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Wednesday, October 19




 

Visual Arts

Why Most People Don't "Get" Conceptual Art "People who complain about conceptual art always do so on the grounds of craft. Anything that has no painterly or sculptural skill is not art, because anyone could do it. But when people object to individual pieces, it's almost always because of the subject matter. This has been true since the start of the readymade tradition..." The Guardian (UK) 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 6:58 pm

The Memorial Museum That Ate New York The museum commemorating the World Trade Center and 9/11 has expanded enormously. "The memorial and its museum have quietly become an $800 million enterprise, $500 million of which must be privately raised. That's almost five times the figure for the World War II Memorial in Washington, which honored the sacrifice of 400,000 soldiers and the service of some 16 million men and women. The museum alone is bigger than either the Whitney or the Ellis Island museums." Bloomberg.com 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 5:44 pm

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Music

McGill Puts Its Money Where Its Music Is Montreal's McGill University has debuted an impressive new building housing its school of music. The project was a long time coming - planning began in 1994 for what was originally supposed to be a library and archive - but the final result is one of the more cutting-edge facilities enjoyed by any conservatory in North America. "Designers did not shy away from the chance to align several different research fields into a single, ambitious studio plan. Film soundtracks, multimedia applications, music recording, studio technology, sound engineering and even neurosciences have a home in the new space." Oh, and did we mention that the architecture is spectacular. La Scena Musicale 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 5:55 am

Pittsburgh Back In The Red The Pittsburgh Symphony boosted its measurable assets by $8 million in the 2004-05 season, but the orchestra still wound up with a $1.1 million deficit. That's a managable number for a major orchestra, but it could also be seen as a potential red flag for an organization whose musician costs increased significantly this fall. The PSO musicians recently received a whopping 23% raise (the result of a backloaded contract signed by a management team no longer with the orchestra), and even after they offered to rework the deal to provide some short-term relief, salaries for 2005-06 will still be considerably higher than in previous seasons. Still, PSO officials say they are in good financial shape, especially when compared with other major American orchestras. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 5:47 am

Holland: Welser-Möst Is Doing Just Fine The Cleveland Orchestra is on tour yet again with music director Franz Welser-Möst, and while some critics may still consider it open season on the young conductor, Bernard Holland doesn't see what all the controversy is about. "The eyebrows that lifted when Mr. Welser-Möst was given this job must certainly have settled by now. One hears his casual elegance reflected in his players: a fastidiousness that is never prim, breathing naturally. The musicians sounded as if they believed in their conductor; he must be delighted with them. The Cleveland played on Monday with the good intentions of the best European orchestra, but with an ability to carry them out that hardly any European orchestra can match." The New York Times 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 5:44 am

What Caused The OSM Strike, Anyway? The months-long strike at l'Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal is finally over, and details are beginning to emerge not only about the OSM's new contract, but about the surprisingly small details of workplace conditions that stalled negotiations for more than a year. "After years of seeing their schedules grow ever tighter under the baton of Charles Dutoit, the musicians seemed to have decided that enough was enough. At the same time, general manager Madeleine Careau was demanding concessions to help tame an accumulated deficit that now stands at $3.4-million. To make matters worse, the OSM has been caught in recent years between the demands of its escalating international fortunes and the apparent decline of Montreal's ability to finance large performing-arts organizations." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 5:26 am

Two Ensembles, One Conductor: Sounds Like Synergy The Cleveland Orchestra and the Zurich Opera are in talks about possible future collaborations. Franz Welser-Möst serves as music director for both groups, and he owes much of his international success to Zurich Opera's director general, who has tirelessly promoted the sometimes controversial young conductor. "Welser-Möst has been considering using the orchestra pit at Severance Hall - as did Artur Rodzinski in the 1930s and Lake Erie Opera Theater in the 1960s - to present full-scale opera productions. It isn't unreasonable that a production originating at the Zurich Opera - Pereira mentioned Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos and Capriccio and Mozart's Cosi fan tutte as possibilities - could be adapted for the Severance Hall stage." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 5:18 am

Checking In With NY City Opera "The composer-critic Deems Taylor called the City Center Opera 'democracy in action, a democracy realizing the work of the individual.' Tickets started at eighty-five cents—nine and a half dollars, in today’s currency—and topped out at $2.20. These days, you have to pay quite a bit more to get through the doors of what LaGuardia dubbed 'the people’s opera company.' Tickets go up to a hundred and twenty dollars, which is more than most orchestra seats for 'Spamalot.' Don’t blame City Opera for falling short of its populist mission..." The New Yorker 10/17/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 6:48 pm

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Arts Issues

Republicans Take Aim At PBS & NEA (Again) President Bush has made it very clear that he will veto any tax hike proposed by Congress, even with the cost of rebuilding the Gulf Coast spiralling into the hundreds of billions. That means that all that money will have to be shaved out of other government programs or added to the already bloated deficit. Conservatives, of course, are not traditionally fans of excessive deficit spending, so a group of Republican legislators has been meeting to hash out the necessary cuts to divert money to the rebuilding effort. And as you might expect, first on the GOP's list of programs to be eliminated are government support for public television and the National Endowment for the Arts. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Scripps) 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 6:56 am

Envisioning The New Gulf Coast Rebuilding America's Gulf Coast will be one of the great design challenges of the age, and last week, a group of 200 urban planners and architects held a six-day conference to discuss the direction the rebuilding effort should take in 11 Mississippi towns devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The result could be a complete rethinking of suburban design in the area, as well as a fullscale overhaul for the city of Biloxi. The New York Times 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 6:21 am

Rest Of The World Teams Up To Protect Its Culture From US "A Franco-Canadian initiative, which has won broad backing as a swipe at US 'cultural imperialism', could mean that countries will be able to subsidise domestic film industries and restrict foreign music and content on their radio and television stations in the name of preserving and promoting cultural diversity." The Guardian (UK) 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 7:00 pm

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People

Chomsky Voted No. 1 Intellectual Noam Chomsky has been voted the world's top public intellectual in a poll. "Chomsky, who was underwhelmed by the honour, beat off challenges from Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens to win the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll. More than 20,000 voters from around the world took part in selecting the winners from a list of 100. The most striking aspect of the list is the shortage of the young, the female and the French." The Guardian (UK) 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 7:12 pm

Ba Jin, 101 Chinese writer Ba Jin has died in Shanhai. "Ba, a native of Chengdu, southwestern Sichuan Province, was recognized widely as one of China's greatest literary masters and an outstanding publisher and editor. Ba went to study in France in 1926 and completed his first novel 'Destruction' there. He wrote numerous books, including novels, short stories, and essays, totaling some six million words." China Daily 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 7:08 pm

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Theatre

RSC: Connecting Today With The Bard "For the Royal Shakespeare Company, revivified under the directorship of Michael Boyd, restoring the link between Shakespeare and contemporary writing is becoming something of a mission..." Financial Times 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 7:19 pm

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Publishing

Penguin Snaps Up Chinese Novel For $100,000 China's bestselling novel, The Wolf Totem, is coming to the U.S. Penguin Books has purchased the American rights to Jiang Rong's 2004 work for $100,000, a record sum for a Chinese book. "The meticulously researched, semiautobiographical tale is built around the lives of wolves told through the eyes of a student sent to work on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. It is set during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong emptied the cities of educated youths to have them work alongside peasants and herders. Critics and readers have praised its exploration of the relationship between man and animal, accurate detail and spiritualistic questioning." Chicago Tribune (AP) 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 6:31 am

And Coming Soon, The Performance Art Version! "Strunk and White's legendary Elements of Style was first published in 1959, and in the intervening decades, this little book on language and its proper usage has been force-fed to countless high school English students, who have read it zealously, dog-eared key pages, showered it in graphite love or else completely disregarded and forgotten it, usually at their own risk... [A]ppreciation for this slim volume takes a turn toward the whimsical and even surreal this week, as the Penguin Press publishes the first illustrated edition, featuring artwork by Maira Kalman, and the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought Elements of Style song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight [at] the New York Public Library." The New York Times 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 6:18 am

Rough Seas For Wikipedia? The Wikipedia has enjoyed charmed press and its supporters' claims of a new collaborative world are impressive. But an increasing number of critics are complaining about wiki's quality problems. "In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. Only it isn't. An encyclopedia can't just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What's the worth of an unreliable reference work?" The Register 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 6:02 pm

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Media

Welcome To Nollywood! Hollywood? Old news. Bollywood? Been there, done that. The newest frontier in film is emerging in the unlikeliest of places: Nigeria. "Buoyed by a voracious appetite among Nigerians (population: 128 million) for their own stories, and bolstered by the proliferation of video equipment -- allowing for less expensive production costs -- this developing nation's burgeoning film business now produces a whopping 1,000 features a year." The Nigerian scene (known, of course, as Nollywood) has risen astonishingly quickly from its beginnings in the 1970s, and it is beginning to produce huge stars whose profile will soon be noticable even from the cloistered U.S. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 6:38 am

South Park As Cultural Signpost When it debuted in the late 1990s, Comedy Central's animated hit, South Park, was mainly a "scare-the-horses" addition to the network's lineup, relying on foul language (from the mouths of its seven-year-old stars, no less) and ever-grosser gags to attract the young male viewers so coveted by advertisers. But nine seasons on, South Park is a bona fide cultural phenomenon that has risen above its own raunch to become an up-to-the-minute social commentary on some of the most controversial issues of the day. Of course, much of the attraction is still in the show's envelope-pushing antics, but wouldn't we all be a bit tired of fart jokes by now if they weren't folded into a fairly sophisticated satire? The New York Times 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 6:13 am

Dumping The Composer At The Last Minute Music is added to movies last, and changing it has always been difficult. But the composer of the much-anticipated remake of King Kong has been removed just weeks before the film opens. How? "New technology has meant that composers can now be asked to present their score in a demo form on synthesisers before its been properly recorded. They then ask test audiences what they think. It is like judging a film by having the cast shout out the script first. People have been taken off films on the basis of the results. It is not a particularly rational form of decision-making." BBC 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 5:55 pm

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Dance

Joffrey Still Rules The Ballet Roost In Chicago Seventeen years after the death of its founder and a decade after moving operations from New York to Chicago, the renowned Joffrey Ballet lives on, and this week the company begins celebrating its 50th anniversary. "The Joffrey was the most American of [New York's] three major classical companies in its embrace of pop culture and its youthfulness. And it was also the troupe that drew in new ballet audiences of all ages... The company is now a continual presence in [Chicago] with four two-week seasons a year. And it is moving toward establishing itself as the third leg of a classical triumvirate with the Lyric Opera and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra." The New York Times 10/19/05
Posted: 10/19/2005 5:37 am

Ballet's New Casting Paradigm Time was when ballet companies cast their roles by type. You look like this? You dance these kinds of roles. But times have changed, and American Ballet Theatre's new season illustrates a new approach to casting, writes Tobi Tobias. Seeing Things (AJBlogs) 10/18/05
Posted: 10/18/2005 7:24 pm

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