Monday, May 23
The More You Know, The Less You Remember? Certain kinds of memory decrease the more knowledge you accumulate, reports a new study. "Verbatim memory is often a property of being a novice. As people become smarter, they start to put things into categories, and one of the costs they pay is lower memory accuracy for individual differences. The ability to categorize is often very helpful, but this study shows how it can lead people to ignore individual details." EurekAlert 05/20/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 5:21 am
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Will Corcoran Cancel Gehry Expansion? "The Corcoran Gallery of Art's chairman said Thursday that the 136-year-old institution is in such serious financial straits that it should suspend efforts to build its much-heralded new wing, for which architect Frank Gehry has already completed a design, and replace its longtime director." Washington Post 05/20/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 5:15 am
A Battle For The Soul Of The Barnes Over a difficult three years, the future of the Barnes Collection was debated and hammered out until finally an agreement to move the museum to Philadelphia was worked out. So how did the deal come together? Patricia Horn charts the scene behind the scenes... Philadelphia Inquirer 05/22/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 10:11 pm
Austrian Art Loans Canceled A dispute between the Albertina Museum and the Austrian government has led to the cancellation of hundreds of loans worldwide. These include "the cancellation of the Schiele exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, following the dropping of the Dürer show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Loans of individual works have also been withdrawn from other venues, including major shows in Paris, Berlin and Ottawa. So far over 400 promised loans have been banned from leaving Austria." The Art Newspaper 05/22/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 7:23 pm
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Alsop - Woman Conductor On The Edge? "While female conductors are increasingly common among small and midsize symphonies, they have not penetrated the ranks of the world's top orchestras. Marin Alsop will be just the second woman in history to lead Holland's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra when she makes her debut in 2006." Denver Post 05/22/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 7:53 am
Talent And Money - How Do You Sort Out The Artistry? Atsushi Yamada conducts New york City Opera this week in Tokyo. "Mr. Yamada's rise to the podium is a testament to the spirit of artistic entrepreneurship: he helped raise millions of dollars for City Opera's foray to his native land, its first overseas tour in almost 20 years. But it also leads to questions about the role big money plays in the arts, particularly in the cash-desperate world of classical music, and how it influences artistic choices. Mr. Yamada, 41, studied and worked his way onto the City Opera's conducting roster; the company says he is a genuine talent and is well liked at the house, where he is an established presence, having conducted eight performances so far. But he also had the backing of a City Opera board member who was his boss at Sony, a longtime supporter of the opera. The New York Times 05/21/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 5:18 am
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Lucian Freud At 82 Freud is one of our most famous living artists and very exacting about which of his work is released. "Lucian has put his foot through at least half of his paintings. There comes a point, and it may be months into a painting, when he has to make a crucial decision between options on the canvas. He will hazard the success of a nearly finished painting, possibly worth millions, on one decision that can't be undone. If he realises that he's made the wrong choice, he'll slash it, destroy it." The Times (UK) 05/22/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 8:06 pm
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A Challenge For Black British Theatre Two pieces of black British theatre are playing in London's West End. "There are now three generations of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain, a cultural shift that the establishment can no longer afford not to invest in. These new audiences and theatre practitioners have experiences that are meaningful to everyone, not just to specific cultural groups." The Independent (UK) 05/20/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 7:44 am
This Year's Tonys - Triumph Of The Little Guys? It's easy to think that the big musical wins all the Tonys. But sometimes the little guy wins too. "The most intriguing possibility - and the one most discussed by voters who were interviewed for this article - is a showdown between the blockbuster "Spamalot" and another little Off Broadway musical that made its way to the big time: "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee." The New York Times 04/22/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 7:13 am
Dromgoole To Lead Globe In a major surprise, Dominic Dromgoole has been tapped to lead London's Old Globe Theatre. "Dromgoole, who has led the Oxford Stage Company for seven years, will become only the second artistic director of the reconstructed Elizabethan venue when he replaces Mark Rylance at the end of the year. Speaking about his new role yesterday, Mr Dromgoole said that although Shakespeare would remain the core work of the open-air theatre he hoped to present new writing and a wider range of European and British classics." The Independent (UK) 05/21/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 6:36 am
Our Changing Shakespeare The performance of Shakespeare has changed enormously in the past few decades. "Olivier and Gielgud gave to their times a vital new sensibility and naturalness. The skill with which they adapted to changing styles, as well as creating them, was a remarkable feature of both actors. But both had finished with live Shakespeare by the mid-1970s, and so stood apart from the many revisions that followed. Who knows what either would have thought about the three very different Macbeths earlier this year; or what Gielgud would have made of an audience breathing down his neck from three sides, having parked their plastic tumblers on the edge of a tiny studio stage; or how eagerly Olivier would have welcomed the kind of rehearsal in which the Duke of Exeter's opinion can be rated as highly as that of King Henry." The Guardian (UK) 05/22/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 5:29 am
Broadway's Big Theatres Thinking Small The big Broadway theatres usually stay dark between major productions. But "to keep the revenue streaming in during the summer, their owners are thinking small, as in the one- and two-month engagements commonly associated with smaller, Off Broadway theaters. This kind of microprogramming can be a smart financial hedge; it can also be risky business. You really have to do sell-out business before you open, because you can't play catch up - there's not enough time." The New York Times 05/22/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 9:15 pm
Apprentice, The Musical? Doesn't Donald Trump seem a classic operatic figure? Now there are plans to turn Trump's "The Apprentice" into a Broadway musical. "The producers, whose other credits include Chicago and Sweet Charity, are assembling a team to shepherd the new show through the development stage. It will open in the spring of 2006 in New York." CBC 05/22/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 7:29 pm
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Unpublished Jack Karouac Discovered "Beat Generation, written in the autumn of 1957, the same year as the publication of Kerouac's breakthrough work On the Road, was unearthed in a New Jersey warehouse six months ago. An excerpt will appear in the July issue of Best Life magazine. The play recounts a day in the life of the hard-drinking, drug-fuelled life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac's alter-ego." The Guardian (UK) 04/22/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 7:36 am
The Soldier-Writer Under an NEA program, US soldiers are learnign to write. "Is there any evidence that seeing a war first-hand will forge a better writer? Is there a correlation between what a marine experiences and what he or she writes, between seeing and doing, M-16 and pencil? Most of the writers I spoke to admitted that war had provided them with swathes of material, since, to paraphrase Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, it is life lived at maximum tension. But this reality doesn’t necessarily translate into literature." Financial Times 05/20/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 9:08 pm
Somewhere Between STory And Novel Is it a novel? Is it a collection of short stories? "Genres don't come into existence every day, but in the past few years a good number of writers have started exploring the previously blank territory that lies between the collection of short stories and the novel proper. It starts to look like a new form altogether." The Telegraph (UK) 05/17/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 8:14 pm
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A School For Values-Based Movie-Making "Two years ago, the Rev. Robert B. Lawton, the new Jesuit president of Loyola Marymount University, began an ambitious, and costly, effort to turn the small Roman Catholic school, located in a staid, middle-class neighborhood northwest of Los Angeles International Airport, into a haven for aspiring filmmakers. 'I looked at the landscape, and I thought there should be one values-based institution in the world that's strong in teaching how to make images that shape and reflect us'." The New York Times 04/22/05
Posted: 05/23/2005 7:21 am
Movies For (And By) The Masses "As digital technology reduces the cost and difficulty of making a movie, and memories of the dot-com bust fade, entrepreneurs, some less quixotic than others, are again looking at ways to bring the economic power and global reach of the Web to bear on the always difficult matter of film finance." The New York Times 05/22/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 9:20 pm
Star Wars Wins At the Box Office Star Wars has scored record box office in its opening weekend. "Revenge of the Sith rang in a whopping $50 million on its opening Thursday, a single-day record boosted by eagerly anticipated midnight showings, and its total receipts since then beat the four-day $134.3 million opening of 2003's "The Matrix Reloaded." The George Lucas film has also grossed $144.7 million overseas for a total of $303 million worldwide." Yahoo! (AP) 05/22/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 8:27 pm
BBC Workers On Strike Workers at the BBC are on a 24-hour strike. "The strike is already causing disruption to overnight TV, radio and online news services. BBC employees are protesting at plans to cut 3,780 jobs and privatise parts of the corporation, which were announced in recent months. Unions say the cuts are the most damaging in BBC history. The corporation says they are needed so the BBC can invest more in programmes." BBC 05/22/05
Posted: 05/22/2005 7:19 pm
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