Making The 'Creative Class' Feel Welcome. Or Not. What with the down economy, the war, and all, it can be easy to forget that an urban revival is continuing to progress in cities throughout North America. Thanks in large part to author Richard Florida's urban planning idea-of-the-moment (that cities should embrace the arts, culture, and something called the "creative class" in order to spur economic development,) cities are seeking out new ways to include the arts in their plans for a bigger and better future. But there's a difference between throwing a theatre festival designed for the same old elite (and mostly suburban) crowd, and actually looking for new ways to bring a community together around a cultural scene. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/22/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 5:53 am
How Technology Trumps Law-making Technology always finds a way around obstacles, writes Clay Shirkey. Peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies will continue to adapt to the ways recording companies try to stop them. Social softwarefinds ways to connect people. "In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now." Shirkey 10/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 7:58 pm
OCAD's New Look The Ontario College of Art & Design has a new building rising in downtown Toronto, and Lisa Rochon is already impressed with the "flying box" design and "hallucinatory" architecture. "In this scenario, technology has been twisted into art to produce an exhilarating building. A public square has been rammed directly into the architecture, sending sparks flying from the impact... Fully executed and carefully resolved, the building and civic square at OCAD could become Canada's version of the Centre Pompidou." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/22/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 5:47 am
Escher Museum Opens In The Hague MC Escher, who always said that he was as much mathematician as artist, has a new museum dedicated to his work. The Escher Museum, based in the Netherlands, "arranges Escher's prints and drawings chronologically, with early realistic sketches, linoleum cuts, and some commercial designs on the first floor and most of the masterpieces of perspective and optical illusion that made him famous in the 1950s and 1960s grouped thematically on the second, main floor. The museum also adds a modern touch with a 'virtual reality' display on the third floor that turns some of Escher's best-known works into moving holograms." Boston Globe (AP) 10/22/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 5:29 am
V&A Museum Launches Glossy Mag The Victoria & Albert Museum launches a new glossy magazine for museum members. "It's an ambitious and risky project. As a general-interest art magazine, containing a lavish 82 pages of editorial complemented by only 30 pages of up-market advertising, it appears far superior to anything on the commercial market. The dummy issue I saw looked pacey, imaginative and stylish, with plenty of strong words as well as beautiful pictures." The Telegraph (UK) 10/22/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 8:59 pm
Hermitage To Go Dutch The Hermitage Museum plans to open a branch in Amsterdam next year. "Located in a 17th-century canal-side building, the Hermitage Amsterdam will be much more than a boutique satellite operation; once finished, it will be larger than the city’s Stedelijk Museum." The Art Newspaper 10/18/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 6:28 pm
Thieves Who Appreciate Good Contemporary Art Thieves have stolen nine works from Sergei Bugayev's house outside St. Petersburg. "The missing works, valued at $250,000 by experts at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, include works by Bugayev himself, who is also known as 'Africa', and by other leading local artists, such as Timur Novikov. The thieves destroyed about 140 other works of art, as well as rare antique furniture and books, the charred remains of which were found in the house’s back yard. 'The mastermind behind this crime knows contemporary art, Bugayev told The Art Newspaper, “They took the best works'." The Art Newspaper 10/18/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 5:30 pm
Libeskind Pulls Out Of 'Ring' Production Covent Garden thought it had scored a coup when it hired architect Daniel Libeskind to design sets for a new production of Wagner's Ring. "But a Covent Garden spokesman said yesterday that he and director Keith Warner had been "unable to agree on the imagery", for the operas whose design always provokes passionate - and sometimes vitriolic - debate among Wagner buffs." So Libeskind has pulled out of the project. The Guardian (UK) 10/22/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 9:05 pm
iTunes - The End Of Illegal Downloading? Apple's iTunes for Windows is a big success so far. "To hear Apple's CEO Steve Jobs tell it, the iTunes store is the beginning of the end for the file-sharing networks. 'This has been the birth of legal downloading'." Others, though, are not so sure... Wired 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 8:39 pm
Recording Industry On The Trail Of 204 More Music File-Traders The recording industry has warned 204 more people that they will be prosecuted for file-sharing. "The RIAA's second round of lawsuits started with a sternly worded letter giving the individuals 10 days to contact the RIAA to discuss a settlement and avoid being formally sued. Under copyright law, the defendants could face damages that range from $750 to $150,000 for each illegal song." San Francisco Chronicle 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 8:03 pm
A Tax To Pay Artists For Music Copying? Harvard professor William Fisher has a proposal for a tax on digital playback devices. Music could be downloaded and copied freely and artists would be paid from the tax fees. "He predicts that his plan, debated at a recent copyright conference, eventually would boost music revenues. Since online distribution is cheaper than printing CDs, overhead should shrink. Promotion costs could drop, too, as fans spread the word themselves about talented artists. Legal costs should vanish along with copyright lawsuits." The Star-Ledger (Newark) 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 6:22 pm
The Comic That Scared Washington "In an unprecedented move that angered readers and generated industry criticism, The Washington Post recently killed an entire week of "The Boondocks" comic strip with a story line suggesting the world might be a safer place if national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had a more active love life." Comics have been being pulled from newspapers since the days of Pogo, of course, but the fact that a paper of national import such as the Post would find the strip, which was not explicit, too hot to handle, is raising old questions about censorship, humor, and the purpose of a newspaper's comics page. Boston Globe 10/22/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 5:23 am
Bringing Art To The People, They Hope A new project by the UK's Ministry of Arts will attempt to bring the nation's cultural scene to a broader swath of the public with a web site called Culture Online. The site is really several different sites, each emphasizing a different artistic discipline, and each with a very different look. Some of the projects are interactive, some are not, and all are being developed in partnership with various prominent British arts groups. BBC 10/21/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 4:57 am
Pavarotti Hospitalized In Health Scare The Italian tenor, 68, was said to have fallen ill after a recital in Mexico and was flown to an unnamed hospital in New York. The Scotsman 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 8:44 pm
Music For New Lord of the Rings Musical AR Rahman, who wrote music for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams, has been hired to write the score for a musical version of Lord of the Rings. "Rahman is a star in his native India and has sold more than 100 million albums, composing the soundtracks to more than 50 Bollywood films. The £8m musical is due to open in the spring of 2005 in London." BBC 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 8:16 pm
Harbourfront, After The Storm "The International Festival of Authors will be launched tonight in Toronto with a lavish party at Harbourfront Centre's Premiere Dance Theatre, proof positive that it has survived the summer cataclysm of founder Greg Gatenby's ouster. His successor, long-time festival manager Geoffrey Taylor, has cobbled together a 2003 festival that, like some literary fable, contains elements programmed by Gatenby and others by Taylor, with nobody able to tell which is which. That's because neither party feels free to speak." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/22/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 5:51 am
Amazon Turns A Profit "Online retailer Amazon has reported a quarterly profit for the first time outside of the key Christmas sales period. The company said free delivery offers and a new sporting goods store had helped boost revenue by 33%... The results - only the third time in its history Amazon has made a quarterly net profit - were slightly better than most Wall Street estimates." Still, many industry observers believe that the bookselling supercompany is performing far below its potential, and analysts continue to warn that the company's stock is dangerously overvalued. BBC 10/21/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 5:02 am
Children's Books - Now Big Business "Children’s literature has become such a powerful, dense mass that its gravity is sucking in everyone in sight. Madonna, whose last published work, Sex, involved explicit photographs, stream of consciousness pornography and rape fantasies, has followed it up with English Roses, a tale of four little girls jealous of their beautiful classmate, Binah. Peter Ackroyd, author of biographies of Sir Thomas More and William Blake, has embarked on explaining the world to ten year-olds in a series of children’s educational books for the publisher Dorling Kindersley, while the latest "blow-in" to the genre is Philip Kerr, the Scots thriller writer and author of A Philosophical Investigation and The Shot." The Scotsman 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 8:48 pm
Saving Paris Review The Paris Review was always a struggling literary magazine - low subscriber base and shoestring budget. But "last week's George Plimpton tribute, a celebrity-studded gala at Cipriani on 42nd Street, raised $500,000 for the Paris Review Foundation, bringing the foundation's endowment to about $1 million. Now literary insiders are buzzing about how what used to be a for-profit magazine that lost money every year has turned into a bustling nonprofit with a shot at long-term profitability. Meanwhile, the search for a new editor has begun." Village Voice 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 6:42 pm
Court To Webcasters: Pay Up "Radio stations must pay royalties to recording companies and performers, as they do to composers and songwriters, when musical broadcasts are streamed over the Internet, a federal appeals court has affirmed... Traditional radio broadcasts haven't been subject to royalties to recording companies and performers because they have served to promote sales of recordings. But Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which required such royalties from webcasters." Wired 10/21/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 6:15 am
Copy-Protecting Your TV "U.S. regulators in coming weeks will adopt strict limits on sending digital television programs over the Internet to avoid the problems now plaguing the music industry, U.S. officials said on Tuesday. The Federal Communications Commission will likely adopt rules that will allow programmers to attach a code to digital broadcasts that will in most cases bar consumers from sending copies of popular shows around the world." Few law-abiding sorts would have reason to object, it would seem, but consumer advocates are warning that the new digital 'flags' would require most consumers to replace their DVD players at their own cost, at a time when everyone will be forced to replace their TVs just to receive the digital signal. Wired (Reuters) 10/21/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 5:10 am
Oscar Voters, Academy Near Compromise In Movie Dispute A compromise is being worked out between critics and the Motion Picture Academy to send Oscar voters tapes of films nominated for Oscars. "The plan would call for the studios to send out only videotapes of the films, not DVDs, and each tape would be coded with the recipient's name for tracking purposes. If a tape is illegally copied, or "pirated," for resale on black markets or digitized for Internet downloading, the tape's recipient would be sanctioned, and punishment could include dismissal from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, the U.S. film industry's top honors." Backstage 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 8:27 pm
Afghan Film Wins Festival "Afghan director Siddiq Barmak's "Osama" has won the top prize at the International Festival of New Film and Media in Montreal. "Osama," a joint production of Afghanistan, Japan and Ireland, was one of the first features produced in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban almost two years ago." Backstage 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 8:24 pm
Tivo Nation Tivo pioneered digital video recorders. But cable companies are getting into the act. "So far, 2.5 million to 2.8 million of the nation's roughly 110 million homes have digital video recorders. But DVR's inspire fierce loyalty from those who have them, terrify advertisers (because they can be used to skip commercials) and are seen by many media experts as the future of television. The Yankee Group estimates that in four years, almost 25 million homes will have digital video recorders and that about two-thirds of those will be DVR's that have been integrated into satellite or cable set-top decoders." The New York Times 10/21/03
Posted: 10/21/2003 6:38 pm
The Ongoing Legacy Of A Provocateur Bill T. Jones is not as scary as he once was. Or maybe it's that society has finally caught up to his way of looking at the world. In any case, the 51-year-old choreographer, who stunned the dance world with his harshly political looks at AIDS, race, and religion in the early 1990s, is still producing new works, and they are still provocative, if not quite so shocking as they used to be. Simply by enduring, Jones seems to have advanced the notion that dance can be as political as any other art form to a new acceptance within the mainstream dance community. Chicago Tribune 10/22/03
Posted: 10/22/2003 5:35 am
