U-Michigan Names Museum Architect "Brad Cloepfil's Allied Works Architecture based in Portland, Oregon, has been chosen for the $35 million expansion and renovation of the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor. The project will include a 55,000-square-foot addition to the museum, which is housed in Alumni Memorial Hall, a Beaux-Arts landmark, located in the heart of the main campus. The hall itself will undergo a complete renovation. When everything is complete, the museum will more than double in size from 41,676 square feet to 95,396. Construction will begin when a fund-raising campaign winds down next year." Detroit News 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 6:16 am
Art Saved From The Damned Yanks (So?) An exhibition of "saved" art in London is a tedious self-congratulatory affair, writes Jonathan Jones. "Quite what art needs to be saved from is not made clear but, as this exhibition documents a century of the National Art Collections Fund, whose mission is to purchase for British galleries "treasures" that would otherwise be sold abroad, I think we all know that the villain of the piece smokes a big cigar, wears a Stetson and waves a bunch of dollars about. Thank God, we are supposed to say, that Titian's Venus Anadyomene never ended up in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Te argument is plain enough." The Guardian (UK) 10/28/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 4:33 pm
Turner Prize: Going For Gruesome (And A Health Dept. Warning) This year's Turner finalists (surprise, surprise) are out to shock again. The Chapman Brothers' entry depicts oral sex and incorporates decaying bodies. "The controversy threatens to dwarf even the rows that have engulfed the Turner Prize over its past 20 years when Death goes on display on Tuesday. Grayson Perry, one of the other nominees for the award, said the Chapman brothers 'are going for the shock horror jugular'." The Observer (UK) 10/28/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 4:29 pm
- In It For The Shock Value (And This Is A Surprise?) The Turner Prize always seems to find new ways of being controversial. "It ought to be impossible, in this, the 19th year of its art world stranglehold, to create controversy by any means at all, short of eating a human baby. Whereas in fact, the Chapman brothers, shortlisted this year for their piece Death, are already at the centre of a storm over some garden-variety oral sex. The Turner prize does feel gimmicky and hollow - and there is a reason for this." The Guardian (UK) 10/28/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 4:25 pm
- Forget Controversy - This Year's Turner Is Great Stuff Too bad for the Chapman controversy, writes Richard Dorment. "This has become a Turner Prize tradition, one I am sorry to see. Because, otherwise, the exhibition of the shortlisted artists is curiously coherent. In their different ways, they all share a pessimistic view of nature, history, sex and society, expressed in work that is often beautiful, always compelling."
The Telegraph (UK) 10/29/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 4:20 pm
Yerba Accident: Don't Call 911! An overturned truck on the steps of San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center looks like an accident has just happened, and has prompted passersby to call 911. "Open at the back, the truck holds about two dozen video and computer monitors, some of which flicker with chopped-up animation, scrambled convenience-store surveillance tapes and footage of a man rolling paint over graffiti on an outdoor wall. The man has a Sisyphean counterpart in real space: a mechanized wood cutout figure who brandishes a spray can up and down, up and down, reminiscent of Jonathan Borofsky's famous Hammering Man." San Francisco Chronicle 10/28/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 4:19 pm
Pittsburgh Turns It Around The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which has been seen as a textbook case of the financial chaos enveloping American symphony orchestras, has somehow managed to balance its budget. "The PSO had projected a $2.5 million to $3 million structural deficit for the 2003-04 season, but expects to avoid it through increased endowment performance, augmented annual fund contributions, reduced musicians' salaries, increases in ticket revenue and enhancement of shared services... Other positive fiscal factors include fund raising that is $250,000 ahead of this time last year, a new musicians' contract that includes a 7.8 percent wage cut for the first two years, and a 30 percent increase in new classical subscription sales from last year to date, totaling 1,550 new subscribers." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 6:48 am
Good News/Bad News in San Antonio The musicians of the San Antonio Symphony have a new contract. The good news is that the embattled ensemble will apparently survive, and will mount 26 weeks of concerts in 2004-05. The bad news is that there will be no concerts this season, and musicians will have no salaries, no health insurance, and few local prospects for full-time musical employment in the interim. The contract calls for the musicians to receive a raise in weekly wages in 2004, but because of the short season, they will actually make far less in salary and benefits than they did prior to the orchestra's bankruptcy filing last spring. San Antonio Express-News 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 5:53 am
NJSO: Basking in the Järvi Glow So how do the musicians of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra feel about the appointment of Neeme Järvi as their next music director? 'Ecstatic' may not be a strong enough word. Järvi first conducted the NJSO last season, and the orchestra's principal flute says that "after that concert, I heard the most unbelievable gushing from every section of the orchestra. The veterans loved him, the newbies loved him. Everybody fell for him." Musicians are also praising the orchestra's board for making them an integral part of the search process, rather than an afterthought. Newark Star-Ledger 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 5:39 am
- Getting To Know Him While the appointment of Neeme Järvi in New Jersey may have come as a shock to the orchestra industry, the new partnership is already looking like a natural match. After all, Newark is not so terribly different a city from Detroit, where Järvi has spent the last 14 seasons. And the NJSO couldn't ask for a more down-to-earth musician to match its down-to-earth base of operations: by all accounts, Järvi's strength is in his ability to take music seriously without ever forgetting that he and his musicians are entertainers first. "Do you know what is the difference between God and a conductor?" he asks. "God doesn't think he's a conductor!" Newark Star-Ledger 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 5:38 am
- Previously: Stunning Appointment: Järvi to New Jersey In what is being widely viewed as a major coup for a second-tier American orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra has announced that Neeme Järvi will be its next music director, officially beginning in 2005. Järvi will take over immediately as the orchestra's principal conductor, ending a 2-1/2 year search to replace the departed Zdenek Macal in Newark. Järvi has been the music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for 14 years, and has been credited with transforming the DSO into one of the top ensembles in the U.S. The announcement is seen as a badly needed shot in the arm for the NJSO, which has been running severe deficits and which recently lost its well-regarded executive director to Pittsburgh. Newark Star-Ledger 10/28/03
Big-Time Opera, Hold the Sticker Shock A British impresario has announced that he will shortly launch a new opera company in London designed specifically to be accessible to a wider and more diverse audience than the city's other, larger companies. "The Savoy Opera company, based at London's Savoy Theatre, will stage popular operas such as Carmen and the Marriage of Figaro, beginning in April. The aim is to not to compete with the capital's two big opera companies, but to offer a cheaper alternative. Top ticket prices will be £50, compared to £170 at the Royal Opera House." BBC 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 5:24 am
Presidential Peter "A couple of new recordings of Peter and the Wolf - narrated by Sophia Loren and Bill Clinton. "His famously pock-marked voice is strangely alluring. He sounds sincere and avuncular, and acts with a fair amount of ease. This is something more complex than a statesmanlike reading of Copland's Lincoln Portrait. Hidden talents? No. After all, it was Ronald Reagan who said during his presidency that there had been times when he wondered how you could do the job if you hadn't been an actor." Philadelphia Inquirer 10/26/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 3:52 pm
Baltimore Looks To The Arts A wide-ranging collection of arts groups and cultural leaders will meet this weekend in Baltimore for the city's second annual summit meeting on the arts. Mayor Martin O'Malley hosted the first meeting last year, which was billed as a citywide brainstorming session, and which drew 300 artists and activists. This year's event will focus on ways to make up the national shortfall in arts funding, the future of private giving to the arts, and the omnipresent issue of how to draw out a city's "creative class." Baltimore Sun 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 5:35 am
Arts Giving Down Sharply In US For the first time in 12 years, charitable giving in the US was down last year. But cultural groups took a big hit, reports the Chronicle of Philanthropy. "A large, one-time gift in the 2001 fiscal year from the Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund to two arts and cultural groups in this year's survey had the effect of causing donations to arts groups to decline steeply last year in percentage terms. The 14 arts organizations in the survey saw their aggregate gifts fall 26.5 percent in 2002. Some arts groups, however, say that they expect to raise at least as much in 2003 as they did last year, in part from capital campaigns." Chronicle of Philanthropy 10/30/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 2:57 pm
Campeau Wins Siminovitch Stage designer Louise Campeau has won Canada's 2003 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, the richest art prize in the nation. Campeau, who has designed sets for some 14 companies in Montreal, will receive CAN$100,000, 25% of which she must give to a protégé of her choice. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 6:18 am
Updike On Robert Hughes Robert Hughes is back, three years after a crippling car accident in Australia. "The dreadful accident in Western Australia has not extinguished Hughes’s old habits of incidental invective and capsule tirade. I have seen his prose characterized as of the Muscle Beach school, which, transposed to the higher cultural tone of Sydney’s Bondi Beach, seems fair enough. He has done the workouts to get himself into shape, and, if he turned a few handstands and kicked sand at a few ninety-pound weaklings, his pleasure in his own strength and suppleness of mind and pen was infectious." And thus a new book on Goya...
The New Yorker 10/26/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 5:35 pm
Based On A True Story... As if the controversy surrounding the impending move of the Barnes Collection to center city Philadelphia weren't confusing enough already, a new play by Thomas Gibbons threatens to muddy the waters even more. Permanent Collection is a fictional play, with made-up characters and a central conflict invented in the author's mind, but it takes place at the Barnes, and uses the conflicts that have occurred there over the past decade as its historical base. "The wiliest trust lawyer could get lost in the baffling dilemmas involved, but Gibbons sees the difficulties as an invitation to compress some of them into a two-hour drama." Philadelphia Inquirer 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 6:44 am
Not Violet's Finest Hour "What's going on with The Violet Hour? Richard Greenberg's eagerly awaited new play has been in previews a couple of weeks and already there are so many bodies piling up, the producers might as well park a hearse outside the stage door." Two lead actors and a director have been axed as the troubled production snowballs towards its official opening, and while the company producing Violet insists that things are under control, Michael Riedel isn't convinced. New York Post 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 6:39 am
Miller To Close, Urinetown Left Dangling The Henry Miller Theatre on West 43rd Street in New York will be closing this winter, to make way for a new skyscraper. But Miller is more than just another Broadway showhouse: it is currently the home of the unexpected smash hit Urinetown, which will be evicted by mid-February. No other Broadway theaters are currently available for the show to move into, and a move to off-Broadway would cause all sorts of union troubles, and would also be a strange move for a show enjoying the success of Urinetown. The Miller's owners are planning to rebuild, possibly within the new skyscraper, but that project won't be completed until at least 2008. The New York Times 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 4:59 am
Seat Of Power: Running Two Of Britain's Most Innovative Theatres In another life, Michael Grandage - who is artistic director of London's Donmar Warehouse and associate director of the Sheffield Crucible - might have "made an excellent soccer manager - but he is better off where he is. He's not only programming two thriving theatres in London and Sheffield. He has also proved that it is possible to be preoccupied by power without being corrupted by it." The Guardian (UK) 10/28/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 4:41 pm
Everyone Loves A Good Brawl In America, the debate over whether newspapers have a right to kill negative book reviews in order not to offend readers and authors has been raging in recent weeks. Meanwhile, in the UK, book reviewers regularly take great delight in savaging not only the works of famous authors, but the authors themselves. (Can you imagine an American review comparing a novel to "catching your favourite uncle masturbating in the school yard," as a British review of Martin Amis's latest recently did?) The British approach to literary criticism might be exhausting, says Kate Taylor, but it's exhilirating, too, and vastly preferable to the vague disinterest favored by North American critics. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 6:22 am
DoubleTake Hopes For Take Two The Boston-based documentary magazine known as DoubleTake ceased publication this summer, less than a year after a big-money benefit concert pumped $1 million into its coffers. A lack of direction combined with an unrealistic business plan seem to be what sunk the publication, and "if DoubleTake returns, the somewhat esoteric magazine, noted for striking photography and pieces about North Dakota farmers and descendants of the US Confederacy living in Brazil, will be reincarnated with more immediacy and mass appeal." Boston Globe 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 6:03 am
Amazon... In Search Of Not Paying For Books Amazon's new search function that allows browsers to search pages of thousands of books seems like a great thing. But some authors and publishers have concerns. "Authors Guild staff members had managed to view and print as many as 100 consecutive pages of several books by searching repeatedly for different terms. Recipes from some cookbooks and details from travel books were also available, meaning that users could print recipes or destination descriptions without buying the books. You don't even have to wait for Amazon to deliver." The New York Times 10/27/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 4:11 pm
Lethal Weapon - Book Review As Blunt Object Dale Peck is "a 36-year-old novelist and critic who has created a furor in the literary world by lobbing grenades in the back pages of The New Republic intended not to disparage, not to bring down a peg, but to destroy his victims - usually established writers whom Peck deems a threat to literature. To puncture the inflated reputations of these (mostly) Living White Males is a matter of the greatest urgency, Peck seems to believe, and he goes about the task with a crusader's obsessive zeal. At the end of a Peck essay, his subjects - Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Colson Whitehead - are wounded, their books in ruins, massacred." New York Times Magazine 10/26/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 3:02 pm
Satellite Radio On The Rise After a decidedly slow start, the satellite radio industry seems to be gaining some long-awaited traction. This week, XM Satellite Radio, the larger of the two currently operating networks, will announce that it has passed the key benchmark of a million subscribers. Sirius, XM's only competitor, has approximately 250,000 subscribers. The significance of the million-listener mark is likely to be felt on Wall Street, where investors are expected to begin taking the industry seriously for the first time. New York Daily News 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 6:35 am
Getting Around the DMCA "Busting open a digital lock to get hold of copyright works normally is forbidden, but the Librarian of Congress ruled Tuesday that there are exceptions. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, prohibits, among other things, bypassing any technology that controls access to copyright material. This provision is criticized frequently by digital-rights groups because they say it stifles many legitimate activities in the process, including academic research, competition and innovation. But the controversial law also recognizes that there are certain cases when circumvention should be permitted... Basically, those who have a non-infringing, fair-use reason to circumvent copy protections should be allowed to do so." Wired 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 5:15 am
Online Music: Where's The Variety? Even before illegal services like Napster took off, the world of online music used to be "a place for artists to control and directly profit from their music. But in most online services today that dream has been lost, with the services functioning as online arms of the record companies while the artists receive pennies (or fractions of pennies) for each download." Even more disappointing, there is a stunning lack of originality and forward thinking in the development of new download services, most of which are just mimicking the format and interface of Apple's iTunes. The New York Times 10/29/03
Posted: 10/29/2003 5:07 am
File-Sharing That's Legal? "Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers." The New York Times 10/28/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 4:02 pm
Valenti: We Will Fight Them On The Beaches! (And Then Compromise) Jack Valenti explains why the Motion Picture Academy proposed not sending copies of movies to Academy Award voters this year. And why he finally compromised on the issue. "The digital world with its zeroes and ones and perfect copies of originals has changed the movie landscape forever, which is why the movie world's priorities have been permanently altered. The industry wants to use the Internet to dispatch films to consumers. But as we do, we must also challenge piracy and defeat it with every weapon we can summon--and we will succeed, I am convinced--or one day we will sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the decline and fall of America's greatest artistic triumph and an awesome engine of job and economic growth." OpinionJournal.com 10/29/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 3:56 pm
When Merce Meets Radiohead It didn't rock, reports Joan Acocella. "You can find dancing that is more poignant, or easier to watch, than Merce Cunningham’s, but I don’t think any choreographer in the world gives us a closer look at the truth. Beauty without reasons, and without anxiety over the lack of reasons: that may be what life was like before we started making it up. Sometimes, when I look at Cunningham’s stage, I think I’m seeing the world on the seventh day, with everything new and just itself—before the snake, and the tears, and the explanations." The New Yorker 10/26/03
Posted: 10/28/2003 5:27 pm
- Previously: Marvelous Merce At 50 Interest has been intense on Merce Cunningham's dance company celebration of 50 years, writes Tobi Tobias. "For the opening night gala, attended by a packed house of the rich, the famous, and the curious, augmented by squads of rock music fans and their Cunningham-reverent equivalent, as well as an extra component of security folks, the dice rolling was done onstage, in the presence of the musicians who would later be hidden in the pit and a few dancers picturesquely warming up. Eventually, after all the brouhaha, here it was, another Merce Cunningham dance, and this time, as chance would have it, not a particularly distinguished one." Seeing Things (AJBlogs) 10/16/03
