Ideas Open Source, The Revolution Spreads Open source is a big movement in software. But the idea is spreading beyond computers. "In 2003, the method is proving to be as broadly effective - and, yes, as revolutionary - a means of production as the assembly line was a century ago.But software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. There is open source publishing: Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There's even an open source cookbook." Wired 10/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 11:08 pm Visual Arts The New Corporate Art "Pardon visitors to this King County library branch if they can't quite get a fix on the new addition to the art collection: One minute it's a Winslow Homer, a few minutes later it's a Cezanne, and then a Latour. They're among the first to experience high-resolution digital art delivered by Seattle startup RGB Labs through its just-launched GalleryPlayer, a software-hardware service that provides secure delivery of copyright art directly to plasma screens. Designed primarily for corporate or public-space use, for $195 a month... the GalleryPlayer service delivers digital galleries of art displayed in intervals of 15 to 25 minutes." Wired 10/16/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 7:10 am Art of Catharsis The Rev. Paul R. Shanley is one of the Boston priests who has been charged with child sexual abuse, and he is living in the trendy Cape Cod burg of Provincetown while awaiting trial. The new arrival didn't sit well with one Provincetown artist, who was very nearly one of Shanley's victims as a child. So when Mike Ware "heard of a proposal to create site-specific art installations in the Meadows Motel... he decided to furnish a room for 'this one person who really affected my life.' So Ware designed his contribution to the exhibit, which opens tomorrow in Provincetown: a jail cell for the Rev. Paul R. Shanley." Boston Globe 10/16/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 6:24 am Growing Pains - The Morgan Gets Bigger Charles Pierce, director of the Morgan Library in New York, has just moved into temporary offices while the library is being expandedIt's now so common to see museums shut, turn into construction sites and reopen a few years later that one can easily assume that the whole process is that simple. Yet as I surveyed my new office, I realized how complex, unsettling, and even difficult the last three years have been. There were, as I learned only after we had started, four major challenges involved in our goal of remaking the Morgan Library." OpinionJournal.com 10/16/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 8:09 pm Music Staying Solvent, While Holding On To Your Soul With deficits becoming the rule rather than the exception, and public interest in classical music stagnant at best, American orchestras are searching for ways to reinvent their product without alienating their core audience. No one's done it successfully yet, but many people in the industry are betting that Deborah Card, the Chicago Symphony's new executive director, may eventually lead the way. "Our responsibility as administrators is to make sure that people have the best possible access to those concerts. We have to step up to the challenge of understanding that we're in a marketplace, and the marketplace must be attended to. We have to be sure that our product -- that sounds so crass -- is delivered in the way people want to receive it." Chicago Sun-Times 10/16/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 6:16 am Chicago Balances The Budget, Sort Of The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which stunned the orchestra world when it posted an unprecedented $6 million deficit last year, has officially balanced its books for the 2002-03 season. The CSO cut $2.5 million from its annual budget and took an additional endowment draw of $1.3 million in order to stay out of the red, while ticket sales and contributed income remained flat. However, the orchestra anticipates a return to large deficits for the current season, when it will not be able to repeat the endowment overdraw trick. Chicago Sun-Times 10/16/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 6:10 am Cleveland Posts Large Deficit Even the most prestigious American orchestras aren't safe from the wave of deficits and cash flow problems which has swept the nation in recent years. This week, the Cleveland Orchestra, thought by many to be the best symphony orchestra in the U.S., reported a deficit of nearly $2 million on a budget of $36 million. This is the second consecutive deficit for the group, and orchestra execs are projecting a $4 million deficit for the current fiscal year. The struggle to stay in the black appears to be twofold: "The fundamental problem is the presence of a world-class symphony orchestra in a relatively small city," and the orchestra's endowment was hit hard by the recession, losing more than $50 million over three years. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/16/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 6:04 am Milwaukee's New Top Exec The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, hoping to dig its way out from under a $4 million accumulated debt, has hired Mark C. Hanson as its new executive director. Hanson has run the Knoxville (TN) Symphony for the past two seasons, and received a national award recognizing his progress in both financial and artistic areas there. Hanson is quite young - 29 years old - but his record in retiring debt was apparently attractive to the MSO's search committee, and he is himself a musician, which is often thought to be an important factor to an orchestra's players. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 10/15/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 5:40 am Seattle Symphony Hires Controversial New Exec Director The Seattle Symphony hires a new executive director. Paul Meecham is currently orchestra manager of the New York Philharmonic, but his appointment in Seattle is controversial, and didn't win the full support of the orchestra's board of directors. "According to musicians, Meecham had earlier made derogatory statements about longtime music director Gerard Schwarz's conducting and recordings in a meeting with several musicians." Seattle Times 10/15/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 11:28 pm NY Phil/Carnegie Merger - An Ill-Fated Venture The New York Philharmonic/Carnegie Hall merger was ill-fated from the start, writes Charles Michener. "It was never going to happen. As we now know, the whole farrago was cooked up by Sanford I. Weill, the megabanker who heads Carnegie’s board, and his counterpart at the Philharmonic, Paul B. Guenther. And for all the spin about the orchestra’s glorious return to the place where it flourished before its move to Lincoln Center in 1962, it seems clear that the scheme had nothing to do with nostalgia or concern for the public good. In keeping with the merger mania that has corrupted so much of the product delivered by our media and entertainment leviathans (General Electric, which owns NBC, has just added Vivendi Universal’s entertainment division to its list of household appliances), the deal was all about the bottom line." New York Observer 10/16/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 9:35 pm Arts Issues Music And Dance Schools To Merge Two major English arts schools are planning to merge. "Trinity College of Music and Laban, which have international reputations, are to become a fame academy for the classical world from next autumn. The move has been hailed as a breakthrough for the two disciplines, which have always been taught separately in Britain despite their long shared history." The Guardian (UK) 10/16/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 10:12 pm Aussie University Strike Teachers at Australia's universities have gone on strike. "Classes were cancelled and libraries closed as staff picketed outside universities to protest against government moves to link higher education funding to industrial conditions." The Age (Melbourne) 10/16/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 9:10 pm Foxy Plan For Oakland Arts School "The Oakland City Council is considering spending $13 million to renovate the long-shuttered Fox Theater downtown, with $5.5 million of the public money helping fund a new home for Mayor Jerry Brown's arts charter school." San Francisco Chronicle 10/15/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 7:36 pm People Keeping An Eye On The One With The Cash The UK's arts minister ran afoul of some of the nation's most prominent arts groups this week, when published rumors spread that she was planning to divert government funds away from large national groups such as the British Museum and the National Gallery, in favor of funding smaller, regional organizations. Estelle Morris is sharply denying that she has any such plans, and insists that she merely wants to increase the accessibility of great art. Still, wary arts execs will be watching Morris's next moves closely. BBC 10/16/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 5:56 am Resurrecting Sammy Two new biographies of Sammy Davis Jr. "spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish - indeed his lifelong effort - to be white." Straight Up (AJBlogs) 10/15/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 9:06 pm Leaving San Diego Alive When Don Bacigalupi arrived as director of the San Diego Museum of Art in 1999, the museum was considered a difficult job. "What a difference four years and new leadership makes. The museum has risen to national respectability by generating high-quality exhibitions touching on all areas of the collection, revitalizing the collection itself through judicious acquisitions, and establishing a collegial relationship with other museums in Balboa Park, across town, across the United States and beyond." Now Bacigalupi departs to head up the Toledo Art Museum. San Diego Union-Tribune 10/15/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 8:19 pm Publishing National Book Award Finalists This year's National Book Awards finalists have been named. They are: Shirley Hazzard's "Great Fire," Marianne Wiggins's "Evidence of Things Unseen" (Simon & Schuster), "The Known World," by Edward P. Jones, "A Ship Made of Paper," by Scott Spencer, and "Drop City," by T. C. Boyle. The New York Times 10/16/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 10:49 pm In His Own Words - Booker Winner On His Colorful Past: DBC Pierre knows what it's like to experience "90 flavours of trouble riding on his ass," having been addicted to cocaine and run up such huge debts that he ripped off a friend to the tune of £30,000. Winning the most prestigious literary award in the country worth £50,000 will not counter the lesson of Pierre's past 20 years: that life is "a hard bastard" and "we should count ourselves lucky for just about everything, including drawing breath." The Guardian (UK) 10/16/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 10:20 pm So Who Is DBC Pierre? "It was in 1999 or so that, eking out a living as a cartoonist and graphic designer, he suddenly felt compelled to write. The catalyst was a pre-Columbine American television report about a teenage boy arrested for shooting several schoolmates." The New York Times 10/16/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 10:14 pm Ann Godoff's New Crop Ann Godoff, who was fired from Random House last year, is out with her first set of books at new employer Penguin. "The first sign that the Penguin Press is not your run-of-the-mill commercial publisher is the plain-brown-paper catalog cover. Inside, each of the 14 books gets a two-page spread, as opposed to the one-page announcement that many catalogs give most books. Each book cover is shown in black and white (surely, in the flesh, there’ll be some color) and otherwise illustrated with sepia photo strips. Nothing flashy here. The message seems to be: 'We’re Old World—smart and subdued.' Penguin Press is the publishing equivalent of shabby chic. New York Observer 10/15/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 10:02 pm Media The Strange And Wonderful Documentary Explosion "If the unprecedented box office success of documentary films in 2003 were itself the subject of a documentary, critics would find the plot wildly implausible and the explanations maddeningly inconclusive. A nearly wordless cinematic love poem to the flapping of birds, Winged Migration, has earned nearly twice as much money this year as that teetering blockbuster with Ben and J.Lo... Why this is happening to the much-maligned documentary category is much harder to pinpoint than box-office numbers. The most obvious answer: Good movies sell tickets." Denver Post 10/16/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 6:36 am Universal Slashes Workforce "Universal Music, the world's largest record company, is to slash 1,350 jobs - or 11% of its workforce - in order to cope with a protracted slump in sales. Global music sales have been in decline for more than three years, with the industry laying the blame on illegal song swapping over the internet and home CD burning. Universal says the cuts will save it $200 million a year and leave the firm in a good position to take advantage of any turnaround." BBC 10/16/03 Posted: 10/16/2003 6:00 am Sony Pictures To Lay Off 300 Sony Pictures plans to lay off 300 workers in the next year and a half. "The layoffs will follow the elimination of 1,000 jobs in the entertainment and electronics giant's struggling music group earlier this year. The new cuts are expected to hit across the board at Sony Pictures' key business units, including its Culver City-based Columbia Pictures movie studio, domestic and international television operations and Sony Pictures Digital. Sources estimate that the cuts could save the company as much as $75 million a year." Los Angeles Times 10/15/03 Posted: 10/15/2003 8:22 pm