CAUTION: Artist Puts Up Sign The artist who painting a big yellow "CAUTION: Low flying planes" on the side of a building in Lower Manhattan says he didn't mean to offend his neighbors who are now complaining. "His 10-by-14-foot painting, he says, is about the terrorist threat. 'It's still out there. . . . [The painting is] a statement saying it's not over'." One resident is surprised by the negative reaction: "If that was a Tommy Hilfiger ad, nobody would be complaining. . . . If it was a 12-year-old with too much lipstick on, that would have been all right. But this is not?" Washington Post 05/15/03
Posted: 05/15/2003 7:18 am
The Sex And Sizzle In Chicago's New Skyline Chicago has long had a reputation for great architecture... home of the skyscraper, and all... Now a new generation of great Chicago architecture is going up, and boy, is it sexy... WBEZ (Chicago) 05/13/03 [Audio file]
Posted: 05/14/2003 9:34 pm
Telstra Underwrites Free Admission for Sydney Museum After Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art got a grant in 2000 to drop its admission charges, the museum saw a dramatic increase in visitors. Now Telstra - the free-admission underwriter - has agreed to continue the sponsorship for three more years. "Telstra will inject more than $500,000 annually into the MCA in a three-year arrangement to underwrite the free-entry policy. The deal continues an original sponsorship arrangement that allowed the gallery to scrap its $12 admission fee in mid-2000." Sydney Morning Herald 05/15/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 8:53 pm
Discovering Italy's Jewish History "Dozens of Jewish sites, artifacts, documents, rare books and manuscripts are being discovered, analyzed and restored in southern Italy and Sicily. This work by scholars and government authorities is beginning to flesh out the largely unknown story of vibrant yet long-lost communities of Jews that inhabited the region from Roman times to the end of the Middle Ages. Jews were expelled from southern Italy, known then as the Kingdom of Naples, in the 16th century. Few returned even after the ban was lifted in the 18th century." The New York Times 05/15/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 8:29 pm
All Sealed Up And No Place To Go - But It Wasn't Always That Way "Contemporary architecture has erected innumerable barriers between inside and outside, building and nature. It's there and we're here, and that's that. It wasn't always so. Access to light and air were starting points and first principles of 19th- and early 20th-century buildings, rights instead of accidents. Until air conditioning and tinted glass made them seem passe, sunscreens, deep windows and natural ventilation were standard features, as though architecture itself were a living, breathing thing." Dallas Morning News 05/15/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 7:39 pm
Why Museums? Because They Teach Us "Over the past decades, museums have come to play multiple roles in our lives, but surely none is more important than their ability - in the current period of international turmoil and political realignments - to connect each of us with what other people value culturally and artistically." OpinionJournal.com 05/15/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 7:04 pm
New York Museum Leaders Are Pessimistic "Hit with cut after cut in city funding, a steep decrease in corporate and foundation giving, and rising security and insurance costs, the city's cultural leaders are expressing the lowest level of confidence in the future of their industry since Sept. 11. Museums and performing arts organizations are scaling back on visiting exhibitions and productions, and canceling long-term expansion plans altogether." Crain's New York Business 05/12/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 5:43 pm
Controversial Mural Moved Protests over a mural hung in a Milwaukee courthouse have resulted in the art being moved to a much less prominent place. "When the mural - commissioned by Marquette University's Haggerty Museum of Art as a pictorial history of the Watts area of Los Angeles from the 1965 riots to today - was first hung on the first floor of the courthouse Friday, the work triggered complaints from sheriff's deputies and other officers, who objected to what they saw as the mural's anti-law-enforcement images, including the Rodney King case. Court officials raised concerns that the work's bold images could bias prospective jurors." Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 05/13/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 5:42 pm
New Opera - This Is A Test How do you test out a new opera? (they're too big and expensive to take many chances on lesser-known composers). New York City Opera staged a showcase of operas in progress, presenting scenes from operas in progress with the hope of generating interest in them. "These were only workshop tryouts, of course, and not ready for full critical assessments. Still, several of the works (I heard 6 out of 10) left strong initial impressions, good and not so good." The New York Times 05/15/03
Posted: 05/15/2003 6:36 am
Doing The Math - Money Questions Don't Add Up In Miami Plenty of blame to go around in the collapse of the Florida Philharmonic. There are many questions about the size of the orchestra's money woes, the way the orchestra revealed its problems, and its strategy for dealing with them. Then there's the way the orchestra alienated people with money who had offered to help over the years... Miami Herald 05/15/03
Posted: 05/15/2003 5:38 am
Munich's Big-Bucks Play For Culture Capital Munich is spending big to sign up stars to direct its music institutions. The city is vying to be a cultural capital. "But music is not one of those spectator sports whose results can be rigged by wealth. It is a mind-game, often a minefield, in which sprightly left-wingers run rings around the sorry hulks of expensive defensive walls, and dinky British orchestras have a gratifying habit of outmanoeuvring the mighty spenders. Munich's mistake was to play by a set of rules that has been rendered obsolescent by the collapse of classical recording. Today, when hardly any maestros get past studio security, orchestras are trapped between picking a fossilised relic of distant recorded memory or risking an unknown prospect." London Evening Standard 05/14/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 7:51 pm
The FBI's Extraordinary Harassment Of Aaron Copland The FBI investigated composer Aaron Copland for 20 years. Yes he was political, but he has also, for decades, been considered one of America's most recognizeable musical voices. "The extent of Copland's political engagement is neither a secret nor a surprise. Copland never hid his essential political sympathies. But what these documents tell about the US treatment of Copland is as much the story of the harassment of 20th-century composers as anything that happened to Dmitri Shostakovich in the Soviet Union or to Kurt Weill or Ernst Krenek in Nazi Germany. " The Guardian (UK) 05/14/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 7:11 pm
Russian MPs Protest McCartney Concert Members of the Russian parliament are protesting a planned concert by Paul McCartney in Red Square next week. "More than 100 have signed a petition protesting at the place where the Soviet leaders Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev, and the pioneer cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, lie buried in Moscow being used for a rock concert which carries, they say, 'a covert political meaning'." The Guardian (UK) 05/14/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 7:02 pm
Why New Music Doesn't Play Why don't orchestras play more new music? Especially now when some contemporary composers seem to be picking up buzz. There are plenty of reasons, writes Greg Sandow. There's the audience, for one thing... NewMusicBox 05/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 5:51 pm
Shake, Rattle And Ruhr Arts festivals, like flashy new museum buildings, can be tourist attractions for communities wanting to reinvent themselves. The Ruhr region in Germany, headquarters for coal, steel and heavy industry, has a new festival and a star to run it. But how do you get people to come? "It will take a long time to convince people to come to the Ruhr, And they won't come for the Vienna Philharmonic." So Gerard Mortier, who transformed the Salzburg Festival with new offerings, has put together a season of "23 productions with 129 performances in 15 spaces, along with additional concerts, a fringe festival and what promises to be an astonishing installation of a Bill Viola video spectacle." The New York Times 05/15/03
Posted: 05/15/2003 6:02 am
Australia Bumps Up Arts Funding The Australian government has increased its spending on the arts. "Responding to the 2002 Myer inquiry into the contemporary visual arts and craft sector, the Government promised the industry an extra $19.5 million over the next four years. This is the first new funding the sector has received in more than a decade. It will be phased in gradually, rising from $3 million next financial year to $6 million in 2005-06." Sydney Morning Herald 05/15/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 9:01 pm
New York Arts Orgs Warn Of Cuts If City Budget Passes New York cultural groups detail the cuts they will have to make if the city's proposed budget goes through with arts funding cuts. Closed galleries at city museums, new admission fees... "The report warns in particular that as many as 1,000 staff members would have to be dismissed under the mayor's budget plan, adding to the 450 jobs already eliminated in the 2002-3 fiscal year." The New York Times 05/15/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 8:16 pm
Missouri Orchestra Benches Conductor The Springfield (Missouri) Symphony has pulled its conductor from a concert this week after patrons expressed worries over SARS. "Apo Hsu, who has no symptoms of the disease, was asked to forgo her appearance at Saturday's concert by the symphony's board of directors. The board voted to ask principal violist Amy Muchnick to conduct instead after about 30 patrons called the symphony office about Hsu's lengthy stay in Taiwan. Hsu returned May 10 to the United States after spending a month in Taipei." Newsday 05/15/03
Posted: 05/15/2003 6:18 am
English 101 - Lacking In School It appears that English isn't taught very well in American schools, says a new study. "Nearly half the freshmen who entered California State University last fall ended up on the remedial English bench. Many were stunned to find themselves there. They had always made good grades in English." Los Angeles Times 05/15/03
Posted: 05/15/2003 6:48 am
Rebuilding The Coliseum (Bookstore) New York's Coliseum Books wasn't pretty or comfortable. But it was a great place to find books (and isn't that sometimes the point?). So Coliseum was lamented when it lost its lease last year and went out of business. Now it's reopening on 42nd Street, across from the public library. How to compete with the Barnes & Noble stores on every street corner? Well, there'll be books you probably won't find at B&N. And a coffee shop (the investors insisted). BusinessWeek 05/13/03 [Audio file]
Posted: 05/15/2003 6:30 am
Security Level Red At Movieplexes Metal detectors, pat down searches... your latest trip to the airport? Nope - movie studios are so anxious about piracy of this summer's blockbuster hits that early screenings of the movies feature "heightened" security. That even includes guards wearing night vision goggles scanning crowds during the movie to see if anyone's videotaping the screen... Philadelphia Inquirer 05/15/03
Posted: 05/15/2003 7:00 am
Cannes - Yeah, There Are Movies, But First... "Just getting here at all proved problematic for the estimated 150,000 attendees, including some 4,000 journalists from 75 countries: a massive nationwide public workers strike eliminated 80% of airline flights and two-thirds of all trains on the very day most people traveled. Once the weary cinematic pilgrims arrived, they were handed a stern warning about SARS from France's Ministry of Health. Even though most Asian visitors had volunteered for medical checkups before they'd left, they were directed to report any suspicious symptoms, and all festival-goers were told to leave a forwarding address in case of unknown exposure. Terrorism was another threat no one was exactly ignoring." Los Angeles Times (AP) 05/14/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 8:10 pm
Media Deregulation - A Matter of Survival Or A Threat To Diversity? Local television station autonomy is at the heart of one of the media ownership rules set to be changed soon by the Federal Communications Commission. Media companies say that: 'costs are going up, audience is going down, competition is increasing. The only way to help is to relax the ownership rules, allowing networks to buy more stations and increase revenue." Critics say too much media ownership concentrated in too few hands will destroy media diversity, particularly at the local level. Washington Post 05/14/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 7:19 pm
Bashing French Dance There are many reasons to dislike what the French have contributed to dance, writes Robert Gottlieb. There's Sylvie Guillem, of course, "a dancer with the fatal combination of tremendous ability, a ruthless determination to do it her way and a total lack of sensibility. I hate to think of the number of ballerinas whose classicism has been corrupted by her extravagant ways." And then there's Maurice Bejart... New York Observer 05/14/03
Posted: 05/14/2003 9:18 pm
