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Tuesday, July 15




Visual Arts

Cleveland Museum Makes Cuts The Cleveland Museum, trying to balance its budget, is laying off 37 full- and part-time employees, freezing salaries and reducing pay for senior administrators. In addition, "the museum is reducing loans of artworks to other museums, stretching the duration of special exhibitions, cutting its film program in half, closing its retail store at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and reducing other expenses, from staff travel to photocopying." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 07/15/03
Posted: 07/15/2003 8:50 am

Bush Administration Considers Offloading Archaeologists The Bush administration is considering offloading National Park Service archaeologists who oversee and protect America's historical and cultural heritage. "The administration says turning over the archaeology jobs to private contractors could save money, but critics charge that contractors are ill-equipped to cope with an array of endemic challenges, including influential outsiders trying to dictate Park policy, chronic congressional underfunding and serious personnel shortages that Park Service archaeologists mitigate by using thousands of volunteers - an option not open to a private company." Washington Post 07/15/03
Posted: 07/15/2003 8:07 am

A Bath For David It was inevitable, of course, that the cleaning of Michelangelo's 500-year-old David should spark controversy... "Should the marble colossus be restored to its original perfection or simply cleaned of grime? Or should it learn to live with the inevitable streaks and blotches of venerable old age?" The New York Times 07/15/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 9:54 pm

That's The Picture Two dozen photography shows in London right now make this a summer of photography. "The London shows leave you with no specific definition of what photography is now, except that it is, fruitfully, many things at once, which is a functionally vague description of the medium. You can nevertheless get a fairly clear idea of the differences between a good photograph and a bad one." The New York Times 07/15/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 9:49 pm

Emin: Leave Me Alone If You Don't Like It Artist Tracey Emin is tired of critics slagging off on her. "If you don't like me, leave me alone. I get completely slagged off by people whose mortgage I'm paying. They write 500 words about me, they pay their mortgage that week. Someone on The Independent called me a 'retard' which really wound me up. I responded. I'm not saying how, but I totally responded." The Observer (UK) 07/13/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 8:09 pm

Putting Frames Around The Provocative.. Chris Burden has spent a career pushing at the boundaries of art. "Throughout a 30-year career marked by international fame and notoriety, each new artwork he has made has provoked new and ever more challenging answers to this simple question. But his own response, like so much of what he does, is unexpected. 'It's about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, 'Here's the beauty in this. I'm going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful. That's what artists do. It's really a pointing activity'."
Los Angeles Times 07/13/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 7:25 pm

Report Blasts Australia's National Museum A report on Australia's National Museum of Art gives the museum low marks. "The NMA is short on compelling narratives, engagingly presented dramatic realisations of important events and themes in the Australian story. And there are too few focal objects, radiant and numinous enough to generate memorable vignettes, or to be drawn out into fundamental moments. The report warned the museum may be failing in its role to inspire and educate its visitors because of a problem of translating narrative into museum practice, particularly in areas dealing with post-European arrivals to Australia." The Age (Melbourne) 07/15/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 7:19 pm

Music

The Little Opera Company That Could Producing new operas is a mostly-miss proposition. But tiny Central City (Colorado) Opera "hasn't fared too badly with its handful of commissioned, Colorado-oriented musical tales. Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956) remains in the international repertory. Same thing, on a smaller scale, with Henry Mollicone's Face on the Barroom Floor (1978). Robert Ward's The Lady From Colorado (1964) bombed - but two out of three ain't bad. So, with the premiere Saturday at the Opera House of Mollicone's Gabriel's Daughter, one question was unavoidable: Could Central City make it three out of four?" Rocky Mountain News 07/15/03
Posted: 07/15/2003 8:54 am

File Trading Declines After Industry Threats Recording industry get-tough threats to music downloaders seem to be having an impact on the number of people downloading music on the internet. "Kazaa and Morpheus — two popular file-swapping services — had 15 percent fewer users during the week ending July 6, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The decline translates to about 1 million fewer users on Kazaa. About 41,000 fewer users signed on to Morpheus and the iMesh file-sharing service that week." Washington Post 07/15/03
Posted: 07/15/2003 8:12 am

Glyndebourne - A Report Card Things are looking up considerably at Glyndebourne. Artistically the offerings are getting better, and new management is steering a progressive course, and... no one seems to be fighting about which direction to charge... The Telegraph (UK) 07/15/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 9:22 pm

Lament For Big Music Traditional big recording companies are in a tough way these days. They're getting tougher on consumers who illegally copy their music. But they're also going after government to make tougher laws. Trouble is, they're becoming so broke, finding a solution they can afford becomes tougher and tougher... The Guardian (UK) 07/14/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 8:04 pm

Opera Goes Back To Its Patron Roots In Europe, where recent arts tradition has the state responsible for funding most of the cost of highculture, a shift is taking place. "Opera, the most expensive of art forms, is increasingly turning the clock back a couple of centuries and looking to individuals for patronage. Corporate sponsorship is becoming elusive and is likely to remain so at least until the next boom economy. At Covent Garden, about half the annual contributions from well-wishers now come from private patrons..." Financial Times 07/14/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 7:41 pm

People

Buena Vista Star Dies Compay Segundo, the Cuban singer and guitarist who came to international attention in the 90s with the 'Buena Vista Social Club'has died at the age of 95. "Mr. Segundo, who rose to global fame in his 90's after decades of obscurity, was the most accomplished of the dozen or so Cuban musicians gathered in Havana in 1996 by the American producer Ry Cooder for a recording session meant to recapture the lost music of the pre-Revolutionary Havana nightclub scene." The New York Times 07/15/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 9:51 pm

Publishing

Moving Forward "US Poet Laureate Billy Collins leads the nominees for the UK's richest annual poetry award, the Forward Prize. Collins joins Ciaran Carson, Ian Duhig, Lavinia Greenlaw and Paul Muldoon on the shortlist for the £10,000 prize for the best published poetry collection." BBC 07/14/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 9:45 pm

Nothing But The Best (Seller?) What books really make the British best sller lists? One reporter reads the top ten to see if he had discern a common thread. "The idea, if I remember it rightly - it seems so very long ago - was really two ideas. First, why these particular books, these particular, very big books, out of the thousand or so new novels available, have risen to the top of the pile. And, second, what it might say about the great British reading public that these are the fictions we most want to escape into in the middle of July 2003. One of the things about reading many different books sequentially, many long and different books, is that they all come to seem a little like chapters in the same story." The Guardian (UK) 07/14/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 8:16 pm

The Atlantic In LA The Atlantic Magazine is moving its literary operations out of Boston to LA. "Since taking over as the Atlantic Monthly's literary editor three years ago, 39-year-old Yale- and Oxford-trained historian Benjamin Schwarz has reshaped the venerable magazine's book section into the shrewdest, best-written and most surprising cultural report currently on offer between slick covers. Now, Schwarz plans to break with 146 years of tradition and move the Atlantic's literary editorship from Boston, where the magazine was founded and will continue to publish, to set up shop in Los Angeles." Los Angeles Times 07/14/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 7:34 pm

View From The Top - America's Most "Literate" Cities "A survey of literacy in 64 cities confirmed what Seattle bookworms have long suspected. It named Seattle as one of the country's two most-literate cities, edged out for No. 1 only by Minneapolis. Jack Miller, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater chancellor and education professor, used statistics in five categories and 13 different measures of literacy to provide a 'literacy profile' of all American cities with populations of 250,000 or more." Seattle Times 07/13/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 7:32 pm

  • Dallas: A View From The Middle Dallas ranks in the middle of "literate" US cities at No. 36. "The surprise is that Dallas ranks above New York City (No. 47), Los Angeles (No. 54) and Chicago (No. 45). In fact, Dallas is the highest-ranked big city. All of the cities that placed above it have populations well below 1 million, while Dallas has 1,006,877 people. The study's author says it "does tend to penalize the biggest cities. New York and L.A. have very high numbers of publications, colleges and newspaper readers, but their populations are so big and varied that they offset any literary concentrations those cities might enjoy." Dallas Morning News 07/15/03
    Posted: 07/14/2003 7:29 pm

Media

ABC Stepping Away From "Reality"? ABC says it will wean itself off reality TV (the genre was described by one ABCer as "crack cocaine" for its seductiveness to programmers). "They all just look the same. They're all focused on interpersonal, petty relationships. They generally have some kind of vote-out mechanism. Many of them seem to get progressively more salacious." Or could it be that ratings for "reality" TV are just way down this summer? Philadelphia Inquirer 07/15/03
Posted: 07/15/2003 8:41 am

In Search Of... Masterpiece Theatre Funding PBS' Materpiece Theatre is looking for funding (and it's not proving easy). "ExxonMobil Corp. had provided sole funding for the program since its 1971 debut until deciding to drop its support. The series is funded by ExxonMobil through 2004." Backstage 07/14/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 9:39 pm

Why Black Actors Make Less Money? Whjy does TV pay black performers less than white ones, even when ratings for the former are higher? "Advertisers pay lower rates for programs that attract black audiences because they reason that blacks are among TV's more loyal customers, and it's easy to reach them across the TV dial." Backstage 07/14/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 9:37 pm

Why Over-Hype Shakespeare? Why does TV always feel its got to sex up serious subjects in order to get attention. A new BBC show on Shakespeare tries to make the Bard's life exciting. Gary Taylor begs to disagree with how this story line has been hyped. "There's something obscene about using the political assassination of Christopher Marlowe, or the legal torture and public execution of martyrs like Edmund Campion, Edward Arden, and Robert Southwell, to spice up someone else's dull biography. Shakespeare never sacrificed anything for anybody." The Guardian (UK) 07/13/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 8:11 pm

Dance

Dance Of The Cliches One dance critic comes away disappointed from an advance screening of Robert Altman's new dance film. "It is a disappointing hybrid that too often plays on dance cliches (a snapped Achilles tendon just hours before opening night, an ego-crushing bit of recasting, an outdoor premiere nearly washed out by a rainstorm, an alcoholic mother and litigious mentor) and never comes close to capturing the hour upon hour of class, rehearsal, repetition and intense, unwavering discipline so crucial to the art." Chicago Sun-Times 07/15/03
Posted: 07/15/2003 7:49 am

  • Previously: A Movie That Gets Inside Dance A new film by Robert Altman about the Joffrey Ballet puts a new spin on filming dance. "Working with director of photography Andrew Dunn, Altman often shoots from unusual angles, tracking gracefully from head to toe, for instance, or elsewhere using noteworthy crane shots and other devices to bring the viewer arrestingly, literally inside the dance." Chicago Tribune 07/13/03

Talent Surfing Ismene Brown goes looking at the UK's leading ballet school performances to see what talent is on the way up. "I saw no stars this summer, nor did I emerge from the four shows with huge optimism about the next British generation, because there are so pitifully few native dancers-in-waiting in the first place. The heavy dominance of our dance schools by foreign youngsters is not just because they are willing to pay the fees but because they are better trained earlier on and often hungrier." The Telegraoh (UK) 07/15/03
Posted: 07/14/2003 9:15 pm


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