When Copyrighters Own The Space Around You "Today, anyone armed with a video camera and movie-editing software can make a documentary. But can everyone afford to make it legally? Clearance costs - licensing fees paid to copyright holders for permission to use material like music, archival photographs and film and news clips - can send expenses for filmmakers soaring into the hundreds of thousands of dollars." The New York Times 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 3:48 pm
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Two Leonardos See Public For The First Time Two previously-unseen paintings by Leonardo have gone on show in Italy. "One is an alternative version of Da Vinci's famous painting known as Virgin of the Rocks, with the infant Jesus and the infant John the Baptist. The other shows Mary Magdalene, thought to have been completed by Leonardo with the help of one of his pupils about 1515, shortly before his death." BBC 10/15/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 5:29 pm
Buying Spree - Will China Own The Art Market? "Facing an acute art shortage, the Chinese government plans to construct 1,000 new museums by 2015, including 32 in Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics and 100 in Shanghai before the opening of the 2010 World's Fair, according to reports in China's government-controlled media. The People's Liberation Army, or PLA, has so far targeted only Chinese art. Analysts say the army's strategy over the next five years is to dip further into China's foreign-currency reserves - about $711 billion, the second biggest after Japan, and growing - to buy and barrack celebrated Western masterpieces, often at prices above their auction-market value." International Herald Tribune 10/15/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 5:24 pm
What The Getty Antiquities Case Means To The Art World "The Getty case is so important that it will represent a milestone and completely change relations within the art world," says Anna Maria Reggiani, archaeology director at the Italian Culture Ministry. The Globe & Mail (AP) 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 5:21 pm
In Baltimore - History Wins Over Design "Going back in time, architecturally, was the overriding concept behind the $32 million restoration and modernization of Baltimore's Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was built starting in 1806 and dedicated in 1821. It was the reason the 1940s-era stained-glass windows were removed. It was the impetus for re-creating 24 skylights in the dome - to 'restore the light' in the cathedral as Latrobe meant for it to be seen. But what happens if restorers discover works of art or other artifacts that are so significant and so well preserved that it would be a shame to peel them away?" Baltimore Sun 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 4:48 pm
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In Cleveland - It's Critic Versus Conductor It's not often that an American music critic takes dead aim at the music director of the local orchestra. "Imagine, then, the horror felt by many people in Cleveland, Ohio, when Donald Rosenberg, critic of The Plain Dealer and one of North American's most respected music journalists, came back from the Cleveland Orchestra's recent west coast tour with an extremely blunt assessment of itsAustrian music director, Franz Welser-Möst. Three years into the conductor's tenure, wrote Rosenberg, Welser-Möst's interpretations were 'vacant'; he was a conductor of 'high proficiency and low inspiration'." Financial Times 10/14/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 5:12 pm
Orchestras - Where Are The Women? "Women have yet to attain the power, prestige and astronomical pay scale of baton-wielding superstars at the Big Five orchestras in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago. They're not exactly flourishing at a variety of other ensembles, either. Why is it that in our supposedly enlightened age, when so many gender barriers have been broken, female conductors still have difficulty reaching the top of the profession? What needs to change in order for that to happen?" San Diego Union-Tribune 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 5:02 pm
Opera - The Future Is Live So we've seen the last of the great studio opera recordings. But maybe there's something new to be made of the live recording. "Think of all those bootlegged accounts of Maria Callas that once surreptitiously circulated among fanatics. More recently, EMI has been legitimizing those recordings and releasing them, sonically cleaned up as much as possible, in its comprehensive Callas Edition. But through the years there have been many distinguished, well-engineered and perfectly legal live recordings of operas." The New York Times 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 3:41 pm
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A Seattle Fringe Rebound "The quality of the so-called 'fringe' — the ever-changing circle of independent Seattle troupes with large creative aspirations and modest means — is a cyclical thing. Today (knock wood), it's on the upswing. Is it the wildly imaginative, thrillingly relevant fringe scene of my dreams? No. Curiously, there is a dearth here of provocative, topical fare that ignites discussion and makes theater part of the public debate about burning issues of war, peace, class, race, et al. But there are compensations." Seattle Times 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 5:05 pm
A Chicago Theatre Shuts Down - Too Many Mistakes It was only eight months ago that Chicago's new $9 million Drury Lane Theatre at the Watertower Place opened in a blaze of publicity. Now the theatre is shutting down, admitting its mistakes and failure. "It's an astonishingly rapid turnaround and indicative of eight months on Chicago's Magnificent Mile that have not gone well at all. There are no current plans for the theater to produce its own shows again." Chicago Tribune 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 4:17 pm
Oooooh - A Flop In The Making? After a two-year gestation involving several much-discussed readings and workshops, 'In My Life' is widely expected to be one of the weirdest productions to reach Broadway in years. There was, for one thing, the plot involving a singer-songwriter with Tourette's syndrome, a song about a tumor and a swishy dead accountant who dances with God. There was the dare-the-critics poster art featuring large, Magritte-like lemons. And then there was the creative team, in particular the composer, lyricist, book writer and director, none of whom had worked on Broadway before and all of whom were in fact the same man: a 67-year-old former jingle writer and Hollywood anomaly named Joe Brooks." The New York Times 0/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 3:50 pm
Pinter - Master Of The Pause "Words are the dialectical battleground of Pinter's works, sometimes treasured and hoarded like irreplaceable gems, sometimes scattered heedlessly like junk in a looted dime store. His people live by them, betray them, bicker over them, flay one another with them." Village Voice 10/12/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 3:12 pm
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Fiction Down... "Has American culture begun to mimic the chronic nostalgia of a certain strain of post-imperial Englishness? Is the embrace of these fantasies part of, in Michael Moorcock's words, a 'longing to possess, again, the infant's eye?' Or is there something in them that speaks to the moment more clearly than, say, 'Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous'?" Boston Globe 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 4:53 pm
An Author's Festival Begins A New Chapter "Two years after Greg Gatenby's resignation as director, Toronto's International Festival of Authors' founder is a long way from having been forgotten. But the annual program of readings, author interviews and panel discussions — the 26th edition of which runs Wednesday to Oct. 29 — gives every appearance of continuing to thrive under successor Geoffrey Taylor, contrary to concerns expressed by some at the time of Gatenby's departure." Toronto Star 10/15/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 4:07 pm
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Canada's Pay TV Prospers In Canada, pay TV languished for years. But it's become quite profitable recently, and now other players want in... The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 5:19 pm
Hey CBC Workers - Welcome Back! (Sorta) CBC boss Tony Burman welcomed his troops back last week after a prolonged lockout. He kindly sent all employees a note. But what was he really thinking, behind all the bonhomie? "Have a great week. It's wonderful you are back where you belong. (At least until the next strike.) Toronto Star 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 4:11 pm
Actors On The Other Side Of The Lens A perhaps not surprising number of actors have aspirations to make their own movies. And some of them do. "These filmmakers may be actors with longtime careers and considerable name recognition, but that's not much help within the blockbuster mentality that dominates the film industry, where even stars with high wattage have had difficultly getting pet projects made. So how did these just-regular thespians pull off making their movies?" Washington Post 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 3:54 pm
Lifetime - A Force To Be Lobbied With The Lifetime Channel is the most-watched network among women. "In recent years Lifetime has promoted its issue-oriented programming by tying it to direct appeals to viewers to improve their lives. In April, for instance, after the broadcast of "Terror at Home," a documentary about domestic abuse, the National Domestic Violence Hotline had a 7,000 percent increase in calls. But Lifetime's most surprising experiment has taken place off screen. Through its public affairs office, it has become a political lobbying force - and quite an effective one at that - rallying its audience to back laws about a broad slate of women's issues." The New York Times 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 3:34 pm
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The Joffrey Turns 50 "It has consistently paid homage to the 'old Europe,' but from the start it was, above all else, a quintessentially American troupe -- the highly individualistic creation of Robert Joffrey (the son of Afghan immigrants who had settled in Seattle), and Gerald Arpino (the son of a working class Italian-American family from Staten Island, New York)." Chicago Sun-Times 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 4:21 pm
Dance - Looking Historical "Dance revivals come in many forms and get sketchier the further one recedes in time. Music has a long-accepted system of notation; theater has texts. Dance has the memories of the choreographer (if still alive) and his or her disciples, who fan across the country and the world recreating works in which, often, they once danced. So why do them at all? In dance, we live in a time, or so many people fret, of diminished choreography: there just aren't that many great dance-makers out there, especially in classical ballet. Hence the desire to freshen the repertory by mining the past..." The New York Times 10/16/05
Posted: 10/16/2005 3:38 pm
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