Ideas

The Flash Mob: Art, Politics, Or Silliness? The new phenomenon of the 'flash mob' - a planned gathering of random individuals who proceed to do something bizarre but harmless in a public place - is certainly a sign of the times. But is it art? Certainly, the activities of most flash mobs are no stranger than the work of some performance artists. Or maybe it's the most basic form of political organizing - after all, the mobs are organized by e-mail, and bring together like-minded people from disparate walks of life. Or, is the flash mob nothing more than this era's obnoxious public fad, like streaking, or running onto a baseball field during the game? Philadelphia Inquirer 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 6:01 am

The Fading History Few students are studying history these days. And those that do seem to have an aversion to history books. "Instead, there is a preference for more bite-sized, experiential media, like TV history programmes or websites. Apparently, TV provides a model for what students expect from their university courses, as something involving 'colour, action, biography and narrative'. There are complaints that students see history as 'basically a narrative, descriptive subject', and 'expect to be told stories rather than acquire the skills of the historian'. A number of reasons have been offered to explain these trends." spiked-culture 07/23/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 6:54 pm

Ukraine - The Land Fads Forgot "It often seems to me that Ukrainians have a distinctive immunity that protects them from the gaudy attractions of fashionable trends. Having said this, there is a thoroughly prosaic reason for such immunity. In a country of 48 million people the middle class is too small, and the poorer classes, preoccupied with problems of day-to-day living, too numerous, for them to have the time and energy to give which fads need to take root. No all-encompassing means of communication has been established; it is impossible for everyone to learn about the same phenomena simultaneously. So everyone, so to speak, sings his own favourite song." Topic Magazine 08/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 5:11 pm

Visual Arts

Weinberg To Head Whitney? "Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover [Massachusetts], is expected to be named the new director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at a Whitney board meeting tonight, according to a museum-world source close to the search... Whitney directors have had notorious difficulties with the post. The last director, Maxwell L. Anderson, resigned in May after disputes with the board. Anderson's predecessor, David A. Ross, who was director of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art before going to the Whitney in 1991, left in 1998 to head the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art." Boston Globe 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 6:52 am

Antiquities Game - Is It All Stolen? Oscar Muscarella believes that most of the antiquities in museums like the Metropolitan Museum are plundered. "Whether this should all be returned or not is another story. Put simply, his view is that the practice of acquiring antiquities, outside of scholarly excavation, is inevitably immoral. It promotes a trade that Muscarella, during his more animated outbursts, likens to 'white slavery'." he believes that "the important thing now is to stop the looting." The Village Voice 08/05/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 5:52 pm

Music

The Searchable Composer A new web site based in Canada is attempting to provide a much-needed resource for the classical music world: "a fully searchable Web site of home grown contemporary music. The slick, bilingual site, www.musiccentre.ca, includes comprehensive biographies and sound samples of about 580 composers, living and dead... Holding the country's largest collection of Canadian classical works, the Toronto-based centre, around since 1959, has re-organized its library resources so the general public can access the materials. Previously the centre's 15,000 scores were only available through five regional lending libraries." Canada.com (CP) 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 5:23 am

Moving Fast In Colorado Less than a year after the Colorado Springs Symphony folded up shop and joined the ranks of defunct North American orchestras, a new ensemble made up of the same musicians has risen from the ashes and announced its first season. The Colorado Springs Philharmonic will play ten sets of classical concerts, and four sets of pops in 2003-04, and will perform under the baton of Lawrence Leighton Smith, the same conductor who led the old symphony. In another interesting twist, Philharmonic executive director Susan Greene is the same manager who was unceremoniously dismissed by the symphony board a year before its demise. Denver Post 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 5:15 am

Opera Returns To The Baths "After a hiatus of exactly 10 years, full-scale opera returned late last month to the Baths of Caracalla. The cream of Roman society put on their best suits and gowns for the occasion on July 24, reveling in the soft orange light that bathes the third-century baths after dusk, making the ruins one of opera's most striking theaters." The New York Times 08/07/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 7:08 pm

The DNA Song A Thai geneticist, a computer programmer and a composer have "written" a piece of music based on DNA genetic sequencing. "When I first heard my hepatitis song, all my hairs stood up. The song was amazingly beautiful and it perfectly fit with my (play about DNA)." Discovery 08/06/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 6:11 pm

Classical Music Recordings Share Dips A new study of recording sales in the UK indicates that sales of classical music are falling as a percentage of total music sales. "More than a decade after the heyday of the Three Tenors, the new survey, compiled by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), appears to prove that the public's brief 1990s flirtation with orchestral music is over. It found that classical CDs accounted for barely one in 20 of all the albums sold in the UK last year - compared to a high of one in 10 in 1990." The Independent (UK) 08/03/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 6:02 pm

Arts Issues

Libeskind's Ground Zero Vision May Be Delayed Groundbreaking on the massive rebuilding project at Ground Zero in New York may be delayed by a peripheral fight over money. There had already been reports that architect Daniel Libeskind and developer Larry Silverstein had been at odds over various details of the project. Now, Silverstein's personal financial battles with the Port Authority and his mortgage company are putting the construction timetable in doubt. "Each of the three warring parties has significant say over how insurance proceeds from the twin towers are used. But Silverstein is insisting that the timetable for the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower will be delayed unless his lender - GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp. - is bought out, sources said." New York Daily News 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 6:14 am

Those Cranky Austrians A new German television show, which allows viewers to vote on the "greatest Germans" of all time, has incurred the wrath of Austrians for including several Austrian-born individuals on the list. Chief among the disputed candidates is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was actually from Salzburg and spent the bulk of his career there and in Vienna. Other great Germans of dubious Germanic heritage include Joseph Haydn, Sigmund Freud, and Copernicus. The Germans say that there were bound to be compaints, because, as the show's producers tactfully put it, "Germany's borders had changed so often." BBC 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 5:28 am

Creativity Equals Capital? "Advocates for the arts have long made a strong case that the local economy benefits from museums, theaters, orchestras, galleries, and similar institutions. Yet looking at the art establishment and its events misses much of the positive economic impact from the arts," says a new study. "The larger business community benefits from the presence of a vibrant arts community, not only because it helps firms recruit skilled workers to the region but also because it provides a pool of talent for them to draw upon for special design, organizational, and marketing efforts." Businessweek 08/06/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 6:43 pm

• Previously: The Creativity Factor A new study by Ann Markusen and David King argues that the arts are a core piece of a local economy. "Good schools, parks, recreation and housing are important, but also lively streets and ample opportunities for entertainment and artistic enrichment. It's not surprising, then, that cities with high concentrations of artists - San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis-St. Paul - tend to be better economic performers than cities with lower concentrations - Dallas, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Markusen is right to suggest that nurturing clusters of artists is a sound investment for governments, foundations and other donors." The Star-Tribune (Minneapolis) 08/03/03

People

Jack of All Trades, Master of Arts "Over the course of a 40-year professional career he has been a musician, composer, conductor, educator and nationally renowned arts administrator. But now the founding director of the Baltimore School for the Arts, who retired in 1996 after leading the school through its first 16 years of existence, is debuting in an entirely new role: David Simon, American realist painter." Baltimore Sun 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 6:56 am

Publishing

The Chicago Way The venerable Chicago Manual of Style comes out with a new edition - its fifteenth. "Still decked out in the familiar, tomato-orange wrapping, and spiffed up inside with two tones of ink and an antic sans-serif font for the examples, the Manual has been launched into the Internet Age. It wants to be as relevant to mainstream publishers of books and magazines, both on- and offline, as it has always been to academic presses. The nine selling points listed on the back cover have been phrased, thank goodness, in tidily parallel form. And most important, the Manual has at last given us a chapter on grammar and usage. At 93 pages, the chapter is by far the longest in the book." Slate 08/06/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 5:29 pm

• Sorting Your Hyphens From Your Dashes "Heads are spinning among those authors, editors and publishers who regard the Chicago Manual as the bible of printing style, grammar and punctuation. Well, not everyone's head. But still, it has been 10 years since the last edition of the manual, which is published by the University of Chicago Press. That one has sold 500,000 copies. The new one is the most significant revision since the 12th edition in 1969." The New York Times 08/07/03
  Posted: 08/06/2003 5:05 pm

New Era For Poetry Magazine A new era is beginning at Chicago-based Poetry Magazine. "After twenty years as editor, Joseph Parisi is stepping down to become executive director of the new Poetry Foundation, established through a recent bequest of around one hundred and fifty million dollars from pharmaceuticals heiress, Ruth Lilly. Poetry's new editor is Christian Wiman. He's 36 years old and his poems and essays appeared frequently in the magazine." The magazine gets 90,000 poetry submissions each year. WBEZ (Chicago) [audio link] 08/05/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 5:02 pm

Media

Splintering The Audience In a recent article in The Atlantic, David Brooks pointed out the hypocritical tendency of Americans to pay lip service to the ideal of 'diversity' from inside the safety of our completely homogenous self-styled social circles. That type of human narrowness is hardly news to the TV industry, which has been increasingly focused on the splintering of the American audience. 'Niche programming' is truly the wave of the future, and where once a network had to appeal to a broad cross-section of the country to be successful, today's strategy is to group viewers into tiny genre boxes, where they can be easily catered to by programmers and, more importantly, advertisers. Chicago Tribune 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 6:41 am

Dance

fFIDA Looks To The fFuture Toronto's Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists (fFIDA) is expanding its lineup and revamping its image this year, in an effort to draw a wider variety of performers and raise the festival's international profile. This year's fFIDA features multiple programs running at the same time in different venues, and a far higher concentration of non-Canadian dancers than usual. "Another change this year is the deliberate linking of choreographers to create interesting programs, rather than letting serendipity rule, even though fFIDA participants are still selected by lottery." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 6:28 am

Reach Out And Touch Someone The phenomenon of 'contact improvisation' is going strong in the modern dance world, despite having been dismissed by many serious dancers as a fad when it was invented in the 1970s. In fact, many modern choreographers say that the improvisational technique has been crucial to their development. "A product of its time, [contact improv] emphasizes spontaneity, togetherness, body/mind integration and other Age of Aquarius values." Call it the dance equivalent of free-association literature. Seattle Times 08/07/03
Posted: 08/07/2003 5:47 am

New Meaning For Underground Dance "On Saturday night the Canadian-owned Inmet mining company set a cultural record by hosting a dance performance - 1,410 metres down its copper and zinc mine in Pyhäsalmi, 475 kilometres north of Helsinki. According to organizers, the 45-minute performance, which went off without a hitch, set a new record for physical profundity in dance." National Post (Canada) 08/06/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 7:02 pm

What's Next For Twyla? Twyla Tharp planned a New York season on short notice. She's a loner — relieved, she’s been saying in interviews, not to be saddled with a large institution, with "real estate." Over the years, she’s proved that she can do just about anything she sets out to do, so what does she want to do now? Can she stay small while getting bigger and bigger? Will she seriously commit herself to revivifying her important work from the past, either under own banner or elsewhere?" New York Observer 08/06/03
Posted: 08/06/2003 6:26 pm