Good Grief! 50 Years Of Schulz It wasn't political, it had no cultural agenda, and it never really pushed the boundaries of what was considered permissible on the comics page. So how did Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" endure for 50 years in countless American papers? Perhaps it was the simplicity of the art and the humor, or the tender way in which Schulz portrayed the most hapless characters, or maybe it was just that Charlie Brown seemed to represent a bygone era of innocence for which many Americans long. This week, the first edition of what will be a complete reprinting of every Peanuts strip ever drawn is being released, authorized by Schulz's widow against his previously expressed wishes. The New York Times 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 5:54 am
Is It Art Or Theft? Jon Routson creates his art by going to his local multiplex, hauling out a handheld video camera, and taping a bootleg version of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. He then shows the distorted films, complete with audience coughs and shaking camera, at art galleries as his own work. He does not sell his works, thus avoiding charges of piracy, but his days as a video artist may be numbered, nonetheless. The act of appropriating pieces of another's work is always a touchy subject in the art world, but Routson's particular method is illegal in five states, and is about to become illegal in his home state, as well. The New York Times 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 5:38 am
Picasso Sells For Highest Price Ever For A Painting Picasso's Garcon a la Pipe (Boy with a Pipe)sold for $104 million Wednesday night. The painting is "one of the most important early works by the artist ever to appear on the market. It was the star item in the collection of the late Mr and Mrs John Hay Whitney. The record price previously paid for a painting was $82.5m for Vincent Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr Gachet at a Christie's auction in 1990. The previous high for a Picasso was $55m." The Guardian (UK) 05/06/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 7:57 pm
Historic Homes As Theme Parks "Until now, most of the America's 3,000 or so historic-home museums have resisted opening pop-culture exhibits and renting out galleries for corporate dinners – even as prestigious art museums have done just that. But sharp state budget cuts, stiff competition from more modern attractions and the overall tourism slide have left many of the homes with little choice. Just in time for the summer tourist rush – and to the dismay of purists – historic homes from California’s Hearst Castle to Virginia’s Mount Vernon are rolling out Broadway-style productions, opening fast-food outlets and courting party planners to combat a steep drop in financing and plummeting attendance." The Journal-Gazette (Fort Wayne) 05/04/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 7:41 pm
Aussie Art Collector Donates Major Collection To Victoria Dr Joseph Brown, one of Australia's biggest art collectors has decided to donate his collection to the National Gallery of Victoria. "The fate of the highly-prized collection -- renowned in art circles for its quality and quantity -- has been a 20-year saga. A succession of state governments have failed to take up Dr Brown's offer of the works, which was once valued by art experts at more than $60 million. The historic value of the works, by many famous artists including Streeton, von Guerard, Drysdale and Whiteley, is immense. The collection has been in storage since 2002, at a cost of about $650-a-week insurance and $300-a-week storage." The Herald-Sun (Australia) 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 7:36 pm
New Zealanders Building Their Own Stone Henge "The aim of the project, funded by a grant of NZ$56,500 from the Royal Society of New Zealand, is to generate interest in science among people who might not normally be keen on the subject. We came up with the idea of Stonehenge because it doesn't matter who you are -- everyone looks at the Pyramids and Stonehenge and structures like that (and asks) who built them, why did they build them?" Wired 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:35 pm
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Maligned Musicians Drop Lawsuit "Violinists from Bonn's Beethoven Orchestra have decided not to go ahead with their groundbreaking legal action in which they were suing for higher wages because they felt they played more than their colleagues in the woodwind and brass sections. [The musicians] agreed to drop their lawsuit, originally scheduled to have been heard by a labour court in Bonn on Thursday, and try and negotiate a compromise with the city authorities instead." The violinists had been widely ridiculed worldwide for their complaint, although many of the critics seemed unaware that many orchestras already pay string players extra salary, or allow them additional time off to compensate for the higher workload. The Mail & Guardian (South Africa) 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 6:39 am
Schwartz: Levine's Just Fine Lloyd Schwartz says that all the breathless speculation about James Levine's health is much ado about nothing. "Levine’s BSO performances have demonstrated no apparent diminishment of energy or quality. He conducts sitting down, but he’s far from the only major conductor to do so... Several musicians from the Met orchestra, who refused to be named, claimed that the maestro gets tired toward the end of five- or six-hour Wagner operas. Well, duh! — who wouldn’t? But has it hurt any performances? ... Is this front-page news? Musicians who were happy to be identified, both from the Met and from the BSO, had nothing but praise for Levine’s musicianship, conducting technique, and energy level." Boston Phoenix 05/07/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 6:32 am
- News Flash: 6-Hour Operas Are Hard Work Justin Davidson is amused by the New York Times's breathless tone in describing the supposed physical deterioration of James Levine. "A few musicians in the Met orchestra have noticed that, halfway through a six-hour performance of Wagner's Die Walküre, the workaholic maestro was liable to exhibit symptoms of fatigue. If so, he is still showing the strain less than one 37-year-old critic with nothing more arduous to do than sit and listen. Suddenly, we are all vicarious hypochondriacs, listening to Levine's performances for signs of his decline." Newsday 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 6:30 am
Proms In The Digital Age London's annual Proms concerts have been reborn. "Digital and web technology has not only revolutionised universal awareness of the Proms, it has become an invaluable PR tool for the BBC. If the two-month event was ever in danger of being an expensive and cumbersome weight around the corporation’s neck, the Proms are now, without doubt, its greatest cultural showcase." The Scotsman 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 7:53 pm
BBC 3 Giving Up Classical Diet? Is BBC3 giving up its commitment to broadcasting classical music? "They don't claim to be the classical music station any more and we feel sad about that. I think they desperately don't want that mantle." The Independent (UK) 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 7:45 pm
- Listeners Protest BBC 3's New Music Policy "The Friends of Radio 3 have launched an all-out assault on the station's controller Roger Wright and the way he has, since he took on the job six years ago, sought to widen its remit. Classical music, they complain, is being sidelined to make way for a trendy cultural cocktail liberally laced with world music and jazz. Now, they say, the Rubicon has been crossed - in the BBC's statement of programme policy, released last week, the old maxim that "classical music remains at the heart of the [Radio 3] schedule" has been quietly dropped." The Guardian (UK) 05/06/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 7:03 pm
Putting Real Money Into The Arts In the Australian state of Victoria, legislators have added an extra AUS$52 million to this year's arts budget. The Melbourne Festival, which has been in precarious fiscal position recently, received a funding commitment for the next four years, allowing it to plan future editions of the fest without wondering whether they'll actually be presented. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image also received a big bump in funding, to AUS$16 million per year, and several other museums and theaters will see increases as well. The Age (Melbourne) 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 5:22 am
Court Throws WTC Project In Doubt Suddenly, a court ruling concerning the insurance payout to the developer of the World Trade Center site has put the entire project in doubt. "Now, barring a lengthy appeals process, it appears that developer Larry Silverstein is a day late and a dollar short of the time and money he needs to build back all 10.5 million square feet of the office space he lost on Sept. 11 according to the Governor’s aggressive plans. And so everyone downtown is buzzing Larry Silverstein is unlikely to be the developer behind most of the office buildings at Ground Zero. Another developer will have to step in. But who has billions of dollars to spend on a spanking new building with no guarantee it will fill up?" New York Observer 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:13 pm
The Two Jansons(s) Mariss Jansons decided to leave the Pittsburgh Symphony mainly because of travel fatigue. So how will he cope with the fatigue of leading two of Europe's top orchestras simultaneously? Very carefully: "I've come to one conclusion, which is to cut myself into two conductors. One works in Amsterdam, the other in Munich. Some might say, 'You are Mariss Jansons. You can't be two different people.' Yes, I agree, but I can still try to work for the interests of both orchestras - repertoire, touring, everything. I'm very objective. This is my principle and I'll try to follow it." The Telegraph (UK) 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 6:20 am
Nabokov Collection Sold, Dispersed The memorabilia collection of Vladimir Nabokov was auctioned off by his son this week. "That son, Dmitri Nabokov, who turns 70 on Monday, felt his own death approaching, he said in an interview, and he wanted to leave no loose ends... The collection, a few items excepted, sold on Wednesday for nearly $750,000, a lower price than anticipated. Various private collections, most from France and Switzerland, bought parts of the collection, which will now be scattered to the breeze." The New York Times 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 5:46 am
Making The Space Fit The Art Most art collectors will only buy artworks that they know they have room to display. But for Tony Podesta and Heather Miller, two powerful Washington lobbyists whose passion is art, the space must adjust to the art, and if a newly purchased statue requires a renovation of their home, complete with structural support for the floor, well, so be it. "They are known for buying 'awkward' works, such as video installations that many other private collectors will not consider... To get around the [display] problem, the couple have excavated a huge subterranean vault beneath their house outside Washington - a white space five metres square and four metres high in which it will be possible to show 'very complicated video pieces' on all four walls." The Age (Melbourne) 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 5:30 am
UK Theatre Worth £2.6 Billion To Economy A new report says that theatre is worth an annual £2.6 billion to the British economy. That makes the £121.3 million in public money spent on UK theatre each year seem like a good investment. The Guardian (UK) 05/06/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 8:00 pm
National Magazine Awards Announced Esquire and The New Yorker were the big winners Wednesday at the National Magazine Awards, taking home seven awards between them. Other honorees included Chicago Magazine, Newsweek, and The Oxford American. Chicago Tribune 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 6:56 am
Wright: Great Poetry Requires Great Readers Pulitzer-winning poet Franz Wright on poetry in America: "Devoted and discerning readers with a genuine love of poetry will find, in this country, an astonishing wealth of wonderful poetry being written and freely offered—it is one of the finest things about the United States, though I’m afraid far too few people have the skill, patience, or the opportunity to benefit from it. I am always haunted by Walt Whitman’s remark to the effect that there will be no great poets without great readers. And there is, of course, a considerable audience for all this and always has been—there is a longing for poetry that can never be eradicated by the more glaring, consumer-oriented forms of popular culture; that’s pretty obvious." Playback St, Louis Review 05/04/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 7:48 pm
NY Times Kills "Ideas" Section "The problem may be that the section seemed blithely uninterested in wooing the kind of readers who seemed most likely to want to devour it every week." Editor Patricia Cohen: 'From the beginning, I didn’t want to approach the stories with an agenda. The point was not to publish my idea or your idea about a subject, but to cover the intellectual world with the same sophistication and detail that the paper covers other subjects."
New York Observer 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:24 pm
Disney: Moore Is Grandstanding Disney officials are accusing filmmaker Michael Moore of using their decision not to release his latest film as a publicity stunt to get his film noticed at Cannes. Moore admits that he knew about Disney's objections nearly a year ago, but says that he has been working "behind the scenes" for a solution, and only went public after determining that Disney was not willing to negotiate. BBC 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 6:04 am
- Previously: Disney Blocks Distribution Of Michael Moore Film That Criticizes Bush "The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush. A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax's distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore's film is deemed to be against Disney's interests not because of the company's business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many." The New York Times 05/05/04
French Reality TV Angers Farmers A French reality TV show has sparked protests by farmers. "La Ferme Celebrites - Celebrity Farm - sees 14 French celebrities live in a farmhouse for 70 days without running water or electricity. Tasks include sheep shearing, milking cows and tending as animals give birth. But the show, which attracts eight million viewers, has infuriated the Farmers' Confederation, who consider the show 'degrading' to rural people." BBC 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 6:40 pm
Jumping From One Twin To Another The James Sewell Ballet, which moved its home base to the Twin Cities from New York a decade ago, has always received rave reviews and enthusiastic audience reactions when it tours around the U.S. But packed houses at home have been harder to come by, and this week, the company announced that it will be moving across the Mississippi River, from a college auditorium in St. Paul where Sewell has performed for years to the big, lavish State Theatre in downtown Minneapolis. The State will be hard to fill - it seats 2,100, as compared with 656 seats in the St. Paul venue - but the company is counting on the extra drawing power of the Minneapolis theater district, as well as on research that suggests that most of their audience lives in Minneapolis and its suburbs. Minneapolis Star Tribune 05/06/04
Posted: 05/06/2004 5:08 am
Great Choreographer Stamps Some of America's greatest choreographers have been honored with postage stamps, unveiled at a ceremony Tuesday. Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille and Martha Graham were recalled in words by family and associates while dancers performed some of their best-known works." NJOnline.com (AP) 05/05/04
Posted: 05/05/2004 7:51 pm
