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Weekend, November 8,9




Ideas

Critical Juice - Why Taste Should Be Personal John Rockwell goes to a concert and hates the performance. This despite the praise of a fellow music critic, who finds the musician's playing intensely intersting. Is one critic right and the other wrong? No, writes Rockwell. There ought not to be an "objective" standard for art. Sure there are "norms" but critical taste is intensely personal and ought to be celebrated. The New York Times 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 11:33 am

The Music Of Life (That's Why We Sing) Why is music found in every culture? It has something to do with our relationship to the physical world, says new research. "Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular -- which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. Says Schwartz, "The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se." Boston Globe 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 10:51 am

Work As A Game A new study reports that allowing workers to play games at work might increase their productivity. "The results suggest that, instead of games being a waste of time at work, they might help personal productivity and make people feel better about their jobs. A round of Solitaire could be used as a strategy to break up the day and help people work more effectively because it gives their brain a break from complex work tasks." BBC 11/07/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 9:34 am

Visual Arts

Towering Disagreement Architects David Childs and Daniel Libeskind are disagreeing over the tower for the site of the World Trade Center. "Libeskind continues to press for the design he sketched in his competition-winning master plan - an asymmetrical tower roughly 70 stories tall, with a slender spire that would echo the upraised arm of the Statue of Liberty and culminate an upward spiral of a group of slice-topped office buildings. Childs, who heads the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, wants a more monolithic form -- a muscular tower that twists as it rises, topped by a latticelike crown that includes antennas. His design, however, has not been made public. Can the two architects compromise without compromising the form - and thus, the meaning - of Libeskind's brilliant ground zero vision? Chicago Tribune 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 11:20 am

Iraq Art Treasure To US? Plans to send Iraq's greatest art treasure to the US for a tour are being considered in Baghdad. "Sending the Nimrud gold to the US, whose armed forces are now occupying Iraq, would undoubtedly disturb many Iraqis. Parallels are being drawn with the controversial US decision to show Germany’s greatest paintings in America in 1948, although the circumstances are different." The Art Newspaper 11/07/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 9:27 am

Auction Market Roars Back The art market is roaring back. Last week "both Sotheby’s and Christie’s had very little difficulty finding buyers for their top lots. The two evening sales totalled $242 million, doubling the $125 million made for the same sessions last May. Adding in the Part II sessions, a total of $283 million was spent on Modern and Impressionist art between 4 and 6 November." The Art Newspaper 11/07/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 8:30 am

Music

Where's The "People" In The "People's Opera"? New York City Opera has been "aggressively lobbying to be named the flagship institution in the new cultural presence at ground zero. To its evident surprise, it has encountered resistance. As of this writing, no decision has been announced, but the downtown powers seem to want a greater diversity of artistic expression. City Opera represented that last flush of idealism in which the common man was to be bettered by high culture. What caused the erosion of that old sense of obligation, and why does our 'people's opera' no longer seem popular — or even welcome — at ground zero? The answer, not to be judgmental about it, is the rise of popular culture." The New York Times 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 11:53 am

McDonald's To Give Away A Billion Songs "In a dramatic move that gives a thumbs up to the music industry's efforts at creating legal alternatives to file sharing, McDonald's plans to give away up to 1 billion songs in a marketing campaign, according to sources familiar with the matter." The company will buy the tracks (at 99 center per) from iTunes. New York Post 11/07/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 9:43 am

iTunes As Apple Loss Leader That 99-cent price to download music from iTunes still seems a little high to some, especially since it costs nothing for the recording companies to produce it. But then, Apple's got to make some money too, right? Wrong. Apple CEO Steve Jobs says that all of that 99 cents goes back to the copyright holders - the recording companies, not artists. That makes iTunes a loss-leader. So how is Apple making money on the deal? Selling iPods... The Register 11/07/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 9:39 am

Arts Issues

College Aid: Rich Get Richer? "The US government typically gives the wealthiest private universities, which often serve the smallest percentage of low-income students, significantly more financial aid money than their struggling counterparts with much greater shares of poor students.
Such disparities have been a sore point among universities for years, leftovers from an era when federal money was given to colleges on an individual, almost negotiable basis. Now, for the first time in more than two decades, the nation's financial aid officers are calling for the imbalances to be wiped away, replaced by a system that steers financial aid toward the universities that poor students actually attend, rather than those with the biggest reputations."
The New York Times 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 12:14 pm

  • Does Tuition Aid Cause Higher Tuitions? "Does federal financial aid simply give colleges an excuse to raise tuition higher and faster than they otherwise would?" Some are asking the question as the US federal deficit balloons. "Whether from necessity or principle, some Republicans now argue that holding the line on aid might be just the ticket to keep college costs down." Most higher-education economists reject the idea as "simplistic and ideologically convenient." Boston Globe 11/09/03
    Posted: 11/09/2003 10:54 am

The New Thing: Getting Informed The Chicago Humanities Festival saw attendance soar by 45 percent this year; 50,000 came in the first weekend... "The festival's popularity is one sign of an American public that is becoming more deeply engaged in serious issues, such as national identity. In the late 1990s, networking clubs were means for aspiring entrepreneurs to find someone else's money to spend. The current wave of discussion clubs offers instead a vehicle to get clever, not rich, quick." Financial Times 11/07/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 8:59 am

Theatre

Sondheim - Listening To Audiences A new Stephen Sondheim musical (his first in nine years) is preparing for Broadway, and producers are studying the audiences. "The conventional wisdom is that you are better off listening to the audience as a group than to any one individual member of it. As far as critics' responses, because each review reflects the opinion of just one person, the show's collaborators tend to discount them. In the case of Bounce, most notices have sounded disappointed. It's not that critics dislike the musical; it's more that they think it's a minor work. Some, though, have added that even below-average Sondheim is better than almost everything else." Baltimore Sun 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 10:34 am

Media

Art As An Agenda (CBS' Troubling Move) "CBS' startling decision this week to pull the broadcast plug on the biographical drama (as distinct from biographical documentary) "The Reagans," following an extensive campaign by conservative activists alleging the movie was "inaccurate" and "unfair" to the former president, reflects a dazzling and immensely troubling lack of awareness of the sacred importance of this vital cultural freedom. Furthermore, such preemptive, content-driven attacks on works of art are on the rise in America." Chicago Tribune 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 11:07 am

Tanking Ratings Threaten TV Industry Where have millions of US TV viewers disappeared? This fall's ratings are down 8-10 percemt. "If this is true, it's a seismic shift. Some of these numbers scare you. And there are billions of dollars in national advertising at stake. When they sell ads, networks pledge that they can deliver a certain number of viewers in certain demographics; if they fail to meet the numbers as tallied by Nielsen, they have to run more ads - 'make-goods' - at no cost. If you go back and you look at TV viewing patterns over the past 10 years, it's very unusual for viewing levels to change more than 2 or 3 percent over time." Chicago Tribune 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 11:05 am

  • The End Of Free TV? In the US, "the season's nearly 40 new shows have again failed to yield a consensus "hit," and according to the Nielsen Media Research firm that measures TV viewing, young men in particular seem to be abandoning the tube in stunning proportions. In the gloomiest interpretations of these omens, they signal the beginning of the end of free, over-the-air television, because shrinking audiences at some point will have to mean declining revenue from the ads that have given viewers a free or relatively cheap ride. Put more simply, that would be: Goodbye broadcasting, hello pay-per-view!" Chicago Tribune 11/09/03
    Posted: 11/09/2003 11:04 am

Dance

New, Newer & Merce How is it that Merce Cunningham still seems new while he's in his 80s? "None of it's particularly deep, though I suppose you could call it a paradox," he says of the irony of his age combined with his still cutting-edge endeavors. "I just think of it as trying to continue. I use chance always in the pieces. I think it opens up new possibilities. You come up with something you don't know you have." Chicago Tribune 11/09/03
Posted: 11/09/2003 11:12 am


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