Ideas How Artists Earn Money For Their Work Not everyone pays for an artist's work. That's a good thing - it allows entry to the work and opens possibilities for the artist. "An ecosystem with many ways for unintended free-release is a requirement. Therefore, an ecosystem which looks to a mixture of the traditional amateur, performance, patronage, and commission forms of payment is a requirement. Depending upon rigid enforcement of performance payments will disrupt the balance. Listening to representatives from the recording and movie industries, you would think that selling fixed artifacts is the only way that artists can get paid. That has never been the case, and should not be in the future or else society and art itself will suffer." Bricklin.com 04/21/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 7:06 pm Visual Arts Brooklyn Museum Closing This Summer To Save Money The Brooklyn Museum is closing for two weeks this summer to save money. "Closing the Brooklyn Museum from Aug. 4 through Aug. 19 will save $250,000, said Robert S. Rubin, chairman of the museum. The nearly 300 union and nonunion employees will rotate shifts for the two weeks so that everyone will be on furlough for at least a week, he said." The New York Times 05/09/03 Posted: 05/09/2003 7:36 am Go West Young Collector Traditional Western art is getting serious attention these days. "The trend is to de-ghettoize Western American art and integrate it into the mainstream traditions of American scholarship. Much the same is true, according to dealers, of the market value for these works: prices for 19th- and early-20th-century artists of the West are now approaching the same levels as those for their East Coast peers." ArtNews 05/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 8:26 pm Iraq Art Recovered American agents report that they have recovered "about 40,000 manuscripts and 700 other artefacts" that had been stolen from Iraq's National Museum." BBC 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 4:48 pm Music What's The Point Of An Orchestra Tour? The San Francisco Symphony is off to Europe on tour. Robert Commanday wonders why? "A decade or two ago, the received rationale was that such tours were necessary for the promotion of record sales. Whatever truth there was in that — and no convincing evidence was ever offered — that reason certainly doesn’t hold today in today’s marginalized record market. It was also argued that the orchestra as collective instrument benefitted from the repeated performances. Again, that might have been true 20 or 30 years ago, but the current level of today’s orchestral ensemble is not going to be significantly heightened by touring." San Francisco Classical Voice 05/06/03 Posted: 05/09/2003 8:12 am Detroit's Remember-We're-Here Tour Instead of traveling abroad, the Detroit Symphony is spending $900,000 to tour the state of Michigan. "While international touring is about building prestige and flexing the orchestra's artistic muscles, the 2-week swing through Michigan has another agenda: reminding audiences statewide that they, too, have a stake in the DSO." Detroit Free Press 05/09/03 Posted: 05/09/2003 8:10 am "Handmaid's Tale" American Premiere In Minnesota Minnesota Opera is staging the American premiere of Poul Ruders' "A Handmaid's Tale (based on the Margaret Atwood book). Company officials have already cast "The Handmaid's Tale" as a "financial bath. They couldn't attract a corporate sponsor, and while the opera comes from a popular book, it's not from a beloved one. 'Maybe it was just a backlash of the times, with the war and all, but make no mistake, we created something extremely volatile and controversial. You have illicit sex, perversion, betrayal, hope and love and such heartbreaking loss. But if audiences are going to be trapped for three hours, you have to grab and entertain them, and this does that quite well'." St. Paul Pioneer-Press 05/09/03 Posted: 05/09/2003 7:49 am Florida Phil Prepares For Bankruptcy The Florida Philharmonic prepares to go out of business. "The Philharmonic changed the locks on its rehearsal hall Wednesday and faxed a legal notice to the governor's office and mayors of the municipalities where it performs, advising officials of its intention to file for bankruptcy. That notice stated that the Philharmonic "has developed plans to permanently shut down" and that "employment separations are expected to commence on or about May 9." The Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale) 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 8:17 pm Why Orchestras Are Hurting... New Jersey orchestras are struggling in the recession. So why do orchestras seem to do so poorly when times are bad? "Everybody knows this is a tough environment. This will be a hard year to even come close to a balanced budget. Every time there is a recession, by definition, orchestras do badly. We are labor intensive - 80 percent of what we do goes to product, and we plan years in advance. There's not much flexibility." Newark Star-Ledger 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 6:31 pm Louisville Mining Its American Legacy The Louisville Orchestra was the first American orchestra to set up its own recording company. It recorded American - one of the most ambitious promotions of American composers ever. "By 1959, when the commissioning component of the Rockefeller grant came to an end, the Louisville Orchestra had commissioned, performed and recorded 116 works by 101 composers." Now the orchestra is in financial difficulty, and its trove of historic recordings offers an opportunity... Louisville Eccentric Observer 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 6:00 pm Arts Issues Editor Attacks BBC Arts Coverage Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger blasts the BBC for the state of its arts coverage. He said "the BBC had experienced a 'terrible failure of nerve' in its commitment to the arts and he laid the blame on the corporation's board of governors." The Guardian (UK) 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 10:12 pm Why Should Pop Culture Diminish High Art? Does writing about Britney Spears in the newspaper diminish appreciation of "high" arts? "It is evident that many people working in - and treasuring - the serious arts still feel embattled. It seems to them as if there is a widespread philistinism around: a remorseless drive in favour of the predominant commercially successful mass culture." The Guardian (UK) 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 8:58 pm Site Specific In LA "Here and there around the United States, you may occasionally find the odd modern dance in a derelict hotel, a theater production on a city bus, or a concert on a public park carousel. But in Los Angeles these things happen regularly - if not quite predictably - thanks to a handful of committed practitioners who have built careers around the making of site-specific theater, dance and music." Los Angeles Times 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 7:40 pm States Find Arts Funding Melting Away States across America are cutting their arts budgets - last week Colorado whacked its budget by 90 percent. A number of states are in danger of not qualifying for money from the National Endowment for the Arts this year... All Things Considered (NPR) 05/08/03 (Audio file) Posted: 05/08/2003 6:50 pm People Zeffirelli At 80 (Still Going Strong) Director Franco Zeffirelli has been in the biz for 60 years. He's got a new play opening in London's West End. "His timetable is punishing, not least because he is 80 and in frail health after near-fatal complications following a hip operation a couple of years ago. He relies on a cane and any available spare arm. Stairs are hazardous..." London Evening Standard 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 7:48 pm The Mind Behind Wigmore Hall "William Lyne must qualify as the most un-Australian Aussie ever to set foot on these shores, which he did nearly 50 years ago. He is a man so self-effacing that he would rather sink into a pothole than be hailed by name across a crowded street. If he has tantrums, nobody has seen them. If he has sulks, they are forever concealed behind an indelible smile. He is the opposite of the “temperamental luvvie” type who is supposed to dominate the arts world. Yet for the past 37 years Lyne has run the greatest chamber-music venue in the world, and run it brilliantly. He has been manager of the Wigmore Hall..." The Times (UK) 05/09/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 7:43 pm Danny Boy - Why They Love Libeskind What is the appeal of Daniel Libeskind? The architect chosen to build on the site of the World Trade Center has dazzled some. "It is clear enough why Libeskind?s work, exceptionally thin in range and character, should have endeared itself over the years to his various clients, all of whom inhabit the world of cultural institutions: museums, schools, and foundations. He himself is most at home in that world, and until recently has inhabited it exclusively. He speaks its language. If his designs struck any of his potential clients as dangerously unhinged, reassurance was always at hand in the form of his impeccable institutional credentials, his professorial demeanor, his high-flown patter." Commentary 05/03/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 4:30 pm Theatre Pop Goes The Musical "After decades of irrelevance and indirection, musical theater has stumbled on a new formula to revitalize itself: mounting shows around the music of beloved pop artists." Philadelphia Inquirer 05/08/03 Posted: 05/09/2003 9:35 am Sondheim - Operas In Disguise? Though Stephen Sondheim is considered a master of musical theatre, the esteem isn't shared by a popular audience. So should his pieces be performed by opera companies instead? "Sondheim himself makes no secret of thinking otherwise. He even affects not to like opera, and has never written a work intended for opera-house production. Still, the alacrity with which 'Sweeney Todd' and 'A Little Night Music' have been taken up by major opera companies in America and elsewhere raises the question of whether they might really have been, all along, modern operas in disguise." Commentary 05/0/3 Posted: 05/08/2003 4:03 pm Publishing Monkey Shakespeare With Lots Of S's Could monkeys typing actually produce Shakespeare given enough monkeys and enough time? "Now someone has attempted to put the theory to the test. Admittedly the British academics involved in this unusual project did not have an infinite number of typewriters, nor monkeys, nor time, but they did have six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys, and one computer, and four weeks for them to get creative. The results of this trial at Paignton zoo in Devon were more Mothercare than Macbeth. The macaques - Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan - produced just five pages of text between them, primarily filled with the letter S. There were greater signs of creativity towards the end, with the letters A, J, L and M making fleeting appearances, but they wrote nothing even close to a word of human language." The Guardian (UK) 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 10:23 pm Media Will Movie Goers Buy Online? Buying movie tickets online has been slow to take off. "While online sales tripled over the last few years, they comprised just 2 percent to 4 percent of roughly $9 billion in movie-theater ticket revenue last year, or about $300 million. That will probably rise to $400 million this year. Buying [movie] tickets in advance is not something Americans do. It's an entrenched consumer behavior to not plan that far in advance when you're thinking about movies." Hartford Courant 05/09/03 Posted: 05/09/2003 6:51 am The Real Digital Film Revolution - Tiny Cameras Digital equipment is changing not just the technology of how films are made, but the styke in which they're made. "You can take as many takes as you want, so you don't have to force anything. We are seeing more and more of this 'in-the-moment' kind of thing. This technology offers a much more intimate kind of movie." For one thing, new tiny digital cameras are so small they don't intrude on or dominate scenes as they have. Christian Science Monitor 05/09/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 6:37 pm When Movies Weren't "Product" The Golden Age of movies in the 70s, writes David Ansen, differed significantly from today's movies in an important way. "The great thing about back then, when the likes of Coppola and Scorsese, Altman and Bogdanovich, Friedkin, Mazursky, Polanski, Ashby, Woody Allen and Peckinpah radically altered the American cinematic landscape, was the fact that their movies weren’t merely 'product.' They were rule-breaking personal visions that connected with the audience in ways studio movies had rarely attempted before. Instead of mere escapism, the audience wanted relevance." Newsweek 05/08/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 5:51 pm Dance Ballet's Hot New Star When the Royal Ballet's Alina Cojocaru stepped into a role at the last minute two years ago, she came back a star. Now she's the "darling of choreographers, critics and audiences here. She was quickly promoted from the corps to principal dancer, and the Royal Ballet gave her so many major roles that she has hardly had time off." The New York Times 05/04/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 7:34 pm Dancing The Road To Recovery "Six years ago, Marc Brew survived a car accident in South Africa that killed his girlfriend, her brother and a friend. It left him a quadriplegic, although he has since regained the use of his arms, and spelled the end of his dancing career - or so he thought. After extensive rehabilitation in Australia, he began dancing in his wheelchair and formed his own dance company, DanceAbility. He moves elegantly: sitting backwards and forwards, swaying and moving himself out of his chair and onto the floor." The Age (Melbourne) 05/09/03 Posted: 05/08/2003 7:12 pm