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Thursday, August 18




Ideas

Music - Nature Or Nurture? Is our attraction to certain kinds of sounds and music something we get from the culture around us or is it an innate physical response, there when we're born? A new study hopes to pin down some answers. CNet News 08/17/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 5:19 pm

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Visual Arts

Identity Crisis - What Makes The Modern Museum Director? Fifteen major American museums are currently searching for directors. Should those directors be art scholars or CEO's? "The current empty posts -- as well as the evolving director's role -- put many high-profile institutions at a crossroads. To be sure, any candidate considered at a top museum will have at least some experience in both management and art scholarship, but the museum world remains divided over the appropriate balance." Wall Street Journal 08/18/05
Posted: 08/18/2005 7:40 am

Getty Calling Are some making too much of the rich Getty Museum soliciting support in the community? "When they are talking about working with collectors to give fabulous collections a public home, how could one argue with that? That's a worthy thing. Having collections of art in the public domain is something that every museum should be doing. The fact that these objects would be preserved and exhibited and interpreted would be a net gain." Los Angeles Times 08/18/05
Posted: 08/18/2005 7:34 am

Wynn - The Most Complex Manmade Structure Ever? Vegas mogul Steve Wynn is irritated. Many critics didn't greet the opening of his new $2.7 billion Wynn hotel casino with the kind of awe he expected. "Comparing a Vegas casino -- each of which is likely to be imploded and rebuilt, by the next century anyway -- to the world's greatest and most enduring structures is an invitation to snickering, even if it might actually be true. But if others question whether his Trump-like hubris has brought him this backlash, Wynn himself wonders why few have asked him to explain the claim." Wired 08/17/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 5:10 pm

Christie's Reports Record Sales Christie's auction house reports record sales for the first six months of 2005. "Sales at Christie's, which is owned by François Pinault, were $1.65bn in the six months to June - a third higher than last year. It sold 178 works of art for more than $1m, compared with 132 during the same period last year." Financial Times 08/17/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 4:47 pm

  • Chinese Power Christie's Art Sales What drove Christie's record sales in the first have of this year? Chinese buyers. "Now if anyone doubts that the Chinese art market is exploding, Christie's has attributed its record sales of £910m for the first six months of 2005 to the emergence of Chinese buyers keen to buy back their cultural heritage. Asian art accounted for £71.3m of Christie's sales between January and June, far short of the £232.3m spent on impressionist and modern art but outstripping the £38.5m spent on old masters." The Guardian (UK) 08/18/05
    Posted: 08/17/2005 4:34 pm

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Music

Matthias Goerne - The Most Beautiful Voice In The World? So thinks Jay Nordlinger: "The first time you hear him, that voice is so shocking, you have trouble concentrating on the music. The voice has an almost unreal beauty.To be sure, Mr. Goerne has more than a beautiful voice: He is an intelligent singer, to boot. But that voice is a meal ticket, a calling card, second to none." New York Sun 08/18/05
Posted: 08/18/2005 7:03 am

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Arts Issues

A Major Blow To Newspaper Arts Sections "Every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in those papers because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, “older and elitist” compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough. Wait, it gets worse: I’ve learned that at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible. This news couldn’t occur at a worse time for the LAT and NYT, which both receive the lion’s share of those very showy $100,000-plus full-page after full-page movie display ads." LAWeekly 08/17/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 5:41 pm

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People

Saxist Brecker Fighting Blood And Marrow Disease "Michael Brecker, one of jazz's most influential tenor saxophonists over the last quarter-century, has been forced to stop performing by blood and bone marrow disease and is searching for a stranger to save his life." The New York Times 08/18/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 5:57 pm

The Critical Temperament Choire Sicha looks in on New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelmen's new book on artists, and observes that "the mild-natured chief art critic of The New York Times, has been for a while now less a critic and more a hagiographer. He has seemed unwilling to use his position as a pulpit." New York Observer 08/17/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 5:38 pm

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Theatre

In Edinburgh - Not Enough Talent For Burlesque The Edinburgh Fringe is full of burlesque shows this year. "One of the problems in Edinburgh is that, with so many burlesque shows, there are simply not enough good artists to go round. Too many performers seem to think that if they have had years of practice taking their clothes off every night before bed, they won't find it so hard to take them off in front of lots of people and get paid for it. You only have to spend a couple of grisly hours down at the Cave of the Golden Calf at the Royal Scots Club to see that burlesque is an art form in which the talentless feel they can really make their mark." The Guardian (UK) 08/18/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 5:46 pm

Minnesota Fringe's Record Year "The Fringe broke its own attendance record, selling 44,630 tickets, up slightly from last year's paid attendance of 44,189. The festival sold 15,465 attendance buttons this year, a fair estimation of the number of people who attended the festival and saw several shows." St. Paul Pioneer-Press 08/17/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 7:38 am

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Publishing

2005's Lit Hits: MIA Where are this year's literary hits? "The big books have been thrillers, such as "The Da Vinci Code" and "The Historian," and the fantasy blockbuster "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Not only have established literary authors disappointed critics, no major new literary voices have emerged. 'I think a lot of editors will tell you that 2004 and 2005 haven't been very good for fiction acquisitions. There weren't a lot of huge auctions or books that publishers got really excited about'." Yahoo! (AP) 08/18/05
Posted: 08/18/2005 7:50 am

Harry Discounts Hurt B&N Financials Booksellers were expecting a blockbuster summer with a new Harry Potter in play. But Barnes & Noble reports disappointing sales "The company's sales rose just 6 percent, to $1.17 billion. Analysts had been expecting sales of $1.18 billion on a bigger boost from the sixth volume of the Harry Potter saga, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." The new book about the boy wizard sold more than 8.9 million copies in the first 24 hours it was on sale in the United States and Britain, becoming the fastest-selling book in history, according to publishers. But retailers cut heavily into their profits on the book, selling it at discounts of more than 50 percent to lure customers into stores." Yahoo! (AP) 08/18/05
Posted: 08/18/2005 7:45 am

A New Thesaurus For "Thinkers" "Peter Meltzer decided the modern thesaurus was so flawed, there was only one way to fix it: He would have to write a new one. Next month, some 10 years and 12,000 entries later, The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words (Marion Street Press), will land on bookstore shelves. Instead of following each entry with five or six more-or-less accurate synonyms, The Thinker's Thesaurus offers but one choice - an exact, albeit unusual, synonym." Philadelphia Inquirer 08/18/05
Posted: 08/18/2005 6:35 am

Going Graphic Comic books... er... graphic novels are hot in the adult market right now. "In the United States, sales of graphic novels have leaped from $75 million in 2001 to $207 million in 2004. Booksellers in America, Britain, Germany, Italy and South Korea cite graphic literature as one of their fastest-growing categories. In Borders, one of America's largest bookstore chains, graphic-novel sales have risen more than 100 percent a year for the past three years. In France, where comics have long been mainstream, sales are reaching record highs, up 13.8 percent to 43.3 million copies in 2004; indeed, five of the 10 best-selling books in France last year were comic books." Newsweek 08/22/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 6:10 pm

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Media

California Considers Tax Breaks For Movies California is losing so many movie and TV jobs that the state is considering giving tax breaks to producers, mimicing a strategy that has lured business elsewhere. "The bill would provide a 12 percent tax credit on a project's spending in California, up to a cap of $3 million per production, according to a draft obtained by The New York Times. Television movies, which are perhaps the most endangered species of Hollywood production, may be given an extra 3 percent credit." The New York Times 08/18/05
Posted: 08/18/2005 6:41 am

American TV Ratings Sink In Summer Heat TV ratings for this summer have been abysmal. "Despite unleashing a torrent of first-run reality series, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, UPN and The WB drew a paltry 30 percent of all TV viewers during the week of Aug. 8-14." Last week's much-hyped finale of "I Want to be a Hilton" lured 3.7 million viewers opposite a Tuesday chapter of the Univision telenovela La Madrastra (The Stepmother), which had 5.3 million viewers. Dallas Morning News 08/18/05
Posted: 08/18/2005 6:02 am

Movie Solution - Different Movie Theatres For Different Patrons? Movie execs continue to struggle with how to goose up the movie box office. "The managing director of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Michele Garra, said Hollywood's focus on "event" movies was limiting the diversity of releases. There was also a trend to "derivative material" that included sequels, remakes, movies made from old television series and comic book adaptations that turned some film-goers off even if they attracted others." Sydney Morning Herald 08/18/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 6:03 pm

Glass: Public Radio All Dressed Up, No Place To Go Why is their so little innovation in America's public radio? Ira Glass thinks he knows: "This is exactly the problem in public broadcasting in general and public radio right now. You've got people, you've got innovative ideas, you've got programming executives who know what should be done next -- and, literally, there's no machinery to fund innovation. And so that's why you get one new show every four or five years." CJR Daily 08/12/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 5:05 pm

"Hollywood" Movies Increasingly Being Made Elsewhere "California finds itself competing with almost every state in the union. Thanks to an array of tax incentives offered from Rhode Island to New Mexico, screenwriters are recasting their plots to accommodate new locales, producers are learning new math to stretch budgets and Hollywood has settled into a multiple-time-zone way of life. Hollywood remains the place where most movies are conceived and financed. And the economic and emotional effect of so-called runaway production has been blunted by a fresh wave of television shows made in town — TV production has surged 64% since 2000, as local movie filming fell 8%. But there's no masking the fact that moviemaking has turned into part of the national economy." Los Angeles Times 08/17/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 4:50 pm

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Dance

Ruin' Smuin Robert Gottlieb attends a Michael Smuin Dance performance and feels his evening has been stolen from him. "Just as depressing as these two works is the company itself—joylessness incarnate. The boys are stiff. The girls are dull. No one can really tap. The dancers’ energy doesn’t spring from the music; it’s tacked on, to make its showbizzy points. Everything is indicated, sold—it’s not just the music that’s canned, it’s the dancing, too. Why do audiences eat it up? Pure nostalgia? Some questions are better left unanswered." New York Observer 08/17/05
Posted: 08/17/2005 5:33 pm

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