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Monday, May 2




 

Ideas

Sell, Sell, Sell! As consumers become ever more impervious to traditional advertising, marketers are becoming ever more obsessive in their attempts to track consumer habits and target specific ad messages to individuals who will be most receptive to them. At the annual Ad-Tech conference in San Francisco, cutting-edge techniques to ensnare potential buyers comingle with such low-tech ideas as cutting back on the number of ads shown on television. Most intriguing, something called Project Apollo promises to provide greater consumer trackability than ever before, providing what advertisers hope will be a surefire method of discovering which ad campaigns actually work. Wired 05/02/05
Posted: 05/02/2005 5:52 am

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Visual Arts

Incompetence, Politics Plague Ground Zero "The master plan for ground zero is unraveling, which is not necessarily bad news. But what are the odds that planners will see this as an opportunity to save it? The discovery that the Freedom Tower will have to be redesigned to address concerns raised by security experts has once again sent architects scurrying to patch up one of the most muddled developments in the city's recent memory... These are not simply errors in judgment. They are byproducts of the mix of secrecy, self-interest and paranoia that have enveloped the site from the outset - a climate that favors political expediency and empty symbolic gestures over thoughtful urban planning discussions." The New York Times 05/02/05
Posted: 05/02/2005 5:37 am

Will Sydney Opera House Lose Heritage Listing? On the eve of major renovations to the Sydney Opera House, fears are raised that the work might endanger the building's listing on the World Heritage List. "In the first major change to the appearance of the building, a 45m verandah – or loggia – is to be built along the western wall facing the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The plans include the opening of nine large windows in the wall alongside the Drama Theatre, Studio and Playhouse to give theatre patrons million-dollar views of the harbour." The Australian 05/01/05
Posted: 05/01/2005 9:45 pm

Seattle Thieves Hold "Repo" Show To Return Stolen Art Beginning last summer a group of thieves began stealing art off the walls of Seattle galleries. The group thinks it's making some sort of "statement" about art, though what that is is anyone's guess. Friday the group gathered the art up at a gallery, and calling it the "Repo" Show, invited artists to retrieve their work. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 04/29/05
Posted: 05/01/2005 9:30 pm

  • Police Look In To Stolen Art "Show" Seattle Police show up at an event held to return stolen art to local artists. The art had been stolen out of galleries over the past year. "To add to the confusion, the Philistine Group deliberately mislabeled all the art on the outer wrapping." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 04/30/05
    Posted: 05/01/2005 9:28 pm

The Art-Collecting Sheikh Lands In Jail Sheikh Saud Al-Thani of Qatar went on an eight-year shopping spree that made the 38-year-old the biggest art buyer in the world. He bought more than $1 billion worth of art before he was done. But now? He's under arrest, accused of mis-spending public money... The Telegraph (UK) 05/01/05
Posted: 05/01/2005 8:41 pm

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Music

Bar-Hopping? Nahhh. Let's Go Hear Some Beethoven! ArtsJournal blogger Drew McManus has declared May to be Take A Friend To the Orchestra Month, and in case that sounds like a dubious proposition in a culture where orchestral music sometimes calls to mind stuffy surroundings and elitist snobbery, Drew has enlisted the help of more than a dozen critics, bloggers, musicians, and administrators to explain how to sell your friends on the concept. Up first is former Chicago Symphony executive director Henry Fogel, who once personally convinced a sixty-year-old Texas pilot to come hear a performance of Mahler 5, while simultaneously rescuing the CSO's instruments from an overturned truck on a remote highway. Adaptistration (AJ Blogs) 05/02/05
Posted: 05/02/2005 6:49 am

La Scala Loses A Tour, But May Gain Labor Peace La Scala has canceled a planned tour of the UK after being unable to secure the services of conductor Mstislav Rostropovich. The tour was originally to have been led by Riccardo Muti, who resigned as La Scala's musical director last month, leaving Milan's famed opera house scrambling to find replacements. However, there is evidence that the labor strife which has engulfed La Scala for much of the last year may be ebbing, as union leaders rescinded their call for an ongoing series of opening-night strikes. National Post (CP) 05/01/05
Posted: 05/02/2005 6:38 am

Maazel Finances Opera, Prompting Charges Is a new Royal Opera House production a "vanity" project? "Lorin Maazel, the conductor-composer whose new opera of George Orwell's 1984 opens tomorrow at the Royal Opera House, has put more than £400,000 of his own money into the production, the Guardian has learned, leading to accusations that Covent Garden is staging a vanity project." The Guardian (UK) 05/01/05
Posted: 05/01/2005 9:55 pm

Recording Companies Rev Up For DualDisc "Until a few years ago, labels automatically took their shiny bread-and-butter format for granted and all the way to the bank. Customers had few other options and rarely balked when list prices were raised. But the unlimited possibilities of music downloads have transformed the playing field, turning the glamorous CD into a badly aging star that needs a major face-lift. For a music business desperate to steer people into stores and away from illegal download sites, that cosmetic surgery couldn't come soon enough. Infamous for infighting and contentious disagreements, all four major record labels are setting their differences aside and supporting DualDisc, a new format that they believe offers the best of the audio and visual worlds." Chicago Tribune 05/01/05
Posted: 05/01/2005 8:36 pm

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Arts Issues

New Foundation Focuses On 'Creativity' There are plenty of grant-awarding foundations out there, but Louise Blouin didn't see enough of them encouraging real creativity through their grants, so the 46-year-old Canadian native decided that the time was right to start her own foundation. In addition to handing out individual grants, "one of the foundation's early projects will be to study the economic importance of the arts. It plans to hold forums at which artists, politicians, business leaders and educators propose cultural policies. The foundation also wants to endow a chair at a leading university to research the relevance of art to everyday life and the connections between the study of art and the study of perception and cognition." The New York Times 05/02/05
Posted: 05/02/2005 5:44 am

Connery: Scotland's Arts Policy Inadequate Actor Sean Connery has struck out at Scotland's cultural policy and its culture minister. He "bitterly complains that the nation has had six culture ministers since devolution but there is little progress in developing the arts." Scotsman on Sunday 05/01/05
Posted: 05/01/2005 9:18 pm

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People

The Lyrical Andrew Davis Andrew Davis, 61, may be "the most forthcoming, honest and human conductor in the business. It may be the Brit in him (even the Financial Times called him "the quintessential English conductor"), but he politely and sincerely answers questions that other conductors would run from." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 05/01/05
Posted: 05/01/2005 8:33 pm

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Theatre

Blue Man Brouhaha There is slightly more than a month to go before the popular Blue Man Group is to open a major show in Toronto, and the media blitz to promote the production has begun. But the group remains locked in a bitter struggle with the unions representing actors, musicians, and stagehands, with no end in sight. Blue Man Group has never been a union show, but has usually paid its participants at rates comparable to those required by labor organizations. Organizers say they don't understand why they can't coexist with union shows, as they have in so many other cities, but the unions appear dug in, and are ready to call for a boycott of the Toronto production. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/02/05
Posted: 05/02/2005 6:13 am

  • Taking The Gloves Off For the first several months of the dispute, Blue Man Group's founders were determined to take the high road, sure that they could satisfy Toronto's unions without actually becoming a union production. But with opening night approaching, the organizers' anger is mounting over what they see as a ridiculous double standard (they compare their organization to the Canadian troupe Cirque du Soleil, which has never mounted a union show,) and over accusations that they are somehow "unprofessional." Toronto Star 05/02/05
    Posted: 05/02/2005 6:00 am

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Media

The Man Who Wants PBS To Be More Republican The new chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pushing PBS to provide more conservative political voices in its programming, citing what he believes is years of "liberal bias" in news programs and documentary series. PBS's outgoing president is firing back, accusing CPB of interfering with the network in an inappropriate way. Others have noted that the new chairman appears to be driven by an obsessive and "vehement dislike of journalist Bill Moyers," who recently left PBS, and that he actually hired outside consultants to monitor the political leanings of guests on Moyers's news/interview program, Now. The New York Times 05/02/05
Posted: 05/02/2005 5:29 am

Hong Kong Movie Industry Dives "From a powerhouse that churned out 300 movies a year and had box office takings of more than a billion Hong Kong dollars annually in the mid-1990s, the industry is now just a shade of its past glory. In 2004, Hong Kong produced a measly 64 features and took $57 million at the box office." Yahoo! (AP) 05/01/05
Posted: 05/01/2005 9:11 pm

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