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Friday, February 27




Ideas

Multiculturalism - Trust The Ones You Know? "A large ongoing survey of American communities seems to show, uncomfortably, that levels of trust and co-operation are highest in the most homogenous neighbourhoods. People living in diverse areas, it turns out, are not just more suspicious of people who don't look like them; they are also more suspicious of their own kind. Because of that, they suffer socially, economically and politically." The Economist 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 9:03 pm

Visual Arts

Cezanne Theft In Australia - Really? An art collector in New South Wales claims that "$67 million worth of art, including a previously unheralded painting by the French impressionist Paul Cezanne, worth $50 million, were stolen from his studio in the tiny town of Limpinwood. "Reports of the theft and in particular the Cezanne, supposedly painted in 1873 and titled Cezanne's Son in a High Chair, were greeted with scepticism in the higher echelons of the Australian art world. The art historian and publisher Lou Klepac described it as like 'finding a crocodile in the Antarctic'." Sydney Morning Herald 02/28/04
Posted: 02/27/2004 7:37 am

Guggenheim Commissions Serra For $20 Million The Guggenheim has commissioned Richard Serra to "create a room-size installation of monumental steel sculptures, including seven new ones" for the museum's Bibao Museum. "The region's Basque government, which covers the museum's operating costs and pays for its acquisitions, has spent about $20 million on the commission. The installation, expected to take 17 months to produce and install, is scheduled for completion in June 2005." The New York Times 02/27/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:55 pm

Science - Unraveling Giorgione's Mind A group of nine Giorgione paintings have been examined with new scientific techniques reveal much about how the artist worked. “What has become clear with the infra-red discoveries is that Giorgione was a radical modernist when he drew. Giorgione doodled as he worked out compositions, just like 20th-century artists. But why did Giorgione, 'the modernist', paint such free and fanciful images only to delete them or adapt them into more restrained ones? The Economist 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 9:11 pm

Music

A String Quartet That Records Everything (And Sells It Too) For about a year, the Borromeo String Quartet has been recording all its live preformances and making them available for sale over the internet. "We had done enough recording that I had started to learn about the techniques and some of the issues involved. I began to carry around a little suitcase of equipment, a mobile recording unit, to take down our concerts because I thought it was too bad that so many just vanish into thin air. If something went wonderfully, we love to study just how and why it happened. It is also important for us to study what didn't go so well." Boston Globe 02/27/04
Posted: 02/27/2004 7:46 am

Kennicott: Something "Refreshing" About Sam's RoadTrip Blog Along with many ArtsJournal readers, the Washington Post's Philip Kennicott has been following violist Sam Bergman's RoadTrip blog. "There is something that is remarkably refreshing, given the sadly hamstrung public relations front that the professional orchestra community presents to the world. There are signs of intelligent life and unselfconscious candor. Bergman found a voice that spoke articulately from inside a world that has become all too reticent, nervous and polished in its nonmusical communication with the public. That his blog, which made the facts of a musician's life fascinating, should be so successful suggests that the professional orchestral world has become so self-absorbed that it no longer knows what is interesting about its own microcosm." Washington Post 02/27/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 11:08 pm

  • In RoadTrip: Some Final Thoughts On A Tour Well-Spent Sam Bergman on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra: The orchestra wound up its three-week European tour with a concert in Finland Thursday night. Friday, the orchestra flies home to Minneapolis, and Sam expects to blog this weekend on his thoughts about the tour RoadTrip (AJBlogs) 02/27/04
    Posted: 02/26/2004 11:04 pm

The Golden Age Of Music (It's Right Now) There's no end of doom and gloom about the music business these days. But that's just the business. "There's never been a better time to be in the music industry? Try telling that to the thousands of music workers who have been laid off over the past couple of years. Universal slashed its workforce by 11% last year. Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in the US two weeks ago. But with album sales rising and the phenomenal growth of ringtones and legal downloads, plus record-breaking years for merchandising and publishing rights, it seems the death of the music industry has been greatly exaggerated." The Guardian (UK) 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:47 pm

Acousti-Guard - How Do You "Fix" Royal Festival Hall? London's Royal Festival Hall has a big problem. "The main problem is the hall's acoustics. They're awful. Simon Rattle once said that playing there 'saps the will to live'. Even the RFH's resident orchestras, who have historically been defensive about their home, now openly admit it 'leaves a lot to be desired'." But doing anything about the sound is more problematic than a mere acoustical upgrade... The Guardian (UK) 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:44 pm

Report: Nagano To Be Named Director Of Montreal Symphony The Montreal newspaper Le Devoir reports that Kent Nagano will be named as the Montreal Symphony's new music director, succeeding Charles Dutoit. The orchestra won't comment and says it will anounce the choice in March. Le Devoir (Montreal) 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:10 pm

  • Celebrating 25 Years Of Nagano At The Helm Conductor Kent Nagano celebrates 25 years as director of the Berkeley Symphony. "He transformed it from a group that shunned tuxedoes and played in street clothes at unusual locations such as art museums into a sophisticated symphony known for performing challenging modern music. The fare has stretched from the works of Frank Zappa to an improvisational jazz trumpet concerto by Jeff Beal." San Francisco Chronicle 02/26/04
    Posted: 02/26/2004 10:04 pm

A Music Downloading Fee? Big Music Doesn't Like It An idea to solve the music downloading problem? How about music fans paying 'a small monthly fee - perhaps $5 - to share files with impunity, using whatever software they like. The money could be collected by a central organization and then distributed among those who own the rights to the songs, based on popularity. The idea has worked before. Broadcast radio stations paid a similar flat fee..." But the music industry has rejected the idea out of hand. Wired 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 9:36 pm

Making It In The Jazz Club Biz "Parisian jazz clubs have had historical and sentimental—and temporary—relevance since Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Bud Powell and the others played in those dank, smoky Left Bank caves not because it was romantic but because it was their only option. They deserved to be playing in Salle Pleyel. It's much better for the deserving in the jazz business now, so it is ironic that more musicians with the clout to play prestigious halls are choosing to go back to multiple performances in smaller, more intimate clubs instead." Culture Kiosque 02/23/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 9:23 pm

Arts Issues

An Arts Incubator At Ground Zero At the World Trade Center site, "an unusual nexus of arts philanthropies, arts organizations, and far-thinking designers is set to create an autonomous complex fostering the creative spirit on stage, page, and canvas. Tentatively dubbed the 'Arts Incubator,' the project is being bankrolled by such well-heeled organizations as the American Express Foundation and the Norman Lear Family Foundation and will be the handiwork of architect-turned-set-designer David Rockwell and Kevin Kennon." Backstage 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:05 pm

Challenging The Nea Funding Increase President Bush's proposal to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by 15 percent is a good thing, right? So why are so many arts supporters talking down the idea? Backstage 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 9:58 pm

People

Asking Questions Of Louise Bourgeois Sculptor Louise Bourgeois is 92. The Guardian asked artists to submit questions to her. "In a way, Bourgeois's history has paralleled that of modernism and surrealism. Yet she has always been somehow apart. This too is her strength..." The Guardian (UK) 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:39 pm

Pierre: How Music Saved My Life Booker prize-winner DBC Pierre was at a low point. Contemplating suicide. Then he discovered the Romantic classics. "I realised my feelings were being set to music. I froze, and heard every detail of my turmoil being painted in symphony. The music acknowledged tumult, contradiction, confusion, fear and the ultimate conquest of the dark plains of psyche and soul. It announced that misery was life's default, and beckoned me to stay close to it, proposing conflict to be a sweet and human thing, a many-textured set of riddles that needed recourse to nothing but a working nervous system. The Romantics had found me. I took them full in the vein." The Guardian (UK) 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:36 pm

The Uncommon Editor "During her 46 years in the publishing business, Judith Jones has become the mouse that roared. If any single human being possesses unerring taste, it is possible that she is that person. Her publishing "finds" include a manuscript by an unknown teen-ager named Anne Frank, a cookbook by an unknown chef named Julia Child and a book of poetry by an unknown scribe named Sylvia Plath." Baltimore Sun 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 7:22 am

Theatre

Monty Python's Spamalot Headed To Chicago, Then Broadway A musical is being made of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The movie, a spoof of the legend of King Arthur, did have a few songs -- most notably 'The Camelot Song,' which contained such famously dubious rhymes as 'We're Knights of the Round Table/We Dance Whene'r We're Able,' as well as the line that inspired the title of the musical spinoff: 'We Eat Ham and Jam and Spam a Lot'." Chicago Tribune 02/27/04
Posted: 02/27/2004 7:59 am

Publishing

The Da Vinci Blockbuster (uh...Shouldn't That Be Leonardo?) "The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, has been on sale for nearly a year now, and—assuming no unexpected plot twists—it should become the fastest-selling adult fiction title ever by March 18, when its publication anniversary rolls around. Apologies to all the religious-thriller, art-history-driven reading groups out there, but, uh, how the hell did an unknown author writing on an obscure subject make publishing history?" Fortune 02/27/04
Posted: 02/27/2004 7:25 am

Omnivore - A New Magazine For/Of Culture Former New Yorker Magazine staffer Lawrence Weschler is trying to launch a new magazine called Omnivore: A Journal of Writing & Visual Culture. Weschler is "dissatisfied with current newsstand choices, contending that extended nonfiction reportage intended for general-interest magazines has atrophied amid 'the increasingly peg-driven, niche-slotted, attention-squeezed, sound-bit media environment of recent years.' In short, writers such as A.J. Liebling, John Hersey, and Joseph Mitchell would feel crunched for space today." New York Sun 02/26/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:25 pm

Found In The Age Of Writing There are very real differences between "being a 'young writer' and an 'older writer' and even an 'old writer'. My conclusion is that old writers have the greatest advantage in that they can offend people at will without consideration to consequences. After all, it's not like they're in this business for a long career." And younger writers? they have an advantage "because if there is one thing publishing takes to be successful it is TIME, usually just a bit more than you're willing to give." BookNinja 02/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 9:24 pm

Media

Alexander: Jerry Seinfeld Has Made $1 Billion In Residuals For "Seinfeld" The stars of Seinfeld have made a deal that will allow the release of DVDs of the series. Jerry Seinfeld's three costars had been complaining because they had been cut out of royalty payments for the series. "I'm not ashamed to talk numbers. I would say in the years that we've been in syndication, Julia, Michael and I have probably individually seen about a quarter of a million dollars out of residuals, whereas our brethren have seen hundreds of millions of dollars. Seinfeld has a profit of over a billion dollars." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/27/04
Posted: 02/27/2004 8:10 am

The Media "Indecency" Wars Heat Up A Florida radio host is fired and his station might be fined $750,000 for "indecent" programming. Howard Stern's show is pulled off the air by six Clear Channel stations. "Cultural conservatives have cheered the moves. But the Stern suspension arrived with little cost to Clear Channel: The often-raunchy show was being carried on just six of its 1,200 radio stations, all in mid-level markets. And some observers say the San Antonio, Texas, company's moves are politically driven, in direct response to the anti-indecency rhetoric streaming from public officials." Baltimore Sun 02/27/04
Posted: 02/27/2004 7:53 am

Dance

Dance Fans: The SF Chronicle Wants To Hear From You! Since dance critic Octavio Roca left the San Francisco Chronicle a few months ago, the newspaper hasn't had a staff dance critic. And it currently has no plans to hire one. This week one of the freelancers who's been helping fill the beat raised an alarm on an online dance BB that the Chron was eliminating dance coverage altogether. Not so, writes Chron editor David Wiegand: We have no intention of cutting dance coverage. But "since Octavio left, I have received all of two letters about the fact we haven't yet been authorized by the Hearst Corp. to hire a new dance critic. That's rather sad, don't you think?" Sounds like an invitation to me... Voice of Dance 02/27/.04
Posted: 02/27/2004 9:47 am

Moore Selected To Run ABT Rachel Moore has been named the new executive director of American Ballet Theatre. "Moore arrives at a time when there has been high turnover among the company's executive directors and questions have been raised by former trustees about the company's financial health. Ballet Theater's auditor and company officials say the company is in good shape. This week, the company announced three new corporate sponsors and a challenge grant of $400,000." The New York Times 02/27/04
Posted: 02/26/2004 10:51 pm


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