The End Of History? Hah! "Francis Fukuyama proclaimed 'the end of history' in 1989. The triumph of the western idea of markets and democracy would bring about a boring kind of bliss for all. Somewhat in parallel grew the concept of globalisation. Economic interdependence and the internet were creating a single world community. Some looked forward to a new law - or rule-based international society. Common to all three was the thought that we had entered a historically unprecedented era in which peace, prosperity and justice might be sustained without the old power relations, which as often as not had brought war and impoverishment." But it hasn't quite worked out that way... New Statesman 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 8:39 pm
Beer Flies At Smithsonian The Smithsonian will not remove beer ads adorning a famous plane when it goes on display. "Twenty members of the House of Representatives had complained in a letter to the Smithsonian's museum that the beer logos represented commercialization and alcohol advertising." Washington Post 11/21/03
Posted: 11/21/2003 8:03 am
- Previously: You Mean Beer And Aviation Don't Mix? Twenty U.S. legislators are asking the Smithsonian Museum to remove beer logos from a historic stunt plane being displayed there. The logos were added to the plane twenty years ago as part of a sponsorship deal, but the legislators say that they are an inappropriate advertisement and inducement to young people to drink. Not surprisingly, the company which paid to have its logo splashed all over the plane is objecting to the attempt to have it removed. Washington Post 11/19/03
Previously Unknown Van Gogh On Display "A Dutch museum opens an exhibition this weekend of what it claims is a previously unknown painting by Vincent van Gogh, and says there may be more among a collection of 250 works once regarded as worthless." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/21/03
Posted: 11/21/2003 7:27 am
Could Pew Control The Barnes Collection's Move? "If the Barnes Foundation wins court permission to move its famed art collection to Center City, the Pew Charitable Trusts, not the Barnes itself, could take charge of administering the $150 million needed to build a new Barnes museum and endow it." Philadelphia Inquirer 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:16 pm
Buying Art - The Fog Of War "I've been covering the art market for a decade now, but I usually don't bother to attend the sales. Every time I do, I'm reminded how mysterious, confusing, and surreal art auctions are. Historians talk about "the fog of war," which makes it virtually impossible for even commanding generals to know what's really happening during a battle. Well, when it comes to generating fog, war doesn't have anything on an art auction." BusinessWeek 11/18/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:09 pm
Milwaukee Symphony - Deeper In The Red Earlier this year the Milwaukee Symphony predicted it would have a $2.5 million deficit. Instead, the orchestra finished $874,000 in the red. "The gap closed because musicians gave back 21/2 weeks of work and pay, several office staff positions were eliminated, other staffers agreed to wage cuts and the symphony negotiated fee cuts with many guest artists. The symphony's accumulated debt now stands at $5 million, $1.37 million of it run up in the last two seasons." Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 11/21/03
Posted: 11/21/2003 7:31 am
How Iraq's National Symphony Got Invited To Perform In The US "The 55 members of the Iraqi group will be joined by about 45 musicians from the National Symphony and they will perform as a single, joint orchestra. Iraqi conductor Mohammed Amin Ezzat and NSO conductor Leonard Slatkin will take turns leading the mixed group. Their Dec. 9 concert will include works by Beethoven and Bizet as well as two pieces of contemporary Iraqi music for a full symphony orchestra, augmented by six Kurdish folk instruments." Chicago Tribune 11/21/03
Posted: 11/21/2003 7:14 am
Hamburg's Pullback From Contemporary Music German conductor Ingo Metzmacher is quitting as music director of Hamburg, and the move is seen as a pulling away oif commitment to contemporary music. "Just as William Forsythe took Frankfurt to the cutting edge of dance, so Metzmacher turned Hamburg into one of the most musically progressive cities in Europe. He introduced avant-garde 20th-century works into his concert programmes and scrapped the traditional New Year's Eve performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in favour of a hugely successful series of concerts entitled Who's Afraid of 20th-Century Music? Under his control, the Opera developed an international reputation for its radical redefinition of opera as hard-hitting music theatre." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 7:55 pm
An Acoustic Appraisal Of Disney Scott Cantrell writes that while Disney is good, Dallas' Meyerson Hall still sounds the best of the new American concert halls. "Most of the 19th- and early 20th-century concert halls regularly cited as best for symphonic music – the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York – are variations on a shoebox shape. Their acoustics tend to be described as 'warm' and 'rich,' but with ample clarity. 'Full-bodied' and 'spacious' weren't adjectives that came immediately to mind at the opening of Disney Hall. What wasn't there was the lower-midrange depth and visceral bass that you get in the great old halls." Dallas Morning News 11/14/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 7:20 pm
The Formula For Selling Opera So promoter Raymond Gubbay is going to present opera in London's West End, and many are skeptical. But Gubbay has a formula, and the formula is a winner. "Hire a prestigious hall, get together a band of highly experienced musicians, give them music to play that they and the rest of the civilised world all know backwards, allot on that basis minimal rehearsal time, engage young, inexpensive soloists eager for the experience or desperate for the work, ditto conductor, dress the whole thing up with a fancy title (preferably printed in rampant italics to give it that classy look), and sit back and wait for Mr and Mrs Average from the Home Counties or suburban Averageville to buy their tickets in their droves. One can easily sneer at all of this, of course, but it works as far as the balance-sheet is concerned. Gubbay will not promote anything if he risks losing so much as a shirt-button. He’s a businessman, not an altruist." The Spectator 11/22/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:23 pm
Video Games Helping To Sell Music "Video games are proving to be a good partner for a struggling industry eager to find new ways to appeal to young people who would rather pirate music off the Internet than pay for it. Million-selling games are boosting sales, launching musical careers, and persuading skittish record executives that not all technology is bad for business." Christian Science Monitor 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:03 pm
Clear Channel To Offer Instant Recordings Of Live Concerts Clear Channel Communications, America's largest concert presenter is getting set to sell recordings of live concerts to the fans who just paid to see the concert as soon as the show is finished. "It is almost an impulse buy. You walk home with a memento of the concert. You had a great feeling coming out of it and, for $20, you can put it on again anytime you want." Christian Science Monitor 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 4:59 pm
How To Kill The Place Where Hip Lives (Get Popular) In the 90s Hoston was the hot, hip area of London, the "playground" of the YBA artists. "But now there are whispers that Hoxton is on the way down. Popularity, they say, has killed personality. Overexposure has destroyed the sense of Hoxton as an exclusive club for the ultra- fashionable: on a Saturday night, the Hoxton-Shoreditch thoroughfare of Curtain Road has lost any sense of an alternative identity, and the Bacardi Breezer-drinking hordes are indistinguishable from those in the West End." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 8:00 pm
Sellars: Artists Must Take The Long View Director Peter Sellars is impressed with demonstrations against the war in Iraq, but under no illusions that American policy will soon change. "We have different timelines. I'm accepting that for the next few years the headlines belong to [US Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld. Our job as artists is to work for the next twenty years. I'm under no illusion that anything happens overnight. The real work is long-term. I have just come from Glyndebourne, working on Idonomeo and Theodora. These are pieces by artists from two different generations, Mozart and Handel, who were putting forward ideas - the end of autocracy and so on - that became the American revolution. That's what artists must do." Financial Times 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 7:40 pm
Donald Gordon, Philanthropist From Out Of Nowhere Last week, as if out of nowhere, Donald Gordon gave 20 million to be shared equally between the Royal Opera House and the Wales Millennium Centre. But why? "In the UK, Gordon is not known as a philanthropist. He has given money to Sadler's Wells, Shakespeare's Globe and the British Museum, but, he says, these donations were a matter of 'a few thousand' and he can't remember what they were for. So why this unexpected and extraordinary gesture? 'For the past few years, my major diversion has been the performing arts. Now I am hoping to make the transition from what they call tycoon to opera appreciator'." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 8:07 pm
A Mechanical Performance That "Sings" The assignment: write theatre for machines that interact with audiences in new ways. "The project is called the Technology Plays, a theater experiment that is trying to take the old man-versus-machine theme to new extremes. The writers, led by Mr. Dresser and Mr. Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Ironweed," have fashioned an unsettling exhibition challenging conventional notions of what theater can be and how it can be delivered." The New York Times 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 8:22 pm
New Leadership For Bolshoi Theatre? There are rumors the Bolshoi Drama Theatre might get new leadership. It's long overdue, as recent productions prove. "After Georgy Tovstonogov's death in 1980, an adequate replacement was not found, and it was decided that the new artistic director would concentrate his efforts on preserving the legacy of the late legendary director. The most important thing was not to ruin the house that Tovstonogov built. Now, that house has become old, feeble and fragile. After being denied fresh blood and any new influence at all for so many years, the BDT troupe finds itself in an unappealing state of stagnation." St. Petersburg Times 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 7:31 pm
Getting Beyond Harry - Developing A Taste For Reading Rachel Billington thinks it's great that children are excited about reading Harry Potter. But what comes after that? In orevious generations, "there was no aggressive marketing to switch us in the direction of a particular book. Finding a book was an adventure that involved real choice. The question for modern parents is how to build on the popularity of a smallish range of exceedingly popular contemporary children's books and lead their goggle-eyed offspring to wider shores." The Guardian (UK) 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 8:12 pm
Stephen King To Book Awards Group: Read More! Terry Teachout attends the National Book Awards banquet as a judge. Stephen King’s speech was "interesting. He was clearly moved by the honor—he choked up. He was funny and unpretentious when paying tribute to his wife and talking about the "vulnerability" to self-doubt of poor, struggling authors (such as himself when young). I suspect he was the first National Book Award laureate ever to say "Oh, shit!" in his acceptance speech (he was describing the way an honest author might portray a terrified character in extreme circumstances). And he was simultaneously a bit defensive and more than a little bit aggressive when he informed the crowd that they’d be making a mistake if they treated their decision to give him the prize as an act of 'tokenism'." About Last Night (AJBlogs) 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:11 pm
The Trouble With Aussie Film "The perception is that the standard of Australian feature films, and television drama is, in general, slipping. Where are the films with international appeal? Where’s the meaningful TV? The drama isn’t dramatic, some industry insiders point out, and the comedy isn’t funny. Feature film and TV drama production is falling, and local expenditure is down. The TV networks are obsessed with cheap and faddish reality and renovation TV." The Age (Melbourne) 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:44 pm
- Is Aussie Film Industry In Trouble? It's been a tough year for Australian films. But is the movie industry in crisis? "Yes, at this stage, it's been nearly 30 years since the so-called 'film renaissance' of the mid-'70s, and we should be producing many more audience-friendly films and far fewer box-office dog whistles, arthouse indulgences and turkeys. Australian film needs to break out of its boutique mentality; its invasion of the multiplex is long overdue. But arrested development does not qualify as a crisis. Not in our book. Not yet." The Age (Melbourne) 11/21/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:38 pm
