Cleveland's Departing Director Getting Out Now "Katharine Reid announced in February she would retire as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art as soon as a successor could be named. This week, she sped up her schedule... Effective Friday, July 1, Reid will become consulting director of the museum. Deputy directors Charles Venable, Susan Jaros and Janet Ashe will run the museum as a team until a new director is appointed." Reid's departure comes as the museum is gearing up for a massive six-year expansion project, and the search for her successor is likely months from being completed. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 6:28 am
Turner Shortlist Takes A Turn For The Traditional For the last several years, a casual observer could have been forgiven for thinking that the overarching mission of Britain's Turner Prize was to antagonize art lovers and the general public as much as humanly possible, while simultaneously propping up the careers of artists who fit nicely into the "shock and awe" category. But this year's Turner shortlist appears to be going in quite a different direction, and includes a painter specializing in traditional still life and landscape work. The shortlist ought to go a long way towards placating the prize's harshest critics, who have accused Turner organizers of ignoring many serious young artists in favor of conceptually-based flavors of the month. BBC 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 5:37 am
The Pompidou Rehangs The Pompidou Museum in Paris is doing a radical rehang of its permanent collection for the first time in 28 years. The museum will "display its permanent collection in thematic sections rather than chronological order. The new hang is entitled “Big bang: destruction and creation in 20th-century art.” The Art Newspaper 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 7:38 pm
Art - A Wild West Marketplace Art is touted as the great investment now as the market soars and stocks settle. But “the art trade is the last major unregulated market. And while it always involved large sums of money, there was never the level of trading and investing that we have now." The Art Newspaper 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 7:34 pm
Gilbert And George In Venice Gilbert and George are no longer young. They still think of themselves as outsiders, even as they represent the UK at this summer's Venice Biennale. "They claim to have sold only two pieces to British collectors in the past 15 years. Saatchi wasn't having any. They complain that the Tate won't hang the little they've got. But in Venice, one of the most important Italian collectors will be hosting a dinner in honour of the duo." The Guardian (UK) 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 4:55 pm
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Melting The New Music Permafrost Contemporary music remains a tough sell in most concert halls, so when flutist Claire Chase decided to found her own ensemble specializing in the stuff, she knew she'd better be ready to take her performances outside traditional "classical" spaces. Three years later, Chase's Chicago-based International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is a bona fide cult hit, performing everywhere from chamber music venues to seedy dive bars, and thriving on a combination of youthful energy (nearly all the Icicles, as members of the group are known, are under 30) and serious artistry. Chicago Tribune 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 6:09 am
End Of A 'Championship' Era In Detroit Most music directors who last more than ten years with a single orchestra don't wind up leaving under the happiest of circumstances (Seiji Ozawa in Boston and Charles Dutoit in Montreal come to mind,) but as Neeme Järvi prepares to depart the Detroit Symphony after 15 years at the helm, there seems to be no question that the DSO and its home city have been witness to one of the great musical partnerships of the era. "The Estonian-born conductor and this mid-American orchestra have evolved into a championship team. They have changed together, flowered together, triumphed together. Especially over the last half-dozen seasons, they have turned what once were highlights into a lofty new standard of excellence at Orchestra Hall." Detroit News 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 5:25 am
Phoenix Gets A Deal Done, With Minimal Bickering The musicians of the Phoenix Symphony have a new contract which will go a long way towards restoring much of what they lost the last time around the negotiating cycle. Back in 2002, the Phoenix players took a 14% pay cut in order to help stabilize the organization's finances. The new 3-year deal calls for raises of 4%, 4%, and 5%, spread over the length of the contract. "In stark contrast to past negotiations characterized by walkout threats and busted deadlines, most details of the new contract were agreed upon before formal negotiations with the union began in April." Arizona Republic 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 5:13 am
Bringing In The Best The well-known firm Artec has been chosen by the Quebec government to manage the acoustical design of the proposed new concert hall for l'Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, and is already proposing that the hall be half again as big as originally planned. "The concert hall would be a public-private partnership, meaning a private consortium would build and operate the structure and Quebec would pay the tab over time." The OSM has been seeking a new home for years, and despte being mired in an ongoing musicians' strike, the organization has been enthusiastically partnering with the provincial government in drawing up the plans. Artec has won praise for its designs of concert halls in Dallas, Birmingham, England and Lucerne, Switzerland. Montreal Gazette 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 4:59 am
St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Looks For New Home The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, tired of sharing a concert hall, are exploring the possibility of building their own hall. "The concert hall idea faces tremendous financial hurdles and long odds. The orchestra would be trying to raise money from arts benefactors whose philanthropy budgets already are stretched thin. Asking taxpayers for help would be sure to spur fervent debate." St. Paul Pioneer-Press 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 7:23 pm
One View Of The Atonalists... Schönberg, Babbitt and Carter et al. were failures as compoers, write Miles Hoffman. "They have either grossly overestimated or willfully ignored the limits of the auditory perceptual abilities of most human beings, and somewhere along the way they have either forgotten or willfully ignored the reasons most people listen to music in the first place. They, or their boosters, may write detailed, not to say impenetrably turgid, analyses of the structural underpinnings of their works and the strict mathematical relationships inherent therein, but to the extent that those relationships remain completely unapparent to the human ear—as they so often do—they’re meaningless, and what we actually hear is . . . noise." Wilson Quarterly 06/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 7:19 pm
Where Are the Women Conductors? Well into her career, Marin Alsop looks around and sees few female conductors as colleagues. "I assumed 20 years ago when I got into the profession and looked around that there would be an influx of women on to the podium. It never happened." The Guardian (UK) 06/02/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 5:05 pm
Gadafi Opera Delayed A new opera about Libyan dictator Moammar Gadafi, a co-production between English National Opera and Asian Dub Foundation, has been delayed. It will now open ENO's 2006/07 season. "The most important thing is to absolutely get this right the first time it goes out. If we continued with the current timetable, we could make the deadlines, but we've given ourselves no space to step back and revisit sections." The Guardian (UK) 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 4:46 pm
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Flexibility May Be The Future As the range of entertainment options available to Americans gets ever wider, it seems to be increasingly difficult for arts organizations to draw a crowd, and by extension, to raise money. "It's not only the will and wherewithal to give that can erode arts funding. Social needs, priorities and sensibilities change. A museum or new theater that was exciting to build and open isn't necessarily as thrilling to fund five years later, when it's up and running... The culture is constantly evolving, under the pressures of changing demographics, audience behavior, seductive new technologies and the nature of making and consuming art. No organization, no artist can afford to assume that anything that's working today will do so tomorrow." San Francisco Chronicle 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 6:32 am
US House Approves Increase In NEA Budget "The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a Congressional Arts Caucus floor amendment to increase the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by $10 million, while quashing two additional amendments that would have cut a total of $45 million from the federal arts budget." Back Stage 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 8:10 pm
Teachout: Culture Blogs And The Quality Of Culture Terry Teachout sees the rise of arts blogs as a profound cultural change. "Artblogs are barely more than three years old. It is far too soon to say which of their opposing tendencies, the atomizing or the embracing, will have a more profound effect on the wider culture they have already started to shape. It may be that blogging will encourage the creation of a new kind of common culture, exerting something of the same unifying force as did the old middlebrow media (and as About Last Night seeks to do). Or not: if the experience of political blogs is any indication, blogging may be more likely to foster discrete subcultures of shared interest, larger and more cohesive but nonetheless separate." Commentary 06/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 7:56 pm
Canadian Culture Increasingly Doesn't Travel "Canada’s export of cultural goods—such as art and music—has been steadily declining for the last four years. In 2004 it reached its lowest point since 1997, according to the Statscan report. The trade deficit in culture goods is due to a decline in exports—particularly to the US—and is most pronounced in the sector of written and published works such as books, periodicals, newspapers, and other printed materials." Epoch Times 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 6:18 pm
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Why Vilar's In Jail Erstwhile philanthropist Alberto Vilar has left a trail of debts and unhappy investors who finally lost patience with him The New York Times 06/02/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 8:03 pm
The Vilar Legacy Philanthropist Alberto Vilar is not a sympathetic figure, no matter all the money he gave to opera. But "whatever the outcome of the charges against him, only a blinkered diva worshipper could deny the vast amount of good that Alberto Vilar has done. Setting aside his $45 million to the Met, which went mainly on braindead productions, and another $10 million or so to Placido Domingo enterprises, Vilar will go down in the records as the man who installed seatback surtitles in major opera houses, introduced young singers’ programmes all over the place and generally gave a hard-pressed art a chance to step back and take stock of itself. His greatest benefice, and the least acclaimed, was his saving of Covent Garden." La Scena Musicale 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 7:30 pm
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The Best Of The Soon-To-Be-Also-Rans It's been an unusually strong year on Broadway, according to Michael Riedel, and while not everyone's efforts on stage will be rewarded in gold next Sunday night at the Tony awards, the year has brought an embarrassment of riches in the honorable mention category... New York Post 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 6:20 am
D.C. Planning Huge Shakespeare Fest "Come January 2007, all of Washington will seem a stage and its leading cultural institutions players in an ambitious six-month citywide festival devoted entirely to the works and influence of William Shakespeare. More than 20 local, national and international organizations are scheduled to participate in the venture, called 'Shakespeare In Washington,' which will take place in various venues, including theater, dance, music and visual-art institutions from January through June 2007." Washington Times 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 5:30 am
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Book Banning In The Heartland A culture war is being fought in America's schools. "According to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books - that is, have them removed from shelves or reading lists - they are on the rise again: 547 books were challenged last year, up from 458 in 2003. These aren't record numbers. In the 1990's the appearance of the Harry Potter books, with their themes of witchcraft and wizardry, caused a raft of objections from evangelical Christians." The New York Times 06/02/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 8:06 pm
Why Can't Johnny Write? "Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way." The New York Times 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 8:01 pm
Minnesota Governor Vetoes Poet Laureate Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty has vetoed a bill that would have created the post of state poet laureate. "While respectful and appreciative of the arts, I do not believe Minnesota needs an official state poet. We can benefit from the richness and the diversity of all the poets in Minnesota and recognize and embrace their work as merit and circumstances warrant." St. Paul Pioneer-Press 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 7:22 pm
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Could Hollywood Benefit From Illegal File-Sharing? Even as Hollywood ramps up its attempts to shut down BitTorrent, the high-volume peer-to-peer file sharing system that is allowing users worldwide to illegally download and share movies and television shows, some in the industry see serious upside to the technology. Specifically, BitTorrent has created cult followings for many foreign TV shows that would otherwise have almost no chance of getting any notice from America's market-driven broadcast industry. Besides, say supporters, Hollywood already uses peer-to-peer networks to create buzz about their latest products, so the lawsuits and pronouncements of doom are ringing fairly hollow. Wired 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 5:52 am
- New Digital Distribution Law Stalls In House "A key lawmaker has complicated the movie industry's push for a law to restrict consumers' ability to redistribute digital TV content over peer-to-peer networks and the internet at large. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Commerce Committee, has indicated that he opposes inserting a broadcast flag measure in his newly introduced digital TV bill, which would set a 2008 hard deadline for broadcasters to give back their analog spectrum." Wired 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 5:50 am
Preserving The Pods Since the explosion of the Internet more than a decade ago, archiving the history of the new medium has become one of the biggest challenges for those inclined to try it - web sites come and go with alarming frequency, and today's revolutionary site could be tomorrow's passé pile of HTML code. Now, with podcasts the latest technology to burst onto the trend-heavy tech scene, one man has made it his mission to archive as much of the online amateur radio as he can get his hands on. Not that he'd actually bother listening to the vast majority of it, you understand... Wired 06/02/05
Posted: 06/02/2005 5:47 am
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Labor Investigation Of Washington Ballet "The National Labor Relations Board has called for a Sept. 7 hearing to determine whether the Washington Ballet, in Washington, D.C., discriminated against two dancers who helped form a union there." Back Stage 06/01/05
Posted: 06/01/2005 8:08 pm
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