Design For Design's Sake - Must We Always Be Entertained? "Highly noticeable design in itself has become an acknowledged competitive strategy, so that the public now expects to be perpetually captivated and entertained and flattered by the novelty and the variety of design in every kind of commodity, not just in the aspect of goods but in their physical ambience. Restaurants are as over-designed as the meals they serve; new boutiques selling wine or cheese or jams or cookies are fitted up like exquisite art galleries, with hushed spatial arrangements so arcane that the goods cannot readily be distinguished from the décor. Such establishments might not sit on the same street with the fake-ethnic diners, but the source of their overt allure is the same." The New Republic 12/12/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:52 pm
The Power Struggle Behind The Freedom Tower The uneasy agreement between Daniel Libeskind and David Childs that resulted in the new Freedom Tower design unveiled last Friday was "the result of a whirlwind of intense, sometimes fiery meetings over the course of the last week. During most of that time, staffers from studio Daniel Libeskind were banned from the 40 Wall Street offices of [Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,] where the two camps had been working. As a result, both sides were barely speaking to one another." In fact, Skidmore staffers accused Libeskind employees of "a Watergate-style break-in," with Libeskind's camp accusing of David Childs of intentionally diverging from the agreed-upon framework for the design. All in all, it's something of a wonder that a design was ever agreed upon. New York Observer 12/22/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 6:46 am
Missing Turner Mask May Have Been Stolen London's Royal Academy of Arts has acknowledged that the death mask of JMW Turner, one of the Academy's most prized possessions, may have been stolen more than 15 years ago, with no one at the museum noticing the mask's disappearance until another institution asked to borrow it in 2002. However, it is also possible that the mask is still somewhere in the Academy's vast collection, and staffers are hoping to turn it up during an ongoing cataloguing project. BBC 12/23/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 5:14 am
RA: Loved The Lloyd-Webber Show Critics hated the Royal Academy's show of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's art. One wrote: "Really useless. Why can't the man keep his private collection of saccharine Victorian art private?" But more than 226,000 people - an average of 2,693 a day - paid to see his treasures. The doorstep-sized catalogue (£15 paperback, £35 hardback) had to be reprinted three times." The show turns out to be one of the RA's most popular exhibitions of the past decade. The Guardian (UK) 12/23/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:40 pm
Cooper-Hewitt - In Need Of A Makeover The struggling Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York has plans to give itself a makeover. "Some in the design field say a rethinking is long overdue, but they remain skeptical about the museum's ability to pull it off, given its recent history. 'Under director Paul Thompson the museum has the same blurry identity it has always had. There's still no strong thread holding it together'." The New York Times 12/22/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:05 pm
Currin Dumps Dealer For Gagosian Artist John Currin suddenly switched his gallery affiliation last week from his longtime New York dealer, Andrea Rosen, to Larry Gagosian. "Artists change galleries all the time, but Mr. Currin's timing drew a great deal of attention. The show at the Whitney is the culmination of his 14-year association with Ms. Rosen, who gave him his first commerical gallery show, in 1992, and worked assiduously to foster and manage his success. Speculation about Mr. Currin's move fueled conversation at art-world Christmas parties over the weekend, with expressions ranging from disgust to admiration for an astute business move." The New York Times 12/23/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 7:59 pm
Kang Quits, DSO Left Wondering Why The Detroit Symphony Orchestra is losing its top executive, just as it is trying to find a new music director and cope with a hefty financial shortfall. Emil Kang, who had earned praise as DSO president for his consensus-building skills and efforts at sharpening the orchestra's artistic vision, resigned abruptly on Monday, without explanation. The orchestra's new board chair has refused to comment on whether or not Kang was forced out, but another board member says that, at least, the board "as a group" did not ask for the resignation. Kang, 35, was one of the youngest administrators of an American symphony orchestra. Detroit Free Press 12/23/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 5:29 am
- Previously: The Detroit Symphony's $2 Million Deficit Hot off the opening of a new $60 million home, the Detroit Symphony "will announce an operating deficit of nearly $2 million on a $28-million budget at its annual meeting of members on Wednesday, according to people with knowledge of the orchestra's finances." Detroit Free Press 12/09/03
Why Is Music Just A Commodity? "Seldom, it would appear, is music simply thought of or enjoyed as music anymore. It's a commodity, a type of virtual contraband, the "sport" at the centre of cutthroat, Olympian competitions. Even the sense of community that a shared love of music is supposed to bring people has been supplanted by a pitched us-against-them mentality between the recording industry and the hordes of downloaders it longs to drag into court." Toronto Star 12/22/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:11 pm
Why Recording Labels And Download Companies Can't Get Together So with all the money to be made in online downloading, why don't recording labels and the downloading networks just get together and be content making their fortunes? Answer - they don't like each other. "Label executives continue to hold hush-hush meetings with leading distributors of file-sharing software, trying to find common ground. But they also seethe at the companies' refusal to change their software in ways that might deter piracy, using words like "extortion" and "rape" to describe their situation." Los Angeles Times 12/21/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 6:59 pm
Actors Equity 1, Homeland Security 0 Canadian actor Geordie Johnson should be on a San Francisco stage today, rehearsing for a new production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. But thanks to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Johnson's work visa was refused as the DHS tightened restrictions on foreigners entering the country. The company Johnson was to have worked with was forced to recast his part, since they could not afford to wait for an appeal. Nonetheless, Actors Equity filed an appeal anyway, and this week, it was granted, the union having successfully argued that "the entire framework of agreements under which actors, directors, musicians and even professional athletes gain cross-border employment [was] in jeopardy." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/23/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 6:15 am
Corporate Giving: Good For The Bottom Line? A new study commissioned by the Boston Foundation reports that the public is more likely to patronize corporate businesses which make a point of donating to the arts and other nonprofits than those which do not. The pollster who led the study says that the upshot of the report is that "foundations have got to get out of the purely good guy giving pool and they've got to drive the argument that partnerships between nonprofits and corporations help a corporation's bottom line. If you can make that case, you can start this argument again and maybe you can get more money." Boston Globe 12/23/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 6:02 am
Judge: Miami Beach Streets Go To Artists Artists can perform where they want now in Miami Beach. "Miami Beach has lost a significant round in its years-long effort to regulate street performers. Last month, a judge declared unconstitutional a city ordinance limiting performers and artists to 11 locations throughout the city. Under the ordinance, only two performers are allowed at each location, chosen by lottery every three months from scores of applicants." Miami Herald 12/22/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:28 pm
Edinburgh's Brain Drain "New figures reveal that Edinburgh has been overtaken by Glasgow as Scotland’s cultural capital. In the most comprehensive attempt to map changes in Scotland’s cultural employment in the first years of devolution, researchers found Edin burgh was undergoing a massive brain drain of creative talent." Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 12/21/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 6:57 pm
Winn: Breaking Out Of The Basic Newspaper Arts Review A panel at the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors in St. Petersburg, Fla got to talking about the state of arts coverage in daily newspapers. Steven Winn - arts writer at the San Francisco Chronicle: "Over the years, I felt a kind of creeping alienation. No one but a critic attends the theater 150 times a year. I was becoming, gradually and inexorably, self referential. I wrote about theater in terms of other theater, because that was what I was living." Poynter 12/20/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 6:51 pm
Broadway 2003: More Money, Fewer People "Fewer people saw shows on New York's Broadway during 2003 - but takings have gone up during the past year. Theatres predict the year will end with 11.2 million people visiting Broadway's venues, down from 11.4 million in 2002. But takings are expected to be up to $730m (£414m), compared with $707m (£401m) the previous year - helped by top ticket prices hitting $100 (£56). Broadway theatres are putting the drop in visitors down to a lack of big shows opening during the summer." BBC 12/23/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 5:22 am
Big Times In A Small Town Concord, Massachusetts, is everything a small New England town should be, and the Concord Bookshop, an independent bookseller widely regarded as one of the best in the Northeast, is a large presence in the community. But an in-house dispute between the bookshop's owners and its employees is tearing the store apart, and the whole town, with its sizable population of well-known writers, seems to be getting involved. Eight employees, including the bookshop's three top managers, have resigned, with one of them saying that "the fragile alchemy that made it such a great place to work [has] died." But the owners insist that they love the shop as much as anyone, and are only trying to survive in an increasingly difficult era for indie booksellers. Boston Globe 12/23/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 5:51 am
Book Town's A Success - But Can The Locals Afford It? The experiment that transformed Blaenavon into a town of book shops has been a big success. But now, can the locals afford to live there? "A year ago anyone who suggested that the same thing could happen in Blaenavon, valley of the squinting plywood, would have been laughed all the way back down the mountain to the M4. Property in the town was in terrible condition, but cheap as chips. Now much of it is still in terrible condition, but you get far fewer chips to the pound. Local people stand in front of the estate agents, staring at the photographs, their jaws dropping." The Guardian (UK) 12/23/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:44 pm
The 20-Year-Old Who's Outselling Harry Potter Christopher Paolini is only 20, and he lives in a remote part of Montana. "This time last year, he was just another geeky teen with too much time on his hands. But now, thanks to Eragon, his 500-page rousing adventure story set in his imaginary world, young Christopher is suddenly rich." The book "is a huge bestseller in America, where it has surged past the Harry Potter books. Almost half a million copies were sold in only two months, a screenplay is in the works and at least a dozen foreign-language editions are on the way." The Telegraph (UK) 12/23/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:32 pm
Strictly Grammarian - The UK's New Punctuation Craze This winter's blockbuster book in the UK? A book on punctuation - Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. "Demand for the book has been so great it burned through six printings in the first three weeks of publication. The initial print run of 5,000 ballooned to 510,000; in the second week of December alone, 67,000 copies were sold, beating sales of John Grisham's new book by more than 40 per cent. Seems correct punctuation isn't just for your pedantic parents any more." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/22/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 7:51 pm
Up All Night, Staring At A Screen Advertisers are famously obsessed with young people, and so television, by necessity, is obsessed as well. In recent years, network brass have been at a loss to explain where all their young viewers have gone. Some say they went to cable, some say they went to the internet, and some say it shouldn't matter, anyway. But what if the 18-to-34s haven't deserted TV after all? What if they've just moved their "prime time" back a few hours? A close look at demographic ratings shows that young people are watching plenty of TV: they're just turning on the set a lot later. Miami Herald (AP) 12/23/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 6:39 am
Hitting 'Em While They're Down "Last week's court decision preventing the recording industry from forcing Internet service providers to identify their subscribers on peer-to-peer networks offers new hope to file traders who have been sued. But fighting the RIAA may prove costly for anyone hoping to challenge the trade group, which spends an estimated $17 million annually in legal fees. In the wake of Friday's ruling, which found that the RIAA can't subpoena Internet providers for subscribers' personal information without going through the court system, experts say lawyers could feasibly argue that their clients' information was unjustly obtained from ISPs, and therefore should not be used. But such a strategy would be unorthodox and difficult to carry out." Wired 12/23/03
Posted: 12/23/2003 5:25 am
American TV's Clutter Grows Promos, ads and other filler has proliferated on American TV. "According to a recent report in Media Life, an online magazine, the major networks now offer one minute of "clutter" for every two minutes of legitimate entertainment during prime time. Or put in another context, the Big Four (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) air about 52 minutes of commercials and promotional material during three hours of prime time. This is up 8 percent from 2000 and a whopping 36 percent since 1991." Rocky Mountain News 12/22/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:20 pm
The Depressed Aussie Film Industry "A soaring Australian dollar, staunch competition from Canada, eastern Europe and New Zealand, the impending US-Australia Free Trade Agreement and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California have cast a dark shadow over the Australian film industry." Sydney Morning Herald 12/23/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 8:14 pm
French Film Award Judges Get Self-Destructing DVD Screeners Voters for the French Cesar film awards will be getting DVD copies of the movies that self-destruct. "The DVD of Gus Van Sant's film Elephant turns black and becomes unusable with two days of being played, reports industry website Screen Daily. The DVDs, which are designed to be disposable, will be sent to members of France's Academie des Arts et Techniques du Cinema, said the report." BBC 12/22/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 7:47 pm
An Idea - Pay TV Viewers To Go Digital? In the UK, plans are for all TV broadcasts to be digital by 2010. But the only way to get some viewers to switch might be to pay them. "There were only two ways of making everyone switch to a digital source, such as a set-top digital box, cable or satellite. One is to pay people to switch, the other is to force them." BBC 12/22/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 7:05 pm
The Dirt On The High-Kicking Rockettes A former Rockette dishes up the backstage dirt about the Christmas show. Stories about "the vodka-soaked pineapple chunks the dancers pop as they come onstage, the stagehands with fake salamis down their pants, and the endless chattering on stage, about sales at Macy's, during the Toy Soldiers number. 'You're 30 yards away from the audience. There's a lot going on that nobody hears or sees.' That would include the camel dung, regularly deposited by the animal talent during the manger scene. (What are you gonna do, fire the camel?)" The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/22/03
Posted: 12/22/2003 7:55 pm
