Representational Art Back On The Radar Screen "Once photography took over the role of depicting reality in the mid-19th century, painters faced the question of what to paint. As new styles from Impressionism to Abstraction flowered, the dominant approach was to avoid anything the camera could record.
Still, artists who stuck with recognizable images continued to paint and exhibit their work - without the respect of modern art's movers and shakers... these painters of so-called representational art have finally been brought back into the fold - and that the art world has finally shed the notion that a single style defines a 'serious' artist." The Christian Science Monitor 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 5:55 am
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SF Symphony Chorus May Strike The professional members of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus are threatening to strike next week's performances if progress is not made in their ongoing contract negotiations. 30 of the chorus's 180 members are paid, and those singers are members of the American Guild of Musical Artists. There is no word on whether the unionized musicians of the symphony itself would cross a potential picket line. San Francisco Chronicle 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 7:05 am
Bypassing The Middleman As the corporations that control the popular music market continue to tighten their grip and shrink their playlists, bands outside the increasingly narrow "mainstream" are turning to the vaguely defined world of internet buzz to market themselves. With the recent proliferation of web sites designed to be "people hubs" (bringing users together around common interests or relationships), musicians have seen an opportunity to generate interest in their work without having to crack the playlist at MTV or ClearChannel. The Christian Science Monitor 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 5:52 am
How To Run A Concert Venue: Don't Rely On Ticket Sales St. Paul's Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which is the main home to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the secondary concert site of the Minnesota Orchestra, has balanced its books for the second year running, after years of red ink. "The Ordway embarked on an austerity program and stepped up its fund-raising efforts for the 2002-'03 fiscal year, raising $3.6 million. The theater nearly matched that figure this year... as the Ordway seeks to decrease its dependence on box office revenues." St. Paul Pioneer Press 10/07/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 8:31 pm
Piano's New Music Box "It is doubtlessly an intimidating challenge to improve the architecture of Rome, but leading Italian architect Renzo Piano may have done just that with his design of the city's new Parco della Musica. This new music complex, almost a decade in planning and construction, not only provides Rome with attractive new musical venues, but also acts as a large-scale infill project by returning a previously underused site to the city's urban fabric." Tandem 10/10/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 8:24 pm
Scottish Opera Goes Begging Desperately searching for ways to stay afloat financially, Scottish Opera, which will be forced by the Scottish Executive to go dark for a year in summer 2005, is considering mounting a tour outside of Scotland to be paid for by England's Arts Council. "There is concern that if the opera drops out of sight, the road back will be even tougher. Staging a brand-new opera in Scotland, however, could potentially cost up to £400,000." So if there is a tour, Scottish audiences may miss out on seeing their own opera company. The Scotsman (UK) 10/08/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 8:08 pm
Following The Leader The UK's music industry trade group is preparing to file lawsuits against 28 illegal file-traders, in a mimic of the anti-piracy tactic that has been used effectively by industry groups in Europe and the US. The European group will soon be suing a new group of nearly 500 file-swappers; the US recording companies have sued nearly 6,000. BBC 10/07/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 7:54 pm
- Does File-Swapping Really Hurt Anyone? One illegal downloader offers a counterpoint to the recording industry's assertion that the practice is destroying their businesses. "I've never burnt a CD and sold it on. It isn't done. You just do it for your own use. I probably spend more on music now since I started downloading." The Guardian (UK) 10/08/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 7:53 pm
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Britten's Family Values Benjamin Britten lived his entire life obsessed with the concept of family, and was known for creating surrogate units around himself wherever he went. "There were families that Britten devised and then depended on to facilitate and fulfil his work: the companies that staged his works, and in particular the managements of the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh festival. But there were many times in the later 1940s and 1950s when the conduct of these surrogate families was overshadowed by frustrations, jealousies and even thinly disguised homophobia." The Guardian (UK) 10/08/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 9:08 pm
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Who's Afraid of Edward Albee? The Box Office, Apparently. Edward Albee apparently isn't the box office draw he once was, according to the producers who have abruptly canceled the playwright's new off-Broadway production before it began. Albee is reportedly more than a little bit annoyed with the decision, reportedly asking, "Since when is anyone supposed to make money on an Edward Albee play?" New York Post 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 6:27 am
Broadway Theaters To Be Renamed For Bean-Counters The Shubert Organization has announced that it will be renaming two of its Broadway theaters after the company's own executives. "The Royale will become the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, and the Plymouth will be renamed the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater." Theaters have traditionally been named after those who impact theater on the artistic side of things, and the reaction to the announcement has been mainly in the realm of disbelief. "Several prominent producers and publicity agents, all of whom refused to be identified for fear of angering the powerful Shubert Organization, responded with disbelief, laughter or both." The New York Times 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 6:14 am
Standing Room's Looking Like A Pretty Good Deal Movie theaters figured out years ago that patrons like to be able to watch a film without requiring major physical rehabilitation when they pry themselves out of their seats at the end of the evening. So why are so many newly refurbished Broadway theaters still sporting totally substandard seating with zero leg room? The answer is a combination of historic preservation restrictions and profit-driven decision making. The New York Times 10/08/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 9:42 pm
Desperately Seeking Playwrights The UK's largest theater companies are openly soliciting the younger generation of playwrights to write the next generation of great British plays. "We are, it seems, witnessing a shift in the theatre culture, an explosion of energy not witnessed since the emergence of Joe Penhall, Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Conor McPherson et al through the Royal Court a decade ago. That energy has, however, long since dissipated," and the best young writers tend to be found working in the television world, making for a work experience which doesn't necessarily translate well to the stage. The Guardian (UK) 10/07/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 9:15 pm
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GoogleLit On The Way Google is launching a new search engine which would allow anyone to search the content of books online, and observers are saying that the move "could help touch off an important shift in the balance of power between companies that produce books and those that sell them." The service works by searching the scanned pages of books provided to Google by publishers, and offering links to online sites where the books could be purchased. Publishers are giddy over the concept, which could allow them to eventually sell books directly to consumers, but the whole enterprise may be yet more bad news for traditional booksellers. The New York Times 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 6:34 am
Random Acts Of Publishing Pay Off The shortlist for Canada's Giller Prize is out, and the field is dominated by Random House of Canada authors. Four of six nominated authors write for Random House, with only one small-press book making the cut. The Giller comes with a CAN$25,000 cash award, and the winner will be announced November 11. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 6:19 am
The Cult of the First Edition "What persuades anyone to part with more than two million dollars for a long roll of teletype paper covered in the scribbled script that would one day become On The Road? How can any old book be worth nearly half-a-million dollars when the same thing brand spanking new is sitting on the paperback classics shelf for less than $30?" Still, someone is clearly fueling the markups, and first editions remain one of the most cherished of literary collector's items. The Age (Melbourne) 10/08/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 8:43 pm
Nobel Winner Known For Reinventing Dialogue Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek is an artist of many varying stripes, and it may have been that self-contained diversity that attracted the Nobel Academy to her in the first place. "In her dramatic works, the academy noted, Ms. Jelinek 'successively abandoned traditional dialogues for a kind of polyphonic monologues that do not serve to delineate roles but to permit voices from various levels of the psyche and history to be heard simultaneously.' She may be the first Nobel laureate in literature to have made a significant commitment to the Internet, frequently posting commentary on her own web site." The Chronicle of Higher Education 10/07/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 7:44 pm
- Is The Nobel Following A Pattern? It's become almost a tradition for the Nobel literature recipient to be someone who wasn't even on the critical radar screen at the moment, and so it is with Elfriede Jelinek. And yet, "Ms. Jelinek fits a more familiar pattern. She is the seventh European literature laureate in the past decade. The academy has also again shown a preference for literature with a political echo. As with several recent winners, including last year's, J. M. Coetzee, a critic of South Africa's apartheid government, Ms. Jelinek has used her literary work as a form of political engagement." The New York Times 10/08/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 7:43 pm
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Will Stern Jumpstart Satellite Radio? When shock jock Howard Stern announced this week that he would be departing his syndicated radio show to join the lineup of Sirius Satellite Radio, it marked a seismic shift in the broadcasting landscape. Satellite is still in its infancy, and while it has been growing steadily, it has yet to attract an audience the size of Stern's current one. And unlike other well-known hosts who have defected to satellite recently, Stern has the potential to bring a sizable chunk of the middle American radio audience with him to the other side. Detroit Free Press 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 6:10 am
How To Review Michael Moore How should critics approach the new wave of decidedly skewed "documentary" films in an age of political polarization and intolerance? Many readers complain that such films are nothing but propaganda, and they're not exactly wrong, but should reviewers be expected to chase down the truth of every supposed fact in every nonfiction film? And can such pictures really be reviewed simply as movies, or must they be separately graded as political documents. It's a tricky issue... The Christian Science Monitor 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 5:59 am
The Ultimate In Narrowcasting "Wires, batteries, plastic containers, cardboard boxes, drills, glue guns, a single-watt FM transmitter, perhaps a toy truck or a stuffed rabbit -- put these together and you have a personal radio station that could start a public revolution. At least that's the idea behind Radio Re-Volt: One Person .00One Watt, a project by Minneapolis' Walker Art Center that intends to open the radio airwaves to the general public, one small radio station at a time." Wired 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 5:14 am
On-Demand Radio, Straight To Your iPod New technology that can "syndicate" online audio content to iPods and other digital music devices in the same way that RSS feeds distribute text from web sites is gaining in popularity. The audio feeds, which are by subscription, can allow listeners to hear their favorite radio programs on demand as they are fed to the portable device. Wired 10/08/04
Posted: 10/08/2004 5:08 am
Bringing Radio Up To Date While digital radio has made nothing so visible as a dent in the American broadcast landscape, the UK is predicting that 13 million digital sets will be sold there by 2008, and the new technology is expected to all but replace analog radio broadcasting within a decade. The government is considering setting a "switch-off date" for the analog broadcasts, as most Western governments have done for TV signals, in an effort to speed the transition. BBC 10/07/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 7:58 pm
Whatever Happened To The Two-Shot? The rules that the Bush and Kerry campaigns attempted to impose on news networks covering their debates may have made for a good laugh at the politicians' expense, but David Thomson says that the participants' aversion to reaction shots can be lumped in with the movie and television industry's move away from "two-shots" and other camera angles designed to emphasize the space around individuals. These days, it seems like close-ups are the only thing anyone cares about. "There was once a set of theories on film direction, or mise en scène, that attested to the aesthetics and the ethics of using spatial relationships in movies." The New York Times 10/07/04
Posted: 10/07/2004 7:36 pm
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