, so the two are "de-merging." And that requires somebody to help pull it off - so the Magnes has hired Joanne Backman as its acting executive director. San Francisco Chronicle 03/29/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 3:13 pm
Deathwatch On CDs "The music industry braces for a future that will involve the death of CD stores and the rise of wireless, pocket-size MP3 players that will enable consumers to access thousands of hours of music at the touch of a button. The only real question is how long it will take for those scenarios to become reality. You'll see CD sections in stores decline quickly over the next few years because they will be replaced by technology that provides dirt-cheap storage and the ability to basically access and play any type of music anytime, anywhere. Wireless technology basically will create a world where we can have anything we want all the time." Chicago Tribune 03/30/03
Posted: 03/30/2003 7:18 am
- Reasons To Love/Hate The CD Cd's revived the recording industry when they were first introduced. They allowed you to listen to music differently and they were a big improvement over vinyl (or so most people thought). But there are drawbacks too to CDs... Chicago Tribune 03/30/03
Posted: 03/30/2003 7:15 am
Chicago Lyric Opera Slips Into The Red The Chicago Lyric Opera sold 96 percent of its tickets this season. But that's a few percentage points below its customary 100 percent sale. So the company will post a $1-2 million deficit, only its second shortfall in the past two decades. Chicago Sun-Times 03/30/03
Posted: 03/30/2003 7:06 am
How Many Operas Are There? (How Many Worth Listening To?) How many operas are there? a few hundred? A thousand? Fifteen hundred? We're aware of more and more from the past as the years progress. "Strange then that the part of the repertoire least certainly alive is the modern, the new, the freshly commissioned. But perhaps 50 years from now people will look back on us and pity us for our ignorance of our contemporaries, who are as obscure to us as Handel was to Dent." The Guardian (UK) 03/29/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 6:21 pm
Have Band, Will Hire Want to hire the Rolling Stones for your party? It'll cost you $13 million. The Eagles will play for $7.8 million. Indeed, many famous bands will sign on for a private performance if the money's right. "Michael Jackson started the trend 10 years ago when he played for the Sultan of Brunei, who has also hired Diana Ross and Whitney Houston for family gatherings, and Bob Dylan has been known to do a gig or two." Sydney Morning Herald 03/30/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 4:16 pm
Culture Capital - Arts Mean Business There are six British finalists for the 2008 European Capital of Culture designation. But the honor seems to have less to do with actual culture than an economic shot in the arm. Why? Glasgow, 1990. "Cannily, the run-down Clydeside city used investment in culture as a major tool to revive its flagging economy. It proved, up to a point, that culture could be translated into tourism, business ventures and jobs as well as museums and concert halls." The Guardian (UK) 03/30/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 6:11 pm
Saatchi's Big New Show At the age of 60, Charles Saatchi is embarking on his most ambitious project yet. "Halfway between Tates Britain and Modern, he is opening a new gallery. At 40,000 sq ft, it is larger than any venue he has managed before. In it he will showcase his major trophies - Damien Hirst's shark, Tracey Emin's bed, Jake and Dinos Chapman's vision of hell - and lots more. If he gets only a tenth of the 12 million people who walk along that stretch of river each year he will have increased his audience by 100 per cent. And, with an £8 a head entrance fee, the new gallery, which he has leased from a Japanese property company, could pay handsome dividends." The Telegraph (UK) 03/30/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 5:54 pm
Why Approval For Polanski The Child Molester? Beth Gillin wonders why Hollywood was applauding Roman Polanski last week when he won an Oscar. "Wait a minute. Did they just give the Academy Award to a child molester? And why are the beautiful people giving him a standing ovation? For many watching the Oscars Sunday, it was an icky moment, marked by obscenely excessive applause. Polanski could not be there to pick up his gold statuette for directing The Pianist, because if he sets foot in this country, he'll be handcuffed and hauled off to prison for up to 50 years." Philadelphia Inquirer 03/30/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 3:36 pm
Room For Politics In Theatre? Why does the idea of political theatre scare off so many people? "Perhaps the problem is the very term 'political': most often it is used to mean theatre with a left-wing axe to grind. So, among other things, the question carries with it a hackle-raising, almost indiscernible whiff of red-baiting: 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the...?' Added to this, there is the fairly mainstream notion that ideas and political theory are limiting for writers, if not downright hostile to talent and the 'real', and that truth springs from the individual, unencumbered by the blinkers of politicking." The Guardian (UK) 03/29/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 6:25 pm
Urban Cowboy - Lookin' For Love In All The Wrong Places With business down, Broadway's looking for a hit. A bunch of new shows are opening, led by a new musical version of "Urban Cowboy". So how is it? Terry Teachout isn't impressed. The story? "By turns cynically maudlin and pointlessly vulgar, it is a tissue of unfunny clichés so implausible-sounding that you wonder how Aaron Latham could possibly have been born in Spur, Texas. And the music? "Have I mentioned the score? Well, there isn't one, only a jumble of ditties that might have been chosen by randomly punching the keys of an oddly stocked jukebox." OpinionJournal.com 03/29/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 3:21 pm
Theatre - Putting Conflict In Perspective "The bracing, dizzying state of the world lately has given rise to several plays about politics, and even more articles about plays about politics. The great virtue of plays about political history like 'Midnight’s Children' and 'Golda’s Balcony' is that they take the seemingly intractable problems out of the realm of finality and return them to contingency, where they belong. They remind us that, although the conflicts in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent owe much to ancient grudges and religious rivalries, they are also a product of individual leaders and the discrete decisions that they made." New York Sun 03/29/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 3:10 pm
What And How We Read How do Britons read? And what? A survey asks the questions. "Those who study the bestseller lists with bewilderment each week can take comfort from the fact that the sales of new books don't necessarily reflect what the nation is reading. Seventy-three per cent of people buy new books, but 41 per cent borrow library books, 42 per cent borrow books from friends and family, and 41 per cent buy from secondhand shops." The Telegraph (UK) 03/23/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 5:59 pm
Griffin Prize (Poetry's Richest) Shortlist Announced The three nominees for the Griffin Prize's Canadian short list and the four nominees in its international competition were announced yesterday in Toronto by the prize's founder, Scott Griffin. The $40,000 prize - the richest in poetry - attracted 320 entries... National Post 03/29/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 5:35 pm
Saving Afghan Books "New York University has just begun an ambitious project to digitize all the books printed in Afghanistan from 1871 to 1930, the earliest period of publishing there, and to catalog them and make them available electronically. The effort to preserve and widely disseminate the rare Afghan books is a counterpoint to decades of destruction of the country's art, books and monuments. In the early 1990's alone, tens of thousands of books in both the Kabul Public Library and the Kabul University Library were destroyed under Taliban rule." The New York Times 03/30/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 3:34 pm
A Poetry Award With Narrow Scope So the organizers of the new $10,000 Trillium Prize for a first book of poetry by an Ontario resident couldn't find enough entrants to even mount a shortlist. Can we really be surprised? wonders Alex Good. How many good new debut poetry books by an Ontario resident are there in a given year. Who are the people running this award? A check of the group's website reveals an intimidating corporate "mission statement": "Our focus is to build capacity and competitiveness of Ontario's cultural media industry, individually and across the sectors and to provide opportunities that encourage business alliances across the cultural industries." GoodReports 03/30/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 3:03 pm
- Previously: Poetry Jury Fails To Field Shortlist - Poetry Fans Protest Poetry fans are protesting that the jury for the new $10,000 Trillium Prize for poetry in Canada were unable to come up with a shortlist for the prize. "There were very few titles published in 2002 that met the criteria of a first book of poetry by a poet resident in Ontario for three of the last five years." Only ten books were submitted, but protesters want a new jury to be chosen and the deadline to be extended. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/27/03
BBC And Arts - Got To Be More Than Rolf Eh? The BBC's arts coverage is constantly under attack. But the fixer can't be more down-market pop art, can it? Is the public broadcaster fixated on the large ratings for Rolf Harris's art odyssey? "What next? Will the Rolf Experience be followed by Cliff Richard on Beethoven? Will audiences of five to seven million become the benchmark - a favourite word of TV planners - by which other arts programmes are judged? Having won such audiences, can they settle for less?" London Evening Standard 03/28/03
Posted: 03/29/2003 6:06 pm
