Ideas Creativity - An Overused And Abused Idea Everyone seems to talk about creativity as if it were this force innate to every person, and that some sort of spigot is all that is required to cause it to gush forth. Barbican director John Tusa's new book explores what it means to be creative. "Creative, creation, creativity, as Tusa says in his introduction, 'are some of the most overused and ultimately debased words in the language', which are liberally applied by everybody from bureaucrats to politicians to thinktanks..." spiked-culture 06/04/03 Visual Arts Selling Saatchi "For many, this is a veritable freak show - one now worth an estimated £50 million - in large part due to the yBas, a group of young British artists who fought a frenzied fight for attention in the late 1980s and '90s. It was a conflagration that Saatchi, advertising man to the core, had an instinct for uncovering and promoting. One suspects that Saatchi perceives himself as a kind of magus, someone whose primary motive is control. It seems quite possible that his pleasure comes from the manipulation of taste, the general public and art community." ArtNet.com 06/04/03 Posted: 06/05/2003 7:18 am Go 2 R Museum Trying to attract younger audiences, York's railway museum is trying a new ad campaign. "Posters showing a pair of oily handprints on a woman's denims went up yesterday in clubs and student bars across York to try to bring down the average age of helpers at the National Railway Museum. Heavily reliant on enthusiasts in the their 40s and above - a problem shared by scores of other museums and galleries across the country - the final home of hundreds of historic trains is also texting young people in schools and colleges in the city to tempt them into helping. Designers have created a locomotive-like logo using computer symbols from the asterisk to the double-dash, and added the message: 'Ifu think trAns R ZzZz thnk x2.' (If you think trains are boring, think again.) The Guardian (UK) 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 6:26 pm A Place For Big Ideas Suzaan Boettger writes that Dia's new outpost at Beacon is a place where space could allow for the jumble and interplay of big ideas. "The Dia collection harkens back to a decade when the convergence of strong fiscal growth, the largesse of Great Society programs, increasing support for civil rights, anti-Vietnam war protests, and myriad forms of personal and sexual liberation made such artistic innovation on a large scale a cultural manifestation of the utopian belief that 'anything is possible'." Artnet 06/03/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 5:49 pm Royal Mail: Hands Off Queenie Britain's postal service is protesting an artist's use of a picture of the Queen on stamps. The Queen's face has been hidden by the addition of a gas mask. "A spokesman for the Royal Mail said: 'We do take any breach of copyright very seriously especially in relation to the Queen's image. We produce over three billion of these stamps every year and the images belong to the Royal Mail'." BBC 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 4:55 pm American Museums Discover Latin America "American museums, long accustomed to regarding Latin American art as an appendage of other divisions or to ignoring it altogether, are bolstering their commitment to buying, showing, and studying everything from Mexican colonial portraiture to Chilean Surrealism. Two major institutions, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), have recently appointed their first chief curators for Latin American art. Others have held major Latin American shows. Museums across the country have established community groups aimed at drumming up support and interest for their Latin American programs, and dealers say the institutional push into Latin American art is adding momentum to the market." ARTNews 06/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 4:51 pm Sculptor of Heroes Many of us have a distinct sense of what we think constitutes a fitting statue in honor of a great figure. That image comes from the 18th century, and "when we visualize one of these heroes, we are almost always referencing Jean-Antoine Houdon's brilliant sculptural portraits. Between 1775 and 1789 he sculpted the men of letters and of the nobility of Europe and America." Artcyclopedia 06/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 4:00 pm Music Exploring American Music In Its Many Flaovors Minnesota Public Radio's American Mavericks series is a collection of first-rate radio shows about American music. But it's also a valuable website, the "latest attempt to find a home on the Internet for progressive classical music, which is played sparingly in concert and on the radio. "For Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony's music director and co-host of the "American Mavericks" radio series, the Internet is a logical place for young people to discover new music. Just as cutting-edge composers push beyond common assumptions, he said, a certain adventurous nature is needed to explore cyberspace." The New York Times 06/05/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 10:46 pm Mobile Phones - Your Music Here "With sales of CDs on a three-year slide, the music industry sees mobile phones as powerful outlets for promoting artists and distributing music for profit - something it failed to do in the early days of Internet music-swapping. In recent months, recording labels have entered deals with wireless carriers and other companies. The music companies are selling rights to their musicians' recordings and images for use in screen savers, digital images and song snippets that are then sold to mobile phone users." National Post (Canada) 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 10:38 pm The End Of Music As Object? "I believe the era in which music is treated as an almost fetishistic object of desire is coming to an end. Not for me, perhaps, even though I have been busy recently uploading my entire music collection to my computer, clearing acres of valuable shelf-space by transforming stacks of CDs (never the most beloved format, with their easily cracked plastic boxes, tiny covers and tatty booklets full of microscopic print) into digital sound files on a kind of virtual juke box. And quite possibly it is not yet over for you, either, certainly if you grew up in the vinyl era and have developed a soft spot for albums with distinct identities, the running order of songs identified on the sleeve, just as the artist intended. But it is a very different situation for the teenage students..." The Telegraph (UK) 06/05/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 6:54 pm Exit Interview: Toeplitz Leaves Pittsburgh Gideon Toeplitz leaves as manager of the Pittsburgh Symphony. "I made two major mistakes in big chunks. One is something everyone else in the world made, not only the orchestral world. Look at the airlines. We thought the good times would last. And nobody thought the downturn would last as long as it has, and some people are saying it will last eight years. Maybe I pushed too hard, first with myself and therefore with others, to get where I wanted to get. I was ambitious for the Pittsburgh Symphony. We did 15 tours. Maybe 12 would have been enough. Some things I pushed artistically would have come two years later, anyway. So what?" Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 5:23 pm Davidson: Carnegie Move Good For NY Phil So why is the New York Philharmonic walking away from Lincoln Center? "Because it has spent the last 40 years in a hall widely — but certainly not unanimously — held to be an acoustical failure, one that has undergone more than its share of tweaks and massive renovations. The prospect of fixing up Avery Fisher Hall again, launching yet another capital campaign to fund yet another overhaul with uncertain results, seemed daunting and horribly expensive. What if — after getting and spending enough hundreds of millions of dollars to do the job, after vacating Avery Fisher and scrounging dates at other places for the years of construction, trying to patch together residencies, extended tours and temporary locations — after all that, the new auditorium still appalled?" Andante 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 4:23 pm Odd Hall Out - Don't Disparage Lincoln Center Because It's Not Carnegie Hall "Avery Fisher is a misunderstood treasure. Concert halls — indeed, all places where people gather — should not be measured by their iconic status. They should be measured by the service they perform for their communities. In that regard, Avery Fisher has done a yeoman's job. Its ultimate shortcoming may be that it's not Carnegie, but that's also its saving grace. While the out-of-town orchestras rush to perform at the grand old hall on 57th Street, Avery Fisher plays a different — and sometimes more vibrant — role in the city's musical life." The New York Times 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 4:19 pm Arts Issues Artists Angry Over Plans For Arts School Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a "self- proclaimed champion of the arts," has hundreds of artists mad at him. He's proposed expanding his Oakland School for the Arts, but he wants to expand it into a building that already houses artists, and the plan would evict them. "To displace working artists who are serving thousands of kids and adults for a school for the arts that will serve maybe 400 students at most is perverse. It makes no sense." San Francisco Chronicle 06/05/03 Posted: 06/05/2003 7:28 am NY: Will Standardized Arts Education Requirements Help? Arts education in public schools in New York City is haphazard."It's completely hodgepodge. We have in some schools almost no arts, in many schools no music, schools that are not taking advantage of the cultural resources of the city, arts educators who may be asked to decorate the school for Halloween." Now the schools chancellor has proposed a standardized arts regime for the city. The New York Times 06/05/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 10:40 pm San Francisco - A Music Education Program That Works The San Francisco Symphony has been running its Adventures in Music education program for 10 years. So it's time to evaluate. "Among the findings: 86.9 percent of teachers and 85.5 of principals said students are more interested in music and the arts because of AIM; 68 percent of teachers interviewed said participating in AIM helped them find new ways of thinking about curriculum; and 58 percent said they believed the program made them better teachers." San Francisco Chronicle 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 5:16 pm Theatre Broadway Closes Season With Record Box Office "After a season battered by more than its fair share of bad shakes - four orange terror alerts, an Iraqi war, a brutal winter, an ongoing sluggishness in tourism, and a bitterly divisive musicians strike - the League of American Theatres and Producers reported total season grosses up 12%, to a new high of $720.9 million. Attendance was up to 11.4 million, a half-million-ticket rise over last season, and playing weeks, an indicator many consider key to assessing Broadway's health, also rose -- to 1,544 weeks, up 7.7% over last season. But do these seemingly sunny statistics entirely reflect Broadway's well-being?" Backstage 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 7:00 pm Publishing Publishers In A Price-Chopping Mood What were publishers thinking about at last week's annual BookExpo? "Lower prices were on many people's minds at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where BookExpo America, the industry's annual national gathering, ended Sunday. Publishers and booksellers agreed that in a slow economy they needed to find ways to conform to the budgets of their customers. With hardcovers often costing $25 or higher, publishers are cutting the price of some hardcover editions and going straight to paperback." Chicago Tribune (AP) 06/05/03 Posted: 06/05/2003 6:57 am "Dark Materials" Unseats Harry On Bestseller List The Harry Potter books no longer dominate British book bestseller lists. The new champ is Philip Pullman's prize-winning "His Dark Materials" trilogy. The set is "outselling any Potter title by more than 25% after years in which JK Rowling has towered over her market." The Guardian (UK) 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 6:15 pm Why Do Foreigners Keep Winning The Orange Prize? They're Better! "It's becoming an interesting feature of the Orange that only two past winners have been from Britain. The rest have been either from the US or Canada. Why should this be? One answer, advanced at the Hay Festival by Hilary Mantel, a judge of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, is that the Americans and Canadians are simply more accomplished." The Guardian (UK) 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 6:04 pm Do Women Still Need Their Own Literary Prize? "The Orange Prize was founded when no female writers made the shortlist for the prestigious Booker Prize in 1991." It was needed then. But things have improved - currently 15 of 25 best-sellers in the UK were written by women. Is the Orange still necessary? BBC 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 5:03 pm Madonna Book To Set Publishing Record? Madonna's new children's book is being published simultaneously "around the world on 15 September, translated into 42 languages. It is the first of five children's morality tales planned by the singer, based on Hebrew texts she is studying from the Kabbalah religion. US publisher Callaway Editions said it would become the 'widest simultaneous multi-language release in publishing history'." BBC 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 4:58 pm Media Korean Theatres Must Show Korean Movies The South Korean government denies it is thinking about easing a law that forces Korean movie theatres to show Korean movies 40 percent of the time. "The screen quota is not just an issue for the film industry, it is vital to the future of our visual media industry as a whole. If we lower our guards on film, then the rest of the market is lost." Korea Herald 06/05/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 6:44 pm Members Of Congress Seek To Overturn FCC TV-Ownership Ruling Sensing a national mood that opposes the FCC's decision Monday to relax television media ownsership rules, members of Congress are drafting bills to reverse the FCC decision. "Identical bills have been introduced in both houses to overturn Monday's decision on television-station ownership. The old rule said a network cannot own a group of stations that combine to reach more than 35 percent of the national viewing audience. Monday's vote raises that threshold to 45 percent." Washington Post 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 4:14 pm Secret To Success: Promoting The Unconventional The secret to why animation film-maker Pixar keeps turning out high quality movies? "If you don't create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it's likely you're going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace. Those kind of irrational what-ifs eventually lead to something that makes you go, 'Wow, I never would have thought about it.'" San Francisco Chronicle 06/04/03 Posted: 06/04/2003 3:55 pm