Whitney Chooses An Architect The Whitney Museum in New York has chosen Italian architect Renzo Piano to design its upcoming expansion, replacing Rem Koolhaas, whose $200 million design was rejected by the Whitney board last year as too extravagant. Board members say they aren't looking to create a "destination building," merely a functional museum, and they applauded Piano's willingness to work within their parameters. The New York Times 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 6:12 am
Justice Costs A Lot Of Money As the Barnes Collection continues the long, slow legal process required to allow it to move to Center City Philadelphia from the suburban plot it has called home for decades, the case being brought by three Barnes art students in an attempt to block the move seems increasingly quixotic. But the students don't necessarily lack legal standing, merely the financial wherewithal to pursue their agenda as aggressively as the pro-move forces have done. "To keep up their fight, the students want to raise at least $100,000 to hire expert witnesses for the second weeklong hearing in the case, slated for September in Montgomery County Orphans' Court." Philadelphia Inquirer 06/14/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 5:19 am
Maybe It Would Be More Shocking If He Stole Art That People Like "The thief who 'kidnapped' a fibreglass sculpture by the graffiti artist Banksy has struck again. AK47, as he calls himself, has removed a Tracy Emin pink neon sign called Just Love Me from outside the Hackney Empire theatre in east London... He also claimed that AK47 was a rapidly growing international 'arto-political movement', but was vague about the membership, saying only that it had 'a lot'." He plans to return the work by week's end. The Guardian (UK) 06/16/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 10:31 pm
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Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative: Discover the power of mentoring. Launched in 2002, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative programme pairs gifted young artists with renowned artists in their fields, for a year of one-on-one mentoring. The mentors for the Second Cycle are Sir Peter Hall, David Hockney, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mira Nair, Jessye Norman and Saburo Teshigawara. The Second Year of Mentoring begins in May 2004. http://www.rolexmentorprotege.com/
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Relâche Makes Big Changes "In a significant change in artistic authority, Philadelphia's cutting-edge Relâche Ensemble will now be guided by two of its longtime musicians, easing out artistic and executive director Thaddeus Squire. In an announcement yesterday, flutist Michele Kelly and oboist/English hornist Lloyd Shorter were named co-artistic directors." Squire, who has been credited with rescuing the eminent contemporary ensemble from near-collapse four years ago, had recently proposed expanding his authority, a change with which the musicians weren't comfortable. Still, the split appears to have been an amicable one. Philadelphia Inquirer 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 5:50 am
250 Concerts Highlighting Violas and Bassoons? Must We? An unprecedented series of 250 concerts will be held by orchestras across the UK this fall, with the aim of promoting the orchestra as a still-relevant cultural force, as well as to promote certain instruments within the orchestra which have fallen out of favor with young British musicians. Among the much-maligned-or-ignored instruments to be highlighted are the tuba, the bassoon, the double bass, and of course, the butt of all orchestra jokes, the viola. The Guardian (UK) 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 5:41 am
Arts Council Plotted To Kill Off Scottish Opera In a stunning development in the ongoing melodrama enveloping Scottish Opera, a secret document obtained by a newspaper shows that the Scottish Arts Council had a plan in place to eliminate the company completely "and replace it with a new organisation run by a skeleton staff." Under the terms of the plan, which was concocted last summer, even as the company was preparing to stage its wildly successful Ring Cycle, the entire orchestra and chorus of Scottish Opera would have been dismissed, and a new group of administrators would have commissioned future productions on an ad hoc basis. The public release of the plan may well cost some Scottish government overseers their jobs, and the fallout is already beginning in Glasgow. The Scotsman (UK) 06/16/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 11:41 pm
- How Did It Come To This? It is now clear that the Scottish Opera mess was created not by simple indifference, but by a deadly combination of bureaucratic bungling, shortsighted cost-cutting, and a stubborn unwillingness from individuals on all sides even to look for a compromise. "The impression now emerging is that powerful figures in the arts council were more than willing to let the Opera die - and that the Executive, confronted by sweeping redundancies, opted for a political fudge." The Scotsman (UK) 06/16/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 11:41 pm
- Does Anyone Actually Support This Plan? "Scotland's arts world suffered another setback yesterday when Craig Armstrong, one of the country's leading composers, resigned from the country's flagship arts body just days after its membership was announced... In what will be regarded as a serious problem for James Boyle, the head of the commission, the composer resigned after discovering he was the only working artist on the board. He also condemned the Scottish Executive's treatment of Scottish Opera, and called for artists to get together to save the company from the extensive job losses announced last week." The Herald (Glasgow) 06/16/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 11:40 pm
Maazel Gets An Extension, New York Gets A Horse Race The New York Philharmonic has extended the contract of music director Lorin Maazel through the 2008-09 season, but also hired three prominent conductors to lead the orchestra regularly over the next three seasons, presumably placing them at the front of the race to be the next music director. The guest conductors are Riccardo Muti, David Robertson, and Alan Gilbert. Maazel has been a frequent target of critics since his appointment, but the musicians of the orchestra have publicly supported him, going so far as to issue an open request to the Phil's board for the extension. The New York Times 06/16/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 10:01 pm
- PR Masquerading As Artistic Initiative? To Anthony Tommassini, the New York Phil's two-pronged music director strategy "looks like a public relations move dressed up as an artistic policy... Is the Philharmonic feeling defensive as several major orchestras reap credit for having shaken up their institutions by appointing risk-taking artists as their music directors?" The New York Times 06/16/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 10:00 pm
iTunes Europe Launches, But Selection Is Spotty The much-heralded launch of the European incarnation of Apple's iTunes music download service was marred a bit yesterday when consumers signed up for the service, only to find that the company's song selection is missing some key artists. The omissions, which include The Beatles, The White Stripes, and Franz Ferdinand, are due to Apple's ongoing dispute with more than 800 independent record labels. The Guardian (UK) 06/16/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 9:28 pm
MTT Does It Again Michael Tilson Thomas could accurately be said to be the populist heir to Leonard Bernstein, a conductor of a major American orchestra who is as determined to make music accessible to the general public as he is to please the usual concertgoing crowd. His latest project with the San Francisco Symphony is a multi-part PBS documentary exploring how music is created, what it means, and who exactly those tuxedo-clad individuals frowning from the stage really are. An extensive web site and a companion radio documentary produced by Minnesota Public Radio will make Keeping Score the largest music/media project ever undertaken by a symphony orchestra. San Francisco Chronicle 06/15/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 8:14 pm
Staying Relevant Without Going Dumb The phrase "dumbing down" has long been a catch-all term used by arts aficionados to take potshots at any organization daring to try to update their programming for modern audiences. More often than not, the changes aren't dumbing anything down, merely acknowledging that the line between high culture and pop has blurred significantly in the last century, and that the average American's frame of reference is defined not by symphonies and plays, but by rock albums and TV shows. At the National Performing Arts Convention in Pittsburgh, arts groups have been sharing ideas for embracing 21st-century culture without alienating their base or losing their souls. CNN International (AP) 06/14/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 5:12 am
Arts + Office Space = Civic Rebirth Times are tough for corporate real estate brokers operating in Center City Philadelphia. But one area of the city's urban core which had been considered dead and worthless fifteen years ago has been reborn in the eyes of private companies looking for an attractive place to locate their headquarters. South Broad Street, which was rechristened the Avenue of the Arts under former mayor (now PA governor) Ed Rendell, has flourished since becoming home to the Kimmel Center (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra) and multiple theaters. In fact, at the end of 2003, the Avenue of the Arts had an office vacancy rate of only 5%, compared to nearly 13% citywide. Philadelphia Business Journal 06/11/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 9:35 pm
Remembering A Man Of Letters "Tributes continued to pour in yesterday for Jack McClelland, who died Monday after a long illness. For many of his friends, the past few years had been a sad time, watching the decline of a vibrant, engaging man who put Canadian letters on the literary map, not only at home but around the world." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 6:54 am
Keeping Art In The Family Donald and Mera Rubell have been collecting art for four decades, with their two children assisting them for much of that time, and the family has 5,000 works, 27,000 art books, and a 40,000-square-foot museum to show for their efforts. And the Rubells don't plan to abandon the all-in-the-family approach anytime soon: according to the family patriarch, "we're training our two grandkids, too. The 3-year-old, Samuel, can already recognize a Jeff Koons or a Maurizio Cattelan. Ella, who is a year-and-a-half, isn't independent yet. She tends to follow and look at what he looks at. You have to train them." Business Week 06/15/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 5:35 am
Screenwriter Brutally Murdered; Suspect In Custody Hollywood screenwriter Robert Lees, 91, was found decapitated in the backyard of his Los Angeles home this past weekend. His neighbor, a retired doctor, was stabbed to death as well. A homeless man is in custody and will be charged in the killings. Lees wrote dozens of films in his career, and may be best known for the comedy classic Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. BBC 06/15/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 9:18 pm
Library Gets A Chunk Of Broadway History "The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has received a gift of thousands of pages of scripts, songs and other pieces of stage memorabilia from two of Broadway's best-known musical teams: Kander and Ebb, and Bock and Harnick. The donation, ranging from scraps of pure inspiration to less successful discards, gives a glimpse of the sometimes delightful, sometimes devilish backstage grind that went into making classic musicals like Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof." The New York Times 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 6:25 am
Happy Bloomsday, But Not In Ireland It's June 16, Bloomsday, and that means that James Joyce fanatics all over the world will be holding public readings from Ulysses and enjoying a drop of Irish whiskey in memory of the novel's protagonist. But in Ireland, where the novel is set and where Joyce grew up, old wounds have yet to fully heal, and while the country has moved on from the days when it denounced its native son as anti-Catholic, pornographic, and "spiritually offensive," but the Joyce family has never quite gotten over Ireland's direct snub of one of the great authors of the 20th century. Chicago Tribune 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 6:31 am
Adelman Turns Down Foreign Affairs When Kenneth Maxwell resigned as book editor at Foreign Affairs in mid-May, accusations flew that his departure was the direct result of a strong-arm move by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had objected to Maxwell's review of a book about the rise of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Now, Maxwell's chosen successor, Princeton professor Jeremy Adelman, has announced that he will not accept the post, having been disgusted with the treatment of Maxwell by the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs. The New York Times 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 6:20 am
Is Amazon Peddling Pro-Pedophilia Propaganda? A Seattle-area publisher of sailing books has pulled his stock from Amazon.com in protest of the online retailer's refusal to stop selling a book which directly makes the case for sexual relationships between men and prepubescent boys. Amazon says that while the book is clearly reprehensible (and the site's in-house reviewer says as much,) it is not a pornographic work, and the retailer insists that it will not get into the censorship business. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 06/08/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 5:29 am
McSweeney's Goes Seriously Comic The latest issue of Dave Eggers's McSweeney's has been given over to comic art legend Chris Ware, who uses the occasion to take readers who ordinarily might not give comic art a second thought on a tour of the modern scene. "Ware's curatorial tastes are generally quite broad... Even so, you can see his particular selectivity in the McSweeney's picks. Ware prefers minimal, iconic, impressionistic drawing to the more deliberate rendering of the European school ("Blacksad" artist Juanjo Guarnido, say), and his introduction is quick to dismiss the comics aesthetic that's grounded in old superhero comic books." City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 06/16/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 10:42 pm
First-Time Author Wins BBC Book Prize "Debut author Anna Funder has won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for her book about the hardships endured by people from the former East Germany. The book, titled Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, earned Funder £30,000 in prize money." The Samuel Johnson Prize is now in its sixth year of recognizing non-fiction works of all varieties, from travel writing to biography to the arts. BBC 06/15/04
Posted: 06/15/2004 9:31 pm
Well, You Get What You Pay For "Blogging pioneer Dave Winer unexpectedly closed Weblogs.com, his free blog-hosting service, on Sunday, leaving thousands of bloggers without access to their blogs. Blogs affected by the shutdown now redirect to a generic message posted by Winer." The Weblogs.com service was a free one, and Winer says that he simply could not afford the time and money necessary to keep it going. But many of his virtual tenants are furious at having been given no warning of the shutdown, especially since the content of their blogs is now inaccessible to them. Wired 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 6:05 am
BBC Prepares For A Copyright-Free Future "The British Broadcasting Corporation's Creative Archive, one of the most ambitious free digital content projects to date, is set to launch this fall with thousands of three-minute clips of nature programming. The effort could goad other organizations to share their professionally produced content with Web users. The project, announced last year, will make thousands of audio and video clips available to the public for noncommercial viewing, sharing and editing." And it may herald a new global era of more liberal licensing and less restrictive copyright enforcement. Wired 06/16/04
Posted: 06/16/2004 5:55 am
