C'mon In And Set A Spell James Cuno will doubtless take some time to decide how to put his unique stamp on the Art Institute of Chicago, but there's one improvement he'd like to make right away: minimizing "museum fatigue" by adding more benches and chairs for patrons to take a load off while admiring the collection. It seems like an obvious idea, but many museum directors are opposed to having seating in their galleries, saying it distracts from the art. Nonsense, says Cuno. Museumgoers tend to "rush their way through and they don't see as much as we'd like them to see. You want people to sit down and feel comfortable and sort of pace themselves." Chicago Sun-Times 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 5:08 am
Who Can Own A Kiss? When the Tate Modern's new exhibition of Brancusi sculptures opens this week in London, it will be one major work short of what the museum had planned. "It will have Constantin Brancusi's The Kiss (1908) and The Kiss (1916). But it will be without its most starry exhibit, The Kiss (1907-1908) because its Romanian owners see a risk that someone in Britain might claim ownership of it." The Tate says that it doesn't know of any potential UK claimants, and the statue has been exhibited abroad before, but Romanian officials say that they were concerned that they would not have been able to protect the statue in the event of an ownership claim. The Guardian (UK) 01/27/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 8:14 pm
Faking It How good are today's art forgers? So good that some of them make quite a nice living selling their work to collectors who are fully aware that they aren't buying the original painting. "The pursuit of authenticity can encounter nasty opposition," as many would-be whistleblowers have discovered, and after all, isn't the desire to own "the real thing" nothing more than a greedy desire for prestige? "A beautiful artwork does not cease to be beautiful once its authorship is cast in doubt, but it can cease to be precious." Newsday 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:51 pm
What Good Is Music If You Can't Mount It On Your Wall? "At 11 a.m. today, in a midtown Manhattan music studio, a handful of record industry veterans will huddle around a reel of tape they say is an original master from the historic 1954 recording debut of Elvis Presley. Then, after a brief introduction, the tape will be chopped to pieces." Why would anyone do such a thing to an undeniable piece of American musical history? For the merchandising money, of course. The bits of tape will be mounted on handsome plaques and sold for $495 apiece to the type of memorabilia-obsessed cretins who honestly believe that a mangled piece of magnetic tape is more valuable than the music which used to be on it. Washington Post 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 6:29 am
Cutbacks In Philly Opera Company of Philadelphia announced its new season with something less than the usual fanfare this week. Citing financial constraints, OCP is cutting one of its five annual productions, and has adjusted its planned repertoire to add more crowd-pleasers and eliminate an expensive Tchaikovsky production. The company, which has historically operated in the black, ran a small deficit last season, and could lose as much as $200,000 this year. "Subscribers have declined from 11,568 last season to 9,233 this season, with a drop in total ticket revenue from $4.46 million to a projected $3.9 million." Donations have been flat as well. Philadelphia Inquirer 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 6:12 am
Success Is The Best Rebuttal Ever since the Detroit Opera House opened eight years ago, Michigan Opera Theatre has faced serious questions about the long-term financial sustainability of the venue. But now, with MOT in the final phase of a $20 million fund drive, and a major expansion of the opera house about to get underway, founder and director David DiChiera is firmly in the driver's seat, and no one is doubting his dream-big style anymore. Detroit News 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 5:21 am
Don't Label Us! "Rock veterans Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are launching a provocative new musicians' alliance that would cut against the industry grain by letting artists sell their music online instead of only through record labels." The point is to encourage musicians to break free of traditional recording agreements enforced by profit-driven corporations and tradition-bound unions, and to see for themselves wich aspects of new technology are useful, and which are not. Wired 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 7:02 pm
Exit Järvi... Neeme Järvi's last season with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is unveiled, and it plays like nothing so much as a summing up of the 15 years of artistic growth which the Motor City has enjoyed under the Estonian maestro. There are crowd-pleasers (Carl Orff's The Planets,) and critic-pleasers (Ned Rorem's Third Symphony,) but mostly, there is the enthusiastic personality of Järvi himself, capped off in the final three weeks of the 2004-05 season, when Järvi the father will be joined, on stage, by his three children: flautist Maarika, and conductors Paavo (of the Cincinnati Symphony,) and Kristjan. Detroit Free Press 01/23/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:33 pm
- ...Enter Wigglesworth? Handicapping a music director race is always a dicey proposition, since symphony orchestras tend to treat such matters with the secrecy normally reserved for international war plans, but one of the best ways to distinguish the front-runners from the also-rans is to note carefully which conductors keep popping up unexpectedly during the time that the search is ongoing. In Detroit, current conventional wisdom says that 39-year-old Mark Wigglesworth, a talented Briton who has been making the rounds in North America for the last several years, may be high on the DSO's list to replace Neeme Järvi. Detroit Free Press 01/23/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:32 pm
AGO's Big Week To Be Marred By Protest "Visitors to this week's unveiling of Frank Gehry's much-anticipated redesign of Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario will find themselves on the receiving end of a protest against the planned $190-million renovation and expansion." The same community activists who railed against the AGO's last expansion, in the early 1990s, are claiming that the AGO's process has ignored community concerns, and will "likely will be in violation of a 1989 agreement and bylaw brokered by the Ontario Municipal Board that... commits the AGO to holding its expansion at what transpired in 1993." Not surprisingly, the AGO disagrees with that interpretation. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 5:57 am
Rewarding Midwest Diversity "The Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropy with nearly $750 million in assets, on Monday night [awarded] grants of $50,000 each to four Midwest cultural groups for the commissioning of works by artists of color." Recipients of this year's awards are Chicago's Goodman Theatre, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The awards are slated to continue for at least two years, at which time the foundation will reevaluate the program. Chicago Tribune 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 7:59 pm
Now That's a Mayor Who Supports The Arts The under-construction Dallas Center for the Performing Arts gets a very public boost this week, with a donation of $1 million from the family of late Dallas mayor Annette Strauss. "Supporters of the $275 million performing arts center hope to raise $257 million in private funds for its design and completion, with the rest coming from city bond money. The center's opening is targeted for 2009. The Strauss family contribution brings the amount of private donations to $140 million." Dallas Morning News 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 7:26 pm
If You Can't Beat 'Em, Mimic 'Em Taking on Ticketmaster is not generally considered a sound business plan. The ticket-selling behemoth seems to be everywhere, and artists, venues, and rival companies which have tried to break free have typically been stymied or flattened. "But even with annual revenues around $700 million US, Ticketmaster only controls less than seven per cent of the global ticketing industry, a sector that is growing at 7.5 per cent a year," and two Calgary-based entrepreneurs are making a real stab at grabbing a share of the remaining 93%. "Since its September 2000 launch RepeatSeat has grown quickly. Last year it handled $7 million in transactions, up from $5,000 the year before." Calgary Herald 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 7:12 pm
Plenty Of Hits, But Not Much Money If there has been a kingmaker in the pop music industry in recent years, Antonio Reid has been it. "In nearly four years as the chief executive of Arista, Mr. Reid, known as L.A., sparked the careers of Avril Lavigne, Pink and Dido. This year alone he brought in 31 Grammy nominations, more than any other label." But a couple of weeks ago, Reid found himself out of a job, the victim of an increasingly cost-conscious industry for which prestige is no longer enough if it doesn't translate into profit. The bizarre truth is that, in the last two years under Reid's watch, Arista lost $200 million. The New York Times 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 5:00 am
Bringing Theater People Together (Whether They Want To Or Not) Theater is a competitive business, and theaters in the same city rarely join forces for any reason, for fear that success for one will mean failure for another. But a Twin Cities-based website is attempting to draw the region's many theaters together on matters ranging from marketing to the hiring of actors. "Want to post your resume or audition listing? You can do so on the site. Need a set designer or a stage manager? You can cull the hundreds of techies and off-stage talent on the site's searchable database... Maybe you're a theater in need of a friendly audience for a free preview performance? [The] site will send out an e-mail to almost 1,000 subscribers giving them all the particulars." St. Paul Pioneer Press 01/25/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 6:17 am
A Hackney (Not Hackneyed) Restoration "At a cost of £15m, the Hackney Empire will reopen tomorrow, a delirium of colour, from gold to brown. It's anyone's vision of the voluptuous beauty of an Edwardian music hall - and as phoney as a chocolate £6 note." As the restoration proceeded, it became clear that the original color scheme of the theater was a bet, well, slap-dash, and the restorers opted for a faux period look, rather than a historically accurate repaint. "The east London theatre, which 20 years ago narrowly escaped demolition for a car park, was designed by the architect Frank Matcham, and is generally agreed to be the best surviving Victorian and Edwardian music hall." The Guardian (UK) 01/27/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 8:23 pm
It's Not Just Culture, It's A Smart Investment "Armed with new custom-created research claiming Chicago-area theaters are worth a whopping $347 million in total economic activity to their home metropolis, the League of Chicago Theatres is on a newly energized mission to convince local corporate leaders that Chicago theater deserves to be taken more seriously by business interests... The study, to be released on Monday, argues that Chicago's live theater industry has doubled its direct and indirect economic impact in just seven years -- from $164 million in 1996 to $347 million in 2002." Chicago Tribune 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 7:55 pm
Recovery In Sight? "After a painfully slow year in the book trade, Canadian publishers are facing 2004 with cautious optimism. And, perhaps surprisingly, Indigo Books & Music is the reason. The powerful chain appears to have had a strong Christmas season, which has publishers excited. And the company, long criticized for its haphazard inventory control, is poised to introduce a new computer system that will likely solve many of the ordering and tracking problems that have plagued it in the past. Results for the crucial third quarter of Indigo's fiscal year won't be announced to shareholders till early February but publishers say Indigo... is sending out gratifyingly large payments." Toronto Star 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 6:26 am
Oscar Nominees Announced "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the final chapter in Peter Jackson's majestic fantasy trilogy, led the Academy Awards race Tuesday with 11 nominations, including best picture and director. The Napoleonic era naval adventure Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was right behind with 10 nominations, among them best picture and director. Bill Murray, Diane Keaton, Sean Penn and Charlize Theron were among the leading acting nominees. Other best-picture nominees for the 76th annual Oscars included Lost in Translation, about two lonely Americans in Tokyo; the brooding murder thriller Mystic River; and the horse-racing drama Seabiscuit." Los Angeles Times (AP) 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 6:05 am
- New Schedule, Same Old Oscar Stress "This was supposed to be a kinder, gentler Oscar season. After last spring’s awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a shortened season, moving up nominations from February to January... and shifting the awards show itself from March to February. The idea was to take a bite out of the uber-aggressive campaigning that studios big and small launch in the never-ending quest for a golden statuette or two. It may have seemed like a swell plan, but competition is as fierce as ever, especially with all the added studio intensity – pandemonium, panic, twisted nerves – about adapting to the new schedule." Dallas Morning News 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 5:17 am
Stranger Than Fiction Documentaries have increasingly been gaining traction in the film world, and this year's Sundance Festival was no exception. From a horrifying first-person look at what happens to the human body when it is fed nothing but food from McDonald's, to an intimate look at "a roiling skirmish between Latin immigrants and the Long Island natives who've lived in a small town for generations," the documentary made a serious mark in Park City. "The scope and depth of this year's documentaries made the fiction features seem all the smaller and more navel-gazing." Boston Globe 01/27/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 4:53 am
Fight the Power A consortium of 2,000 independent record labels is lodging a complaint with the European Union in an effort to block the pending merger of super-labels Sony and BMG. According to the group, the merged company would control fully 25% of the global music market, and would be able to crush its competition, particularly small, independent labels. BBC 01/26/04
Posted: 01/27/2004 4:40 am
Feeling Used By The Hollywood Machine As trendy, glamorous American cities go, Seattle ranks pretty far up the list. And during the 1980s and '90s, when Seattle's star was rising, Hollywood couldn't get enough of the place, filming movie after movie in its picturesque urban settings. But these days, the filmmakers' dash for the Canadian border has left Seattle bereft of new productions, and forced to watch in disbelief as movies set in the city are filmed in Vancouver and other foreign cities. City officials are trying desperately to lure Hollywood back to town with financial incentives and other deals, but so far, nothing is working. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 8:52 pm
Is CD Armageddon Nigh? The final sign that CDs had supplanted cassettes, record albums, and 8-tracks as the dominant recording media may have come when services began popping up, offering to convert your old vinyl collection to disc for a fee. So what does it say about CDs that there are now companies eager to convert your thousands of shiny discs into MP3 files? Wired 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:58 pm
Giving Up In Glasgow The Scottish Ballet has backed off its plans to convert a popular Glasgow visual arts space into its new headquarters, in the face of mounting criticism from the city's other arts leaders. When concerns were initially voiced about the ballet's plans to convert the Tramway building to office space, the company revised its plans in an effort to be responsive, but the criticism continued, leading to the decision to scrap the whole enterprise. The ballet has also withdrawn its application for federal funds to help with the conversion, and says it is going back to the drawing board. The Herald (Glasgow) 01/27/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 8:29 pm
Politics Amidst The Pirouettes An important hurdle has been cleared in the city of Frankfurt's efforts to bring a new, private ballet company to the city. The public company directed by William Forsythe, which has performed in Frankfurt for years, "will be shut down by the end of the 2003/2004 season because of budgetary constraints. To continue to bring Forsythe premieres to Frankfurt, the renowned choreographer wants to found a private ballet company which would perform its productions in both Frankfurt and Dresden." City politics have proved quite an obstacle to the plan, but last week, Frankfurt's mayor, and the head of the city's cultural bureau declared themselves on board. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 01/23/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 8:11 pm
From Bad To Worse "According to Dance/USA, a Washington, D.C.-based national service organization, 60% of the large dance companies it surveyed finished 2002 with their budgets in the red — the most in at least a dozen years. Anecdotal evidence, the group said, suggests that 2003 wasn't any better, and that 2004 looks grim too." Dance has always been a tough sell to general audiences, and the hit that many troupes took in annual donations during the recession hasn't abated with the current predictions of economic recovery. As more and more companies are forced to the precipice of insolvency, the dance world is realizing just how small its pool of supporters really is. Los Angeles Times 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:47 pm
