Arab World - Looking For legacy A thousand years ago the Arab world was a center of learning, a civilization that led the world. So what happened? "According to a number of highly self-critical reports that have come out in the past few years, the 21 countries that make up the region are struggling to teach even basic science at the university level. For poor countries, such as Yemen and Sudan, the problem is a lack of money and resources. For wealthier ones, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, complacency and a relatively new and underdeveloped university system have hampered progress." Chronicle of Higher Education 03/05/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 9:46 pm
Hockney: Photography Is Dead David Hockney says he believes that photography as an artform is dead. "Hockney says he believes modern photography is now so extensively and easily altered that it can no longer be seen to be true or factual. He also describes art photography as "dull". Even war photography, once seen as objectively "true", has now been cast in doubt by the ubiquitous use of digital cameras which produce images that can be easily enhanced or twisted." The Guardian (UK) 03/04/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 10:29 pm
Kandinsky - Prisoner Of Schoenberg? Kandinsky was very interested in music and admired Schoenberg, write Terry Teachout, "but he was also an idea-besotted intellectual manqué who followed many a half-baked notion down a blind alley, most spectacularly when he embraced theosophy, a pseudo-religion popular at the turn of the 20th century whose amorphous tenets played a part in his own turn to abstraction. Just as theosophy preached the unimportance of the material world, inspiring Kandinsky to portray in his paintings an "immaterial" universe of spiritual "thought-forms," so did Schoenberg’s break with tonality—a break that Schoenberg himself thought to be historically inevitable—seem to Kandinsky a necessary stage in the larger quest for a spiritual art freed from the shackles of materialism. Both men, however, were mistaken." Commentary 03/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 9:59 pm
Architect Proposes Huge Moscow Artist Project A Dutch architect has proposed building "five blocks of luxury flats, each block decorated in the style of a Russian artist. While the mayor backs the project, architectural critics have panned it as another example of the scars millionaires are inflicting on the city's skyline." The Guardian (UK) 03/03/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 9:27 pm
|
Advertisement
LUCIANO PAVAROTTI - Live in New York at the Met! Bid on two (2) Orchestra Seating tickets to see Pavarotti in Puccini's "Tosca" at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City on Saturday, March 6, 2004. This is one of the great tenor's final performances in a full opera at the Met as he begins a worldwide farewell tour! BID NOW! |
Women's Philharmonic Folds The San Francisco-based Women's Philharmonic, which had promoted the role of women in the classical music industry for nearly a quarter-century, officially closed its doors on Sunday, nearly three years after having to suspend its regular concerts due to a lack of funding. Some of the WP's programs will be folded into the American Symphony Orchestra League, and much of the work in which the organization had been involved will continue in other forums, but the demise of such an important organization is still sad to see, says Joshua Kosman. San Francisco Chronicle 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 6:39 am
Take The Concert Home With You Imagine you're at a club, or in a concert hall, completely engrossed in a performance. As a music consumer, you are at your most susceptible in situations like these, but promoters and musicians have rarely been able to take advantage of your concertgoing euphoria, because they have no way of selling you a piece of the live music experience to take home. But a bar in New Jersey is becoming one of several testing grounds for a new digital kiosk which allows audience members to plug in and download a digital recording of the show they just saw, almost immediately after it ends. It's "the next step in instant audio gratification," and the possibilities for its use seem to be limitless. The New York Times 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 6:30 am
Ravinia Looks Inward For Its Centenary Illinois's Ravinia Festival is celebrating its 100th birthday this summer, and organizers have created a season designed to call everyone's attention to that fact. "The nation's oldest music festival will surround the resident Chicago Symphony Orchestra with programs and activities -- 100 nights in all -- that look back to Ravinia's origins in 1904 as a 'high-class amusement park,' its early reign as the summer opera capital of the world, and its subsequent history as a major international center of music, dance and theater." Chicago Tribune 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 6:02 am
The Naxos Future The founder of Naxos records says that classical music isn't dying at all. In fact, Klaus Heymann thinks that the only part of the industry that will fall by the wayside in the future is the part made up of musicians, managers, and union bosses who can't see past the end of their own noses enough to notice that the old formulas for such essentials as recording no longer work. Heymann envisions a future in which the concert experience is more informal, the musicians of a major symphony orchestra are contractually bound to work in area schools and play at local weddings, and recordings are made cheaply and quickly. Nashville City Paper 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 5:35 am
CSO Musicians Won't Beg Barenboim Following a meeting between the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the CSO's executive director and board chairman, the musicians have voted not to hold a referendum on whether to ask outgoing music director Daniel Barenboim to reconsider his resignation. The referendum, which would have amounted to a vote of confidence in Barenboim, and an indirect vote of no confidence in board members who were reportedly dissatisfied with him, was pushed by a handful of musicians loyal to Barenboim, but there were fears that it could have driven a wedge between different factions of the CSO organization. Chicago Tribune 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 5:22 am
There's No Point Trying To Please Everyone "The Canada Council yesterday announced the recipients of this year's Governor-General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts: visual artists Iain Baxter, Eric Cameron, Garry Neill Kennedy and Ian Wallace; sound and performance artists John Oswald and Istvan Kantor; and museum director and First Nations cultural activist Tom Hill. Now the discussion will begin. Is it a good list? Is it a fair list? The G-Gs seems to be the one place where you can never make everybody happy." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 6:10 am
Finding The Silver Lining Cleveland's proposed "arts tax" went down to defeat at the polls this week, but arts advocates in the area say that they were encouraged by the level of support the idea received, and are looking into other innovative ways of increasing the level of public support for the city's cultural scene. "One strategy under consideration is asking Ohio lawmakers to permit counties to increase user fees such as the real-estate conveyance tax on land sales. Another is to persuade lawmakers to allow counties... whose major municipality has a population under 500,000 people to establish countywide arts districts and levy property-tax increases to support them." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 5:28 am
- Previously: Cleveland Arts Tax Fails An ambitious initiative which would have established a dedicated fund for the arts in Northeast Ohio failed at the ballot box in Cleveland on Tuesday. The tax levy was designed to make up for a critical lack of arts and cultural funding in the region, but organizers had a difficult time selling the notion of any new tax to the public, and many felt that the complexity of the funding structure made the initiative difficult to explain. The final vote tally was 54% to 46% against the ballot measure. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/03/04
Consolation Prize - Money For Runner-up Cultural Capitals The British government is offering those UK cities that lost out in the compatition for 2008 European Capital of Culture a pot of £15 million to spend on cultural projects. "The lottery-generated money, channelled through the Millennium Commission and the Arts Council, is intended for festivals, exhibitions and other events which show that culture and the arts are contributing to the area's regeneration." The Guardian (UK) 03/03/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 9:20 pm
The Top Mouse Takes A Hit "In a remarkable vote of defiance against a once unassailable executive, shareholders owning an estimated 43 percent of the Walt Disney Company declined on Wednesday to support the re-election of Michael D. Eisner, the chairman and chief executive, to the board. The mounting shareholder dissent prodded the board to strip Mr. Eisner of the chairman's title Wednesday night and give it to George J. Mitchell, Disney's presiding director and a former senator. Disney board members hope the split of the chairman and chief executive titles will pacify investors disgruntled about an underperforming stock price and Mr. Eisner's autocratic management style." The New York Times 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 6:44 am
Writers' Trust Awards Announced The Writers' Trust of Canada has handed out its annual awards, with the coveted lifetime achievement prize going to British Columbia-based author Audrey Thomas. The prize, valued at CAN$20,000, is one of the most lucrative in the country. Other winners included Kevin Patterson, for his short-story collection Country of Cold, and Brian Fawcett for his non-fiction work Virtual Clearcut: Or, the Way Things Are in My Hometown. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 6:12 am
Pope Sells Million Books A book of poems by Pope John Paul II has sold more than one million copies. "The pontiff first published the poems in 2003 but the print run was expanded after sales topped 300,000 in his native Poland." BBC 03/03/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 9:10 pm
Gelb: William Shawn, Petty Tyrant For years Arthur Gelb had idolized William Shawn and his New Yorker magazine. But when Gelb commissioned a profile of Shawn for the New York Times in 1966, he discovered another side of the legendary editor. Up close, Shawn was "ridiculously petty. He lived in a world he helped create, protected it against outsiders who might penetrate that world a little too deeply and might expose it." Wall Street Journal 03/03/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 9:00 pm
My Amazon Addiction... "From the day their book first lands in stores, most writers will start spending minutes, hours—nay, days, weeks, months and years—tracking its progress on Amazon.com. Never mind that the online retailer accounts for only about 10 percent of a trade book’s total sales (slightly higher for business books, somewhat lower for children’s). By my count, the reviews and the ranking system on Amazon.com count for about 95 percent of writers’ hopes, anxieties and dreams." New York Observer 03/03/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 7:35 pm
Boring? Well, We Asked For It. The Oscars hadn't even ended on Sunday night when the cries of "BO-ring!" began to be heard ringing from every armchair in North America. And yes, Hollywood has been a pretty yawn-inducing place of late, says Tina Brown. But what do we expect of the film industry when our culture has become so paranoid, so easily offended, and so willing to pounce on anyone deemed controversial, or worse, un-American? Add in the self-appointed fashionistas who make every star's life hell at every new awards show, and it's no wonder that Hollywood seems ready to retreat into ultra-safe territory. Washington Post 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 6:46 am
Reading Gibson's Passion "Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last week's debut marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North America. The subtitles were actually Plan B. Gibson originally intended to show the movie without them, letting the sound of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin -- not to mention the spattering blood -- speak for itself." In addition, the scholar who was in charge of creating the dialogue confesses that he threw in a few intentional inaccuracies, some for artistic reasons, and some just for a laugh.
Posted: 03/04/2004 5:58 am
What Is Piracy, Anyway? Lost amid all the bluster over intellectual property and illegal file-swapping is the undeniable fact that a large part of America's cultural history wouldn't exist without some form of piracy. The film and recording industries got their start through the work of individuals skirting the edges of copyright and patent law, and radio still operates under a bizarre set of rules in which authors and composers are paid for the right to broadcast their work, but performers aren't. Is online file-swapping really any worse than any of these practices? Wired 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 5:14 am
A Right To Privacy, So Long As You're A Kid "Two lawmakers introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate Wednesday to prohibit corporations from selling the personal information of children under the age of 16 without their parents' consent. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) introduced the Children's Listbroker Privacy Act to limit the sale of personally identifiable information for purposes of marketing to children, as part of a larger package of legislation intended to help parents combat commercial attacks on their children." Wired 03/04/04
Posted: 03/04/2004 5:10 am
Old? What Old? On TV? Where? Why are there so few older characters on Australian TV? And those older characters there are don't seem realistic. There's a "failure of local dramas to depict the 60-plus generation as people with sex lives, aspirations, careers and sporting ability. 'Everyone knows we're not all young and gorgeous so why doesn't television show it'?" The Age (Melbourne) 03/04/04
Posted: 03/03/2004 10:41 pm
