The Smarter You Are, The Longer You Live? So says a new study of IQ. "People who sat an IQ test at the age of 11 in 1932 were ranked in exactly the same order when they took the exam again at the age of 77, showing that intelligence is stable throughout life. But researchers also found that those with high IQs tended to live longer because they made the right health decisions during their lives." The Telegraph (UK) 09/28/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 3:29 pm
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D.C. Curator Fired For Bad-Mouthing Public Art "Curator Philip Barlow's policy on automatically excluding PandaMania and Party Animals participants from consideration for Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran's 2005 Options exhibition has cost him his position. The survey of emerging Washington area artists will now be curated by Libby Lumpkin, an art historian and critic who lives in California. The move came after [the Washington Post] reported Sept. 23 that Barlow did not regard the city-funded sculpture projects as art... WPA\C Executive Director Annie Adjchavanich issued a statement last week announcing Barlow's resignation and condemning his stance as a violation of 'basic ethical norms of curatorial practice.' Barlow calls the statement a 'complete distortion.'" Washington Post 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 6:38 am
China's New Comeback Kid Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is an unlikely hometown hero in a country famous for its purges of artists. Ai's father, a famous poet, was the victim of such a purge, and the family spent most of Weiwei's childhood in "reeducation camps" scattered across the Gobi Desert. But this year, the artist has found new fame in China for his contribution to the design of the country's new Olympic Stadium. But fierce criticism of the design has been emanating from Chinese architecture circles, largely due to the involvement of European design firms. The New York Times 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 6:15 am
Terra Looks For Extended Life Online When Chcago's Terra Museum of American Art closes forever this Sunday, it will represent a major loss for the city's art scene, but the Terra Foundation's extensive collection will not simply be dispersed to the winds. "The entire collection is soon to be made available on the foundation's new Web site, www.terraamericanart.org. And 50 of the major works, as well as the museum's complete collection of 350 works on paper, will be temporarily loaned to the Art Institute of Chicago in January." Chicago Sun-Times 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 5:45 am
British Museum Appeals To EBay The British Museum has appealed to EBay to remove potentially important archaeological items found in the UK from the auction website. "The Treasure Act of 1996 stipulates that finders have a legal obligation to report potential treasure finds such as gold and silver objects more than 300 years old. Roger Bland, the British Museum’s head of treasure, called for eBay to remove potential treasure items from its website." The Times (UK) 10/27/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 3:37 pm
- Digging Up Buried Treasure In The UK The number of archaeological finds by citizens in the UK has greatly increased after a new law regulating so-called "treasure" finds. “Everyone’s excited by the idea of buried treasure. It also provides a unique insight into our history, and it is good that the number of finds being reported is increasing rapidly and may reach around 500 by the end of this year, representing almost a 100 per cent increase on 2002. This rise is testament to the effectiveness of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the expansion of which last year led to an average five fold increase in the reporting of Treasure." The Scotsman 10/26/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 2:50 pm
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Organized Crime Unit Recovers Missing BC Violins "Two violinists from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra have been reunited with their instruments after they were stolen seven months ago." The instruments, both of which were valuable 19th-century specimens, were taken out of the back seat of a car, and were reportedly recovered by a branch of the Vancouver Police known as the Intelligence Unit for Eastern European Organized Crime. Global BC (Canada) 10/27/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 5:29 am
Chicago Still In The Red, But Improving The Chicago Symphony Orchestra ran a deficit of $2.3 million on a budget of nearly $58 million in its 2003-04 season. That's the bad news. But the good news is that the red ink is about $1.7 million less than the CSO had anticipated, and significantly less than the $7 million deficit of a few years ago. Still, the orchestra was forced to withdraw more than $9 million from its endowment in the past year to cover operating costs. The CSO's management team has pledged a return to balanced budgets by the 2006-07 season. Chicago Sun-Times 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 5:19 am
Major Shakeup At Adelaide The entire upper management team of Australia's Adelaide Symphony Orchestra has resigned just a few weeks before the ensemble launches its much-anticipated Ring cycle. Tempers had reportedly flared at Adelaide in recent weeks over the management's plan to combat persistent deficits by replacing full-time players with part-time freelancers. The orchestra's outgoing chairman took a shot at the federal government for what he calls the "persistent underfunding" of the ASO. Adelaide Advertiser 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 5:11 am
Top 40 Not What It Used To Be "Just 2,000 copies are enough to crack the Top 40. The figure is less than a third of what it would have taken to make it into the chart as recently as six years ago, and is a clear sign of the decline of the singles industry. The number one, long viewed as the ultimate prize in the music business, reached a new low last week when Swedish DJ Eric Prydz had the worst sales ever recorded for a chart-topper." The Independent (UK) 10/24/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 8:28 pm
Rachmaninoff Manuscript Found Lost for 100 years, the manuscript of Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony surfaces. "The first four pages of music have at some stage become detached and are missing, as is a title page - hence, perhaps, the fact that it has remained unidentified for so long. Most of the final page, on which there might have been a date and signature, has also gone astray. But the handwriting, the paper and the manner in which Rachmaninov made corrections - all are as they should be." The Telegraph (UK) 10/28/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 8:19 pm
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The Highest-Earning Dead People Being dead isn't really an impediment to earning lots of money. Celebrities can do very well indeed - this year's Forbes list of high-earning dead people is topped by Elvis, who earned $40 million in 2003. "Elvis Presley's estate earns tens of millions of dollars annually, not from music sales--Elvis' manager famously sold the rights to pre-1973 recordings to RCA (now part of Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people )) for $5 million--but from merchandising and admissions to Graceland." Forbes.com 10/27/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 8:32 pm
Agent And Pavarotti-Minder In a world where the pretense of gentility is a rule of thumb, agent Herbert Breslin is, in the parlance of Hollywood (where he would be less distinctive than he is on West 57th Street), a 'screamer.' He’s also, as those of us who’ve been on the receiving end of his screams know, inordinately persistent, funny and knowledgeable about the nuts-and-bolts of the classical music world." New York Observer 10/27/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 8:07 pm
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Glimmer Of Hope For Endangered Gem "A group of top Broad way producers, who have backed some of the most important American plays of the last several years, may throw a lifeline to Gem of the Ocean. The producers — Elizabeth I. McCann, Roger Berlind and Scott Rudin — were trying yesterday to figure out a way to get the acclaimed August Wilson play to Broadway this season. Gem of the Ocean is on the brink of collapse because its lead producer, Ben Mordecai, has failed to raise the $2.3 million needed to bring it to the stage." Still, the trio of producers has no intenion of bailing Mordecai out of his existing debts, so the production must still be considered a long shot. New York Post 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 6:06 am
- Previously: Two Broadway Shows In Danger Of Closing The opening of "Gem of the Ocean," the new August Wilson play set to open in November, is in danger after a major investor pulled out. Meanwhile, "Brooklyn the Musical," the new $7 million show that opened to mediocre reviews on Thursday and has relatively small advance sales of $1.5 million, is also in danger of closing... The New York Times 10/27/04
For Sale: Broadway Dress-up Broadway's Theater Development Fund "began selling 20,000 costumes from its collection of nearly 85,000 in preparation for a move to a smaller space. The nonprofit Theater Development Fund, perhaps best known for its low-cost TKTS booth at Times Square, runs arts education programs and rents professional costumes at discounts to nonprofit theater groups and schools nationwide. Much of the development fund's inventory comprises donations from the Metropolitan Opera, Broadway and private collections." The New York Times 10/28/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 9:00 pm
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Congratulations! Now Get Out There And Sell, Sell, Sell! When an author wins the Booker Prize, as Alan Hollinghurst just did, publishers more or less expect a sales bonanza. But awards are no guarantee of public acclaim, and there's a lot of heavy lifting to be done to meet those high sales expectations. Hollinghurst is discovering that, for the recipient of the Booker, the work has only just begun. Job one: divest the literary press of the notion that he is a "gay writer" and that his book is a breakthrough work of "gay fiction." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 5:53 am
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A Prairie Home Blockbuster? A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor's weekly variety show focused on the fictional prairie town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, will shortly be going Hollywood. Director Robert Altman and a cast chock full of Hollywood bigs will be collaborating with Keillor on a movie version of the show, with filming to take place during live performances this winter in St. Paul. St. Paul Pioneer Press 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 6:30 am
Politics? That's So Last Week Hollywood's brief dalliance with political filmmaking appears to have been short-lived. As the election season steamrolls towards its conclusion, big-budget studios are turning back to that old Hollywood standby, escapism, to sell tickets. While left-leaning documentaries have done big business this year, "politically oriented films like Paramount's Team America: World Police, which has taken in only about $23 million so far, and The Manchurian Candidate... with about $66 million in ticket sales, have been disappointments at the box office." The New York Times 10/28/04
Posted: 10/28/2004 6:11 am
Oscars: The Year Of No Buzz It's been such a lacklustre year for movies there's little buzz about which movies might contend for Oscars. "Most years, November and December bring a number of sweeping epics and ambitious dramas to woo Oscar voters, but this year only a few such films are left to open before the end of the year." The New York Times 10/28/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 8:49 pm
Hollywood's New Asian Accent "Something remarkable is happening in Asian cinema, and Hollywood has cottoned on. 'Check out the latest US movie production slate and it is hard to escape the conclusion that Hollywood is turning Japanese. And Korean. With a dash of Thai and Hong Kong thrown in." Prospect 11/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 4:36 pm
Big Advertiser Is Listening! It's the latest in high-tech advertising. Little boxes are being installed along roadsides that detect which radio stations drivers are listening to. "The monitoring aims to help retailers choose where to advertise by giving them a snapshot of which stations consumers tune into as they drive by their businesses. The most enthusiastic MobilTrak adopters: auto dealers, who generally believe that 80 percent of their business is with people who live or work within 10 miles of a given dealership." Washington Post 10/27/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 4:32 pm
Review-Proof: Audiences Say Movie Reviews Don't Matter How important are movie reviews to the success of a movie? Not much. "A survey of 2,000 people by three business school researchers found that television ads and recommendations from others were the biggest influences on movie-going habits, each factor cited by about 70 percent of respondents. Professional reviews ran a distant third at 33 percent, while online ratings on such sites as Yahoo and the Internet Movie Database influenced 28 percent." BackStage (AP) 10/27/04
Posted: 10/27/2004 3:55 pm
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