Philly Museum Splits Curatorial Duties "The Philadelphia Museum of Art has divided the leadership of its department of modern and contemporary art between two senior curators, an action that director Anne d'Harnoncourt said enhances the museum's ability to manage a growing collection of art made from 1900 to the present. Michael R. Taylor, acting head of the department since November, has been named Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern art. He will oversee collections and exhibitions of works from the first half of the 20th century. The museum is seeking an equivalent curator of contemporary art, whose purview will be from the mid-20th century to the present." Philadelphia Inquirer 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 6:34 am
Roman Glass Sets Auction Record An exceptionally crafted Roman bowl cut from a single block of glass has set a record at auction in London this week, fetching £2,646,650. The sum is the most ever paid for a piece of ancient glass. "The Constable-Maxwell cage-cup dates from the third century and is decorated with a delicate lattice design. It has survived intact for 17 centuries. It is the third time the item has set the record for the highest price paid for a piece of ancient glass." BBC 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 5:30 am
A Bigger China Means Stress On Heritage "With China's economy expanding and tourism growing even faster, insiders and outsiders worry that China will not take the time and trouble, or have the resources and expertise, to preserve its rich cultural heritage. Much has already been lost."
The New York Times 07/15/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 10:28 pm
In Praise Of Saatchi (Really!) Richard Dorment has new appreciation for Charles Saatchi's place in the artworld. "Since the fire, I've become much more aware of what the Saatchi Gallery means for the visual arts in this country. It has many faults - the difficult exhibition spaces at County Hall, the vagaries of Charles Saatchi's taste, a PR machine in overdrive - but there is nowhere else in the world where so much new art is made instantly accessible to the public on a regular basis. I suppose you never know what you have until you see how easily it could disappear." The Telegraph (UK) 07/15/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 10:18 pm
Police To Gallery: Cover Up Nude! Police have forced a gallery to cover a nude sculpture. "Police said the model at the A Gallery, in Wimbledon, south-west London, was deemed offensive under the Indecent Displays Act 1991." BBC 07/14/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 9:22 pm
A Caravaggio In Hiding? "A painting sold at auction for £75,000 three years ago could be worth millions after experts authenticated it as a work by Italian master Caravaggio. It had been sold at Sotheby's in New York in 2001, where the catalogue listed it as the possible work of 17th Century artist Carlo Magnone. But Sotheby's remains "adamant" that the painting is not by Caravaggio." BBC 07/14/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 9:20 pm
Another Score For Potemkin Sergei Eisenstein's silent film masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin, has twice inspired composers to pen complete scores to accompany it, and now a third soundtrack is in the works. But whereas the first two musical accompaniments were created by the eminent composers Edmund Meisel and Dmitri Shostakovich, the latest version is to be recorded by pop group The Pet Shop Boys. The score will be mainly instrumental, but will include a few new songs. Andante (Deutsche Presse-Agentur) 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 6:08 am
Offenbach Score Unearthed "A handwritten copy of the original score for Jacques Offenbach's last opera has been discovered a century after it was thought lost in a fire. The manuscript for the Tales of Hoffman - which premiered in 1881, a year after Offenbach's death - was found when the Paris opera library was re-organised." BBC 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 5:34 am
The Blonde Wagner Steps In To Save Bayreuth "Some of her famously quarrelsome relatives doubtless regard Katharina Wagner as little more than an inexperienced blonde harpy luring the Wagner family honour on to the rocks. But this week the great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner took a decisive step in the battle to take control of the composer's most prestigious legacy: Germany's Bayreuth Festival. When the tantrums and walk-outs started, it was the 26-year-old Madonna fan who saved the day." The Independent (UK) 07/11/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 10:11 pm
US Goes For Country "Country music sales in the US have risen by more than 10% in the last year, thanks to a wave of new artists." BBC 07/14/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 9:27 pm
Private Funding Partnership Working in UK A program designed to bring private investment to the arts in northwest England seems to be having a real impact. "Companies in the region have pumped £500,202 into arts projects under the Arts & Business New Partners scheme, up from £107,840 in the 2002/3 financial year. And Arts & Business North West, the not-for-profit organisation which runs the project and offers to match business contributions, itself invested £277,061, compared to just £80,670 a year ago." Manchester Evening News (UK) 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 5:58 am
Arts Council: UK Arts Groups In For A Rough Few Years "Arts Council England has warned that the level of arts funding set out in Gordon Brown's spending review will create a difficult few years for arts organisations. On Monday the chancellor announced an extra £230m for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, equivalent to a 2.3% increase per year in real terms. But according to ACE, the Treasury is engaging in some double counting." The Guardian (UK) 07/15/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 9:29 pm
Klein Comes To New Jersey Stephen Klein, a former executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra who has spent most of the last decade running the Pittsburgh Public Theater, has been named the new managing director of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. The New Jersey troupe is considerably less well-known than the Pittsburgh company Klein left last summer, but Klein has always seemed to like a challenge, and has never shied away from taking a job perceived to be less prestigious than his last one. Newark Star-Ledger 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 6:03 am
Why Barenboim Left Chicago Daniel Barenboim's impending departure from the Chicago Symphony had been long-expected, and the perception is that his relationship with the CSO management had soured. The conductor, who has never been shy about expressing himself, admits as much in a recent interview, and in between questions about the affair he had while married to Jacqueline duPre, he insists that he isn't the least bit tired of conducting, merely of what always comes with the job in America. "I can't stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies." The Telegraph (UK) 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 5:47 am
RSC Returns to London "The Royal Shakespeare Company is to return to central London in November for a six-month season at the Albery theatre in Soho... The company transferred none of its plays to London last year because it could not get enough financial backing from producers - the first time it had not had a London season since the 1960s." The RSC will offer special discounts to theatergoers under 25 at the London shows, in a bid to reinvigorate and expand its core audience. BBC 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 5:28 am
Roadshow - Broadway Strike Averted Broadway actors nearly went on strike this week over something that didn't really have much to do with Broadway theatre. "The road is a far less certain bet than it used to be, as evidenced by the recent decision by the producers of "Avenue Q," the Tony Award winner for best musical this year, to opt instead for an open-ended run in Las Vegas. Each side recognized that there needed to be a new economic model. It was no great secret that the road had to be restructured. The question was how." The New York Times 07/15/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 10:24 pm
Cervantes Play To Get World Premiere More than four centuries after it was written, Miguel Cervantes' play "Pedro the Great Pretender" is getting its world premiere, by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Guardian (UK) 07/15/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 9:59 pm
Contemp Theatre Fest Places American Character On The Table The 14th annual Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia is all about character. "The menu at this year's festival, one of the few across the nation devoted entirely to new work, offers a variety of perspectives on a country divided against itself. From the racially driven pessimism in Lee Blessing's playlets to the terrorism-fueled paranoia of Stuart Flack's "Homeland Security" to the lighthearted culture clash in Richard Dresser's Little League comedy "Rounding Third," the writers invited to the campus of Shepherd University find their voices by tracing the fault lines in the contemporary American character." Washington Post 07/14/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 9:29 am
Making Room For Fiction An NEA study on how much Americans read "confirms the predilection for fiction but doesn't explain it. We say that, even though media coverage is not the only factor, it's a big one. That which receives media attention is more likely to be read. Any book publicist will tell you that it's easier to get press or broadcast coverage for non-fiction books because they come with pictures and flesh-and-blood characters. Even C-SPAN's "Book TV" steers clear of fiction. Which leaves us with the question: Do the media have some responsibility to help keep fiction and poetry alive?" Book Babes (Poynter) 07/14/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 9:02 pm
FCC Crackdown Has Public Broadcasters Running Scared The FCC's recent crackdown on "obscenity" isn't likely to change much of what commercial broadcasters choose to put on the air. After all, with most TV networks and radio stations now owned by a few multi-billion dollar corporations, the potential $500,000 fines are a slap on the wrist. But for public broadcasting, where every dollar of programming money has to be begged and cajoled from either viewers or the government, the fines have the potential to be crippling. Accordingly, PBS, public radio, and some individual public stations are working overtime to get rid of anything that sounds even remotely controversial, even when it's just a single word from an innocuous British sitcom or a sound byte embedded in an award-winning documentary series. The Christian Science Monitor 07/13/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 6:24 am
- Previously: Bleeping Because Of FCC "Three foul words, including the F-word, have been bleeped from the new PBS drama Cop Shop, much to the chagrin of Richard Dreyfuss, its star and executive producer." Why the exorcising? FOFCC - Fear of the FCC. The Globe & Mail (Canada) (Reuters) 07/13/04
Who Needs Friends When You've Got Tony Back? In a mildly surprising twist on the usual Hollywood bluster, today's announcement of the nominations for the 56th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards did not include a nod to the just-concluded NBC blockbuster, "Friends." The sitcom probably didn't deserve to be nominated, but that rarely has anything to do with it when a hit show is leaving the air. Instead, the nominated comedies are "Sex & the City," "Arrested Development," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Will & Grace." On the drama side, HBO's mob hit "The Sopranos" once again leads the pack after being ineligible last year. CNN 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 6:15 am
File-Sharing Turns To Film Even as the music industry continues to kvetch over illegal file-trading, it seems that mere songs are no longer the only files on the block to be swapped. In fact, the popularity of online trading of complete films and "other files larger than 100MB" is close to overtaking that of music on peer-to-peer networks. It's all illegal, of course, but while the music industry has been touting the success of its anti-piracy campaign, it seems that what has actually occurred has been a shift in focus, from music to film, and a shift in technique, from large well-known file-trading enablers like Kazaa to smaller, more surreptitious programs. BBC 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 5:21 am
BBC: We've Got To Improve The BBC’s governors yesterday said that the corporation’s programmes were not good enough and launched a major inquiry into how to improve them. The Scotsman 07/15/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 10:30 pm
UK: A Future Without Analog Radio? It's likely that when UK radio stations are all broadcasting in digital format, the analog signals will be switched off. "The government has set a target of 2010 to switch over to digital TV, and the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, recently hinted that a similar move for radio would be considered." The Guardian (UK) 07/14/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 10:03 pm
Ballet School Hopes For An 8-Figure Donation "Wallace McCain, billionaire frozen-food tycoon from New Brunswick, could join an exclusive club this morning when the National Ballet School announces major funding for its $90 million new home... The most intriguing question: Will McCain add his name to the very short list of philanthropists who have given $10 million or more to one of Toronto's cultural projects?" The National Ballet School has long been one of Canada's most important (and underfunded) dance institutions, and it is struggling to raise $50 million in private money to go with $40 million of government financing for its new facility. Toronto Star 07/15/04
Posted: 07/15/2004 6:40 am
The Ashton Side Of Balanchine (Or...) "The Lincoln Center Festival’s Ashton Celebration has reintroduced the British choreographer to the American audience for dance, an audience for whom Balanchine has long reigned supreme. This renewed interest in Ashton may spark a fruitful exploration of what the 20th century’s two foremost geniuses of classical dance choreography have in common—and what makes each distinctive." Seeing Things (AJBlogs) 07/14/04
Posted: 07/14/2004 10:34 pm
