Delaware Museum Gets A Director The Delaware Art Museum has chosen a new director - Danielle Rice, who is currently an associate director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She'll have a challenge: staff layoffs and construction problems on a new $24.5 million expansion project have made the Delaware Museum a troubled place in recent months. Philadelphia Inquirer 03/31/05
Posted: 03/31/2005 7:44 am
UK Arts Leaders Unite For Manifesto Leaders in the UK visual arts world are banding together for a manifesto it is hoped will "transform the arts". "Arts leaders, bitterly disappointed that the Government has failed to follow through on its early investment in culture, have pledged to force politicians to accept that the public has a right to art. They are hoping that the united front, from a sector that has traditionally been fragmented, will place arguments about cultural entitlement firmly on the agenda for this election, for future spending rounds and beyond."
The Independent (UK) 03/31/05
Posted: 03/31/2005 6:30 am
In Store AT The Museum... Museum shops have become an increasingly important source of income. "The Metropolitan has long been the leader in museum marketing. Last year, sales at its 20 gift shops around the country generated $80 million of its $260 million in revenue. But as the bling binge soars, others are following suit, promoting jewels in shops, catalogs and on the Web." The New York Times 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 9:46 pm
Museums - It's All About The Brand? Museums are increasingly turning to branding experts to redefine their image. "There's a realization that museums need to understand what the world thinks of them. Art is a code that can and should be broken and museums are not always good at communicating that code to the outside world," he said. "It's a translation process. We're the interpreters. We're not writing the script, but helping articulate the message." The New York Times 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 9:37 pm
Museums Rethink The History... "In the world of politics, power is pretty upfront: you argue; you face off; you declare war. In culture, the playing out is subtler, but can be, in its way, no less ruthless and devastating. By excluding certain kinds of objects, or by presenting them as relics of a dead past, a museum can degrade a culture just as surely as time and weather can. Fortunately, a museum can also reverse this process. And that has been happening, sometimes with vigor, sometimes with foot dragging, in America over the last 20 years. Whatever the motivating trend - call it postmodernism, pluralism, multiculturalism - the status of non-Western art is beginning to change in mainstream institutions, including sleeping giants in New York like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the recently repackaged Museum of Modern Art, from obscurity to varying degrees of prominence." The New York Times 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 9:28 pm
Renoir Stolen From Auction House A small Renoir painting valued at about 200,000 euros has been stolen from the auction house Tajan in Paris. "The theft of the artwork, entitled Tête de fillette (Head of a little girl), happened while it was displayed in a room of the auction house and not by breaking and entering the premises as police first reported." ABCNews.com 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 6:19 pm
Public Art: Owning The Image As Well As The Art The City of Chicago is preventing artists from taking photos of the Anish Kapoor "Bean" sculpture in the middle of the park, saying that as public art, it owns rights to images of the work as well as the work itself. "According to attorney Henry Kleeman, who negotiated with park artists on the city's behalf, Chicago bought a 'perpetual paid-up license to reproduce the artwork for commercial purposes.' So only the city or its concessionaires may legally sell pictures of the Bean." Christian Science Monitor 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 3:51 pm
Cleveland Museum Scraps Big Show Over Insurance Costs "The Cleveland Museum of Art has postponed indefinitely a major international exhibition scheduled for 2006 because other museums sharing the show couldn't afford terrorism insurance for artworks valued at more than $1 billion. The decision highlights an open secret in the art world: With art prices skyrocketing and insurance premiums rising to meet them, it's becoming harder for art museums to sustain the flow of blockbusters that have been a fixture of American cultural life for decades." Newhouse News 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 3:18 pm
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Battle Of The Orchestra Execs Two major British orchestral figures have engaged in a public argument. "John Summers, chief executive of the Hallé, accused Clive Gillinson, managing director of the LSO, of portraying orchestras as a 'bunch of complainers', when in fact 'government support for what we do has never, in recent times, been more sympathetic'." The Guardian (UK) 03/31/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 8:55 pm
Budapest's Concert Hall: A New Model? Budapest has a brilliant new concert hall, and it was built in a novel way, writes Norman Lebrecht. "What the Hungarians have done is tear up the rulebook and build a hall on the never-never. A patch of industrialised riverbank beside the faux-bourgeois national theatre (opened in 2002) was turned over to a local developer who, with cash from Hungarian expats in Canada, knocked up the new Palace of Arts – 1,700-seat concert hall, art gallery, small theatre – for a mere 31.3 billion Forints. That, by my reckoning, is about £87 million, or rather less than it is costing to restore London’s main concert hall to a semblance of its original inadequacy." La Scena Musicale 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 6:10 pm
Kosman To Modernists: Quit Blaming Everyone Else Joshua Kosman wasn't impressed with the bitter condemnations and whiny tone of conductor James Levine and composer Charles Wuorinen in last Sunday's New York Times concerning the failure of serialism and other complex forms of new music to engage the public. "Audiences couldn't care less. Wuorinen's music and that of other similarly oriented composers has yet to make a dent in the culture at large, or in the consciousness of music lovers. Hence the bitterness, the self-pity, the snarling at the listeners for whose benefit all this scribbling is ostensibly being undertaken." San Francisco Chronicle 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 6:54 am
Temple U Tops Big Names In Opera Competition Where can you find the top student opera theater program in the U.S.? Juilliard? Curtis? Not according to the annual competition sponsored by the National Opera Association. For the second year in a row, Philadelphia-based Temple University has taken top honors, a major boost for a program that sometimes struggles for national recognition. The Temple News (Philadelphia) 03/29/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 5:52 am
Nagano Announces Montreal New Music Prize As he prepares to take the reins of the Montreal Symphony in 2006, conductor Kent Nagano is giving indications of the direction he plans to take the orchestra, with the announcement of an annual composers' competition which will distribute cash prizes to three winning works of new music. "The arrival of the mystery maestro, along with his pianist wife, Mari Kodama, who lives in Paris, is likely to have a tonic effect on the MSO, which has been mired this season in protracted contract negotiations." Montreal Gazette 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 5:30 am
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The Uber-Consultant In an era when cultural institutions are growing and building at an unprecedented rate, arts consultant Adrian Ellis can be counted on for some straight talk. "His sobering message may not be what museums with big dreams want to hear. But Mr. Ellis's clients say his unvarnished advice is not unwelcome. "He's a reality check," said Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery in London. "I think it's healthy for every institution to have a good reality check." The New York Times 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 10:06 pm
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Acclaimed Canadian Publisher Downsizes In Attempt To Survive One of Canada's acclaimed small presses The Porcupine Quill, says it is radically downsizing in order to survive. The imprint blames book giant Indigo. "The press typically takes in $350,000 a year, $150,000 in sales and the remainder in public support, 'but sales are dropping like a rock'. He blames the policies and practices of Indigo Books & Music Inc., the nation's largest bookseller. He says that last year Indigo cut its orders dramatically, ordering only 2,797 units of his press's 11-book list, which included critical favourites So Beautiful by Ramona Dearing and Emma's Hands by Mary Swan. Meanwhile, Indigo's returns of unsold books were 1,415, more than 50 per cent of its order. By comparison, in 1998, Indigo and Chapters (absorbed by Indigo in 2001) ordered 13,293 copies of the press's books and returned 4,052, or less than 30 per cent." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/31/05
Posted: 03/31/2005 8:16 am
Author Rejected By Publishers, Goes Publish-On-Demand Route, Gets Nominated For Orange Prize Patricia Ferguson was puzzled when she couldn't get a publisher for her new book, especially since she had a good track record. Eventually she signed on with a tiny publish-on-demand business. "After a slow start and a couple of favourable reviews, the book, It So Happens, takes off. At first the author and publisher are bemused at the sudden influx of orders. All becomes clear when the author, reading her daily newspaper, comes across a feature on the Orange Prize longlist - and discovers to her amazement, that she has made the grade." The Independent (UK) 03/31/05
Posted: 03/31/2005 6:55 am
Foetry: Of Lotteries And Poetry Contests The Foetry website has been on a mission to expose conflicts of interest in poetry competitions. But if a poetry competition judge awards prizes to former students and colleagues, does that really prove bias? "They haven't proved manipulation per se, by producing a smoking gun. But if you are running a big state lottery like Powerball, how does it look if the buddy of the Powerball operator keeps winning the big prize? Maybe it was just a random drawing, but it sure looks funny." Boston Globe 03/31/05
Posted: 03/31/2005 6:47 am
Harry Publisher looks For Great Year "Bloomsbury, the publisher of Harry Potter, today said it expects to make a £20m profit this year based on strong advanced orders of the latest instalment in the adventures of the boy wizard." The Guardian (UK) 03/31/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 9:17 pm
Will McEwan Be Allowed Back In US? Ian McEwan has a new book. It's a hit. But he wonders if he'll be allowed into the US to promote it. "McEwan's diplomatic woes began a year ago when U.S. officials turned him away from entering the country in error. But that error has remained on the books to haunt him still. 'Once you have been refused entry to the States, you go into the computer and you are regarded with suspicion. It is a matter of enormous irritation. I only got in this time by the skin of my teeth. This could well be the very last time I ever get in'." Yahoo! (Reuters) 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 6:31 pm
Levy Wins Commonwealth Writers Prize "Author Andrea Levy has won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Small Island, her novel about West Indian immigrants in postwar London. It is the third major literary prize for the best-selling book, which also took the Orange Prize and the Whitbread." CBC 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 6:28 pm
Prolific Freelancers Could Get $100,000 From Settlement The class action award to freelancers this week for violating electronic copyright could result in big payouts. "Besides Lexis Nexis, database companies involved include Proquest, Dow Jones and West Group—as well as The Times, whose online archives include more than 100,000 articles written by some 27,000 freelance writers. The Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune are also liable on the print-publishing side, joining publishers including Time Inc., the Washington Post Company and the Hearst Corporation." New York Observer 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 3:13 pm
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StatsCan: Canadians Watch Less TV, More News, Less Sports Older Canadians are watching more TV, but their younger compatriots watch less. "In 2003, men aged 18 to 24 spent an average of 11.1 hours a week watching TV, down from 14.3 hours in 1998. Young women in the same age bracket watched 15.5 hours a week on average in the most recent period, down from 17.6 hours." As for what Canadians watch: current affairs and news-watching are up while sport is down... The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/31/05
Posted: 03/31/2005 8:22 am
Sony Wants Digital Movie Download Service Sony says it wants to create an "iTunes for movies." "Films will be put onto flash memory for mobiles over the next year. Movie studios are keen to stop illegal file-sharing on peer-to-peer nets and cash in on digital the download market. Movie piracy cost the industry £3.7bn ($7bn) in 2003, according to analysts." BBC 03/31/05
Posted: 03/31/2005 6:34 am
Mark Cuban's Digital Movie Dream "As co-owner of Landmark Theatres, a chain of 60 cinemas he purchased two years ago, Mark Cuban is building the first all-digital theater empire. His goal is nothing less than to take the film out of the film industry. In March, the conversion to digital begins with two Landmark theaters in San Francisco and Dallas." Wired 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 6:35 pm
BBC Governors Reject Springer Complaints BBC governors have rejected 60,000 complaints against the recent showing of Jerry Springer, The Opera. "The committee admitted the show had caused offence but said it had been justified by its "outstanding artistic significance". But one governor accused BBC management of a "degree of naivety" in failing to realise the offence that would be caused by the opera, which included hundreds of swear words and portrayed Jesus in a nappy admitting he is a "bit gay"." The Guardian (UK) 03/30/05
Posted: 03/30/2005 6:22 pm
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