The Battle For New Orleans "Rebuilding 'The City That Care Forgot' represents the greatest urban renewal project in American history, but nearly everyone with a stake in the city's future agrees that the outcome is far from certain: Will officials oversee a process that yields a stunning model for 21st-century living, or will fighting among special interests produce a more homogeneous, tourist-centric New Orleans?" Boston Globe 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 10:41 am
How Have Movies Influenced Visual Art? "In the 19th century, painting was supreme, prints were a lesser form of painting, and photography was artistic only insofar as it aspired to the condition of painting. What happened, though, when technology and representation collided at the end of that century to create the motion picture, a whole new way of visualizing reality? Did still pictures change when there emerged a new kind of picture, one that moved? Might Thomas Eakins and Thomas Edison have shared more than just a first name and monogram?" Boston Globe 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 10:36 am
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Madness In The Floorboards Disturbs Paris ArtWorld A long creed carved into a floor by a schizophrenic French farmer has become Paris' most controversial artwork. "Since the Plancher de Jeannot (Jeannot's Floorboards) went on display last week, it has created an unprecedented stir. 'People are terribly disturbed by it. Some feel it should not be on public view.' The carving - 80 lines of text, in capital letters with no punctuation - contains references to Hitler, to Popes and to an infernal machine that controls humans. The work raises painful questions about whether madness can be artistic." The Observer (UK) 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 10:26 am
In LA: A School Building Boom That Disappoints The Los Angeles School District is in the midst of an enormous building campaign - spending more than $17 billion on schools. "Certainly the district deserves praise for confronting, after years of official neglect, the twin problems of overcrowding and aging facilities. The building campaign's central goals — to move every student back to a traditional two-semester calendar and into a neighborhood school — are finally within sight. But as the district has become more aggressive about asking for money and tackling new lists of educational problems, on the design front it has shrunk into caution and insularity." Los Angeles Times 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 7:19 am
Is Russia The Next Big Art Market? "Russia and its nascent art market is the new Eldorado for art dealers. Moscow accounts for at least 85% of the country’s wealth and soaring oil prices are further boosting revenues. The city is plastered with billboards advertising luxury brands, new buildings are being hastily erected everywhere and out in the Western suburbs, a $60 million shopping mall is rising amid the birch forests: it is surrounded by $20 million homes. Dealers and decorators are scrambling to furnish these empty homes, as well as properties in the South of France and London, both obligatory for Russia’s super-rich." The Art Newspaper 09/30/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 6:38 am
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Pittsburgh Symphony Musicians Downsize Their Deal Pittsburgh Symphony musicians have agreed to a new contract with some big concessions. "During the first year of the new contract, which runs through Aug. 31, 2008, musicians will take a 4.2 percent pay reduction, resulting in a savings of $500,000. The orchestra, which posted a $500,000 deficit last year, will reduce the number of musicians from 99 to 95 and institute a hiring freeze. In year two of the contract, an unpaid week of vacation and the hiring freeze will save $1 million. In year three, the PSO will save $900,000." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/01/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 10:20 am
Will Scottish Opera Have To Merge To Survive? Scottish Opera is in dire straits. Some say "unless urgent action is taken on funding, Scotland could be forced to merge its national opera company with Opera North in Leeds, England to survive. Shouldn't Scotland be funding its own opera? The Scotsman 09/29/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 8:03 am
Music Downloader... er Aggregator Expands The Music Pool A new music aggregator on the internet feeds you music from a data store of 3 million tunes. "Listening to Mercora is like tapping into a million iPods all at once. You can control what you listen to, returning to the search engine after each tune to select your next cut, or you can open yourself to the choices and discoveries of whatever random music lover happens to have been playing the tune you first sought." Washington Post 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 7:33 am
Country Music Kicks Butt On Tour Country music is having a great year on the touring circuit. "While other genres struggle to maintain superstars and develop new headliners, country music has been performing extremely well on both fronts, particularly for the past two years. Last year, five country acts were among the top 25 touring acts for the year, following a long dry spell when the genre was lucky to have one or two acts among touring's elite. Country's current boom stems from a premise that is often forgotten by much of the concert industry: Offer great talent at a fair price in an appealing setting, and fans will respond." Yahoo! (Billboard) 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 6:59 am
A Thing About Gershwin Gershwin's Concerto in F is getting its regular-season premiere at the Boston Symphony (the piece had always been relegated to the Pops season). Why has Gershwin's much-loved "serious" music taken so long to be embraced by symphony orchestras? The New York Times 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 5:46 am
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Performing Arts Centers Team Up To Develop New Plays Minnesota's Ordway Theatre is joining four other comparable nonprofit performing arts centers in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Hartford, Connecticut, to form Five Cent Productions "to develop new works of musical theater and breathe new life into the art form. 'The industry has come to rely on the retread, on the revival. People are tired now of seeing the revivals. I mean, these are great classic works of Americana. But people need to see new things'." Minneota Public Radio 10/01/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 10:07 am
Where Are The Women Playwrights? (Why Don't We See Them On Our Stages?) Despite critical acclaim, women playwrights are badly represented on American stages. "During the 2003-04 season 21 percent of professionally produced plays in the United States were written by women; during 2004-05, the number dropped again to 19 percent. The absolute numbers aren't changing. There's simply a kind of schizophrenia in the theater managements. I think that despite the evidence, artistic directors have a strong conviction that plays by women don't sell'." San Diego Union-Tribune 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 10:02 am
Parental Advisory How do you recommend theatre to children? It's not an absolute. There are many things to account for: "how mature he is relative to others his age, what gives her nightmares or whether the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber would make them start speaking in tongues or spit up." St. Paul Pioneer-Press 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 9:51 am
Avoiding The "M" Word A venerable superstition has struck again — that it's bad luck for theater artists to utter the name "Macbeth." Amanda McBroom's solo show opening off-Broadway has had the word deleted from its title. "People are afraid of the word. The arcana is intense."
Los Angeles Times 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 7:24 am
What Does The New Vegas Broadway Mean? "If it isn't already, Las Vegas will soon be the second city of Broadway, home to more New York musicals than any market outside Manhattan. If Broadway shows went to Vegas instead of touring, what would happen to the traditional road theaters and their customers? More saliently, what would happen to their backers, who are often investors in New York productions? If they were outflanked by casino operators, how would that alter the kinds of shows that make it to Broadway in the first place? For even though the tail of touring had to some degree wagged the dog of Broadway for years, Vegas now threatened to clone a new dog entirely. A big dog with sequins." The New York Times 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 5:29 am
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Schizophrenic Book World Worries About Quills "You gotta admit a nationally televised awards show for authors has its challenges. Let's face it, most honorees are just a tad lower on the recognition-o-meter than your average Gwyneth Paltrows and George Clooneys. But for some, that's just the start of the problems with the Quill Awards, which, in the book world, has managed to strike as many nerves as the plastic surgeon who paralyzed Joan Rivers' face." Rocky Mountain News 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 10:15 am
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The Movie Box Office Problem? People Zigged While Hollywood Zagged Hollywood movies had a great September, rebounding from a dreadful summer slump. "Amid 19 weekends of diminished box office — a record stretch that started in late February and ended in early July — many said they believed a cultural sea change was underway. Among the theories: People preferred to consume their entertainment in the comfort of their homes, whether watching DVDs on super-sharp plasma screens, surfing the Internet or playing video games." The real reason? Movies nobody wanted to watch. Los Angeles Times 10/01/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 9:57 am
An Ex-Child Actor Tells Of Her Trauma When she was 10 years old, Sarah Polley starred in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Seventeen years later she recalls the experience as terrifying, and, upon hearing that Gilliam is shooting another movie with a young Canadian actress, writes to tell him of her traumas back then. Toronto Star 10/02/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 7:50 am
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La Scala Dancers Strike After the famed opera house's renovation, "the dancers say their dressing rooms are too small and they are being squeezed out in order to make more room for the orchestra." BBC 10/01/05
Posted: 10/02/2005 6:34 am
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