The New Intellectuals? "While universities continue to play an important role in intellectual culture, increasingly they are no longer the only game in town. With the rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of decentralizing technology, the academy is ceding authority and attention to businesses, nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and Internet communities. Even more significant, in my mind, the academy may be losing something else: its hold over many of its most promising young academics, who appear more and more willing to take their services elsewhere — and who may comprise an embryonic cohort of new “postacademic intellectuals” in the making." InsideHigherEd 04/04/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 5:17 pm
And The Scan Says: I Trust You Scientists say they can use a brain scanner to tell whether one person trusts another person. "The results suggest that a brain region called the caudate nucleus lights up when it receives or computes data to make decisions based on trust." BBC 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 4:29 pm
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Christie's Expands To Middle East Christie's is trying to tap into a wealthy Middle East market. "London-based Christie's, which had auction sales of $2.5 billion last year, will open as many as four offices in the Middle East during the next five years, starting with Dubai in the United Arab Emirates." Bloomberg 04/05/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 12:00 am
Scottish Art In Danger Of Devolution The director of the National Galleries of Scotland warns that a proposal to redistribute art across the country's galleries will backfire. "What will happen in Scotland unless we are very careful is that local authorities will say to themselves that they need to have a museum which they do not have already, so all the smaller galleries and museums in Perth, Dundee and Auchterarder - places like that - will all have art centres. If you do have a geographical redistribution of works of art in Scotland, it will mean that the relatively small metropolitan collections will be redistributed, or the monies will be redistributed from them, which will make them ineffective." Scotland on Sunday 04/03/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 5:26 pm
Is Damien Hirst The End Of An Era? (Thank God!) Jerry Saltz hates Damien Hirst's new show of paintings. "In the end, Hirst is just another symptom of the hype, the hubris, and the money that have swamped the art scene lately. I love that weirdos and gypsies are rewarded in the art world. But Hirst and the many others who are currently riding the whirlwind aren't weird at all; they're official pitchmen and -women. Hirst's show merely brings us a step closer to the end of this profligate period. At his glitzy after-party, in an enormous tent on the roof of Lever House—amid dancing models, reveling stockbrokers, and the same successful artists and art world showboats you see at every one of these events—I thought I heard the Drums of Destiny on the horizon. Village Voice 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 4:55 pm
Mona Lisa Gets A New Home The Mona Lisa is changing rooms at the Louvre. "Leonardo da Vinci's 500-year-old masterpiece will be hung alone on a wall in the museum's Salle des Etats. It will give the millions of people who come to see the Mona Lisa every year a better view of the painting. The Salle des Etats has had a 4.8m euro (£3.29m) renovation to provide a suitable home for the masterpiece." BBC 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 4:20 pm
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Music, War, And Memories of Britten Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem," isn't often performed, largely because of its massive personnel requirements - a full orchestra, a separate chamber orchestra, plus several choirs and vocal soloists - but this week, the Minnesota Orchestra and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra will combine for the first time in decades to bring the anti-war opus to life. And the music won't be the only star: as luck would have it, a 93-year-old musician who played in the Requiem's emotional premiere in Coventry, England lives three hours from the Twin Cities, and is being brought in to attend the concert and speak to the audience about the impact Britten's work had on a shattered post-war British public. Minneapolis Star Tribune 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 6:43 am
Talvi, Seattle Dispute To Arbitration The Seattle Symphony has decided not to appeal a court ruling ordering it to settle a lawsuit brought by its recently dismissed concertmaster through arbitration. Violinist Ilkka Talvi, who recently turned up the heat on the orchestra by launching a blog and using it to air much of the ensemble's dirty laundry, claims that he was capriciously dismissed by Seattle music director Gerard Schwarz, and further argues that a clause in his contract does not allow him to be fired so long as Schwarz remains in charge. Seattle Times 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 5:49 am
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Feds Displeased With Kennedy Center Washington's Kennedy Center is under fire from the federal government's General Accounting Office for cost overruns on several construction projects, and for failing to install what the GAO considers adequate fire safety equipment. Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser has called the GAO report "misleading," and argues that it is based on incorrect and outdated information. Washington Post 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 7:15 am
Alberta At Bottom In Arts Spending A new study says that Alberta ranks last in Canadian provinces in spending on the arts. "Data from 2002-2003 -- the most recent year available "-- show the arts in this province receive 160-dollars per person. The national average is 236-dollars." Calgary Herald 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 11:15 pm
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Illuminating An Annoying Snob Nothing will turn the media against you faster than overexposure, and for novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, the tipping point seems fast approaching. His third novel is garnering some scathing reviews, and his particular brand of literary snobbery (think Dave Eggers with more gimmicks) is fast wearing thin within the book world. "Given Foer's rock-star status, who can blame the rest of New York for being a bit sick of Brooklyn's literary boy wonder?" New York Post 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 6:57 am
A Thinner Voigt, But Still Vocally Rich Deborah Voigt's first Met Opera engagement following gastric bypass surgery is going well, and that's no small thing, since "any surgery higher than the knees could, in theory, compromise the vocal mechanism... But in many ways, her dietary concession to the modern visual age turns out to be not all that artistically significant. She may land a few extra magazine covers, but what matters most are her detailed word coloring and inflection of the vocal line. Those strengths have come slowly to her over the years, but on Monday, she outran her costars in that respect. And that's saying a lot." Philadelphia Inquirer 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 5:45 am
Remembering Saul Bellow "The center of his fictional universe was Chicago, where he grew up and spent most of his life, and which he made into the first city of American letters. Many of his works are set there, and almost all of them have a Midwestern earthiness and brashness. Like their creator, Mr. Bellow's heroes were all head and all body both. They tended to be dreamers, questers or bookish intellectuals, but they lived in a lovingly depicted world of cranks, con men, fast-talking salesmen and wheeler-dealers." The New York Times 04/06/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 11:47 pm
Early Music Promoter Laurette Goldberg, 73 "A tireless organizer, performer and advocate for early music, Ms. Goldberg probably did more than any other individual to establish the Bay Area as a center for historically informed performance. Through her teaching and institutional work, she helped create a close-knit community of early music devotees and made the Bay Area a magnet for such enthusiasts worldwide. Her greatest legacy is San Francisco's Philharmonia, which she founded in 1981 and led through the first five years of its existence." San Francisco Chronicle 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 4:59 pm
Saul Bellow, 89 "Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. To American letters, he brought the immigrant's hustle, the bookworm's brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic." Chicago Tribune (AP) 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 4:22 pm
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Democracy Flops In New York "It had great buzz from London. It had terrific reviews in New York. It had 'snob hit' written all over it. And it had $2 million in the bank before opening night. And yet Democracy — Michael Frayn's political drama about the spy who brought down West German Chancellor Willie Brandt — has collapsed almost as fast as the Berlin Wall. Once touted as a sure-fire Tony Award contender, the production will close April 17 after only four months on Broadway. It will lose nearly all of its $2.5 million investment." New York Post 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 7:02 am
Humana In Need Of An Overhaul? In a year when theatre as a whole seemed reinvigorated by politics and activism, Louisville's venerable Humana Festival fell distinctly flat, says Michael Phillips. "The case of this year's Humana Festival, the fifth under the stewardship of Actors Theatre artistic director Marc Masterson, is one of artistic Chapter 11. The festival, a venerable and well-known showcase for new work, needs reorganization, a fresh angle, a renewed reason for being in a theatrical world very different from the one in which it began." Chicago Tribune 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 6:31 am
Glancing Back, Pushing Forward Michael Ritchie's tenure as artistic director of the L.A.-based Center Theater Group will be a delicate balancing act between honoring the company's past proven successes and seeking new audiences and new directions that might galvanize the theater community in the city. He is determined to make the three theaters under his control succeed without relying on touring Broadway productions, and says that he won't hesitate to use the star power available to him from neighboring Hollywood to bring in the crowds. The New York Times 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 6:22 am
If They Call It Art, Is It Still Stripping? Idaho law prohibits nude dancing unless it's part of a performance with "serious artistic merit." So an adult club "tried to beat the ordinance by distributing pencils and sketch pads to patrons during special twice-weekly 'art nights,' when the dancers performed nude." Police didn't buy the scheme and raided the place this week... ABCNews 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 11:51 pm
Being Nice To The Big Bookers Any theatre producer will tell you that the key to great sales is getting those people who book big groups to buy the tickets. Though The Lion King is a big world-wide hit, Australian producers are taking no chances as the show comes Down Under. Disney Australia chartered a plane and invited 216 big bookers from Victoria to come along. The hope is they'll go back home and sell the show. The Age (Melbourne) 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 4:34 pm
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Book Busking Hawking your self-published collection of poetry on the New York subway might not sound like a fun way to make a living. But for Brad Bathgate, aka Blue, it's the only life he knows, and when you watch him work his magic on a subway car full of jaded, hostile New Yorkers, you start to believe that there just might be something to this unusual sales technique. New York Daily News 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 6:52 am
Scientists: Poetry Makes You Think Harder Than Prose "Psychologists at Dundee and St Andrews universities claim the work of poets such as Lord Byron exercise the mind more than a novel by Jane Austen. By monitoring the way different forms of text are read, they found poetry generated far more eye movement which is associated with deeper thought. Subjects were found to read poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with prose." Scotsman on Sunday 04/03/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 5:31 pm
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Public Broadcasting To Get In-House Critiques Journalist Ken Bode and former Readers' Digest editor William Schulz have been appointed to the positions of ombudsmen for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "Bode and Schultz periodically will review public radio and TV shows after the programs have aired and report on their journalistic balance and accuracy. The appointments come after a long history of conservative complaints about alleged bias on PBS and NPR." Observers say that the appointments are a clear reaction to the firestorm of controversy over an episode of a PBS children's show which featured a lesbian couple and their children. Washington Post 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 7:19 am
How About Prosecuting Grandstanding Politicians, Too? According to one congressman, the FCC crackdown on "indecency" hasn't worked, not because it was wrongheaded and infantile, but because it simply didn't go far enough. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) is proposing to scrap the current system, under which offending TV and radio stations are fined for airing objectionable material, and replace it with criminal prosecution of offenders. New York Post 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 7:05 am
Slipping In A Message Under The Radar A new Indian film focusing on homosexuality, family, and the AIDS virus is testing traditional social boundaries in the socially conservative country. But remarkably, My Brother Nikhil hasn't met with much opposition. "Commercially, it is no runaway Bollywood blockbuster; nor is it meant to be. Rather, its impact lies in having served up a story about love and loss - sentimental staples of contemporary Indian cinema - with a gay man at its center, and having done so without kicking up the slightest fuss from India's cultural conservatives." The New York Times 04/06/05
Posted: 04/06/2005 6:19 am
FCC Chairman To Cable Nets: Clean Up Programming Kevin Martin, new chairman of the FCC, used the opportunity of his first major speech to tell cable TV execs to clean up their programming. "I think what you're seeing is an environment in which consumers and parents are increasingly concerned. I think this is an opportunity for the cable industry to try to address it, not just speak to me but to speak to the consumers and parents." Yahoo! (AP) 04/05/05
Posted: 04/05/2005 4:24 pm
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