Could Cultural Diplomacy Help America's Image Abroad? "Almost out of earshot, questions are being asked about whether it is wise for the United States's cultural image to be shaped exclusively by the marketplace. More specifically, with Washington now dusting off public diplomacy as a strategy to combat rampant anti-Americanism, is it time to revive cultural diplomacy? The purpose would not be to mute American popular culture. Instead, rather than trying to compete for the attention of the masses, cultural diplomacy would aim to persuade political and intellectual elites of the virtues of American civilization. This approach is now being quietly promoted by several arts lobbies in the United States." The New York Times 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 6:22 am
Attention, Electronic Gadgets: Shut Up! The modern world is too damn noisy. Car alarms, beeping microwaves, chirping beepers, cell phones that play that hideous 50 Cent hook... it's all just a bit much, isn't it? "The people who make all these things obviously think we're idiots. That without their constant, irritating reminders, we'd go wandering off, our minds blank, to drool down our shirts or spend 30 minutes tying our shoes. The world is noisy enough without adding completely useless aural pollution to the mix." Wired 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 5:57 am
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Rush To Rose "Michael Rush will be the next director of Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum, the university has announced... Rush, 55, will take over from Joseph Ketner, who left the Rose last summer to become chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Rush will assume his new position about a year after resigning from the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, which he had run since 1999. He said he disagreed with the institute's foundation over the organization's direction." The Rose Museum is in the midst of trying to raise $12 million for a major expansion. Boston Globe 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 6:30 am
Christie's Hits The Fall Auction Jackpot "Rarely do three well-known art collections come to the auction block in the same season. Even more rarely does one auction house get to sell them all. Starting Tuesday, Christie's will offer several exceptional works, including a Toulouse-Lautrec painting of a red-haired model, one of the centerpieces of the recent exhibition 'Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre' at the Art Institute of Chicago; a 1954 Rothko inspired by Matisse's 1911 'Red Studio'; and an abstract de Kooning from 1977 that has had only one owner: the artist's lawyer, Lee V. Eastman. Experts at the auction house are trying not to gloat." The New York Times 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 6:15 am
Acropolis Museum Underway "The long-awaited and much-delayed Acropolis Museum will be ready by the end of next year, the government said yesterday, while insisting that it would keep up its efforts toward the return of the Elgin Marbles so they can be housed in the new building. Construction of the museum, a few hundred meters from the Acropolis, was meant to have been finished in time for last year’s Athens Olympics." kathemerini 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 8:15 pm
Reality TV Takes On Public Art Britain's Channel 4 hopes to creat great public art. "The Big Art Project is seeking nominations from communities, identifying sites where a piece of significant public art could be placed. Six sites will be shortlisted by a panel of experts in January, and the series will follow the progress of the communities working with artists to commission and create the pieces. The completed works are expected to be unveiled in October 2007."
The Guardian (UK) 10/27/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 7:44 pm
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Paganini's Violin To Hit The Block An 18th century Cremonese violin once owned by Nicolo Paganini will go on sale at Sotheby's next week with an asking price of £500,000 ($894,600). "Not only is it the first time one of Paganini‘s cherished instruments has come up for auction, it is one of only 50 surviving violins by master craftsman Carlo Bergonzi of Cremona." Leading The Charge (Australia) 10/26/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 5:49 am
SAS Execs To Get Kennedy Training The recently resurrected San Antonio Symphony will be one of the orchestras to send its executives to Washington, D.C. next month for the Kennedy Center's new program aimed at training better orchestra managers. The arts management program "will allow symphonies to share information and learn new ways to diversify funding sources. They will also consider ways to make the symphonies relevant in the communities they serve." San Antonio Express-News 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 5:35 am
Customs Agents Take Opera Ireland Sets In Cocaine Bust Opera Ireland is hoping its audiences are as high on its production of La Traviata as customs officials in Dover who seized a shipment of cocaine worth £500,000 in one of three trucks delivering sets and costumes for an Opera Ireland production. "Rehearsals were due to begin in Dublin this week on the co-production with Germany's Theatre Aachen." The Guardian (UK) 10/27/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 7:47 pm
Detroit Jazz - Benefactor Or Purchaser? A Detroit philanthropist is offering to save the Detroit Jazz Festival with a $10 million commitment. "Here's the rub: Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, which has produced the jazz festival since 1994, would have to give up control of the event." Detroit Free Press 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 7:20 pm
Cuban Choir Members On Tour Defect To Canada Members of a Cuban choir on tour in Canada have defected. "In all, 11 of the 41-member choir managed to flee the hotel between 6 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, when Digna Guerra, the choir's manager, discovered the absences. In an emergency meeting, she warned the remaining singers that the Cuban government would retaliate against their family members if they tried to seek asylum here" The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 6:26 pm
A Radical Idea: Five Cents A Song? "There are an estimated 45 billion free music downloads happening annually, compared to around 360 million annual paid downloads. How to convert more of the free downloads to paid? Lower the price. How about five cents a song? "It's certainly better than the system we have right now. If you charge five cents for 45 billion annual downloads, it's a lot better than nothing." Montreal Gazette 10/24/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 6:17 pm
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Warning To Non-Profits: Your Donors May Hold A Grudge "A new report suggests that most ordinary donors to charities have long memories about scandals at tax-exempt organizations but little awareness of high-level policy debates on the need for more government regulation of such groups... It claims that such donors wrote off a particular charity once it became tainted in their minds, whether by scandal or poor performance. Yet problems at a particular organization did not necessarily translate into cynicism about all charities." Chicago Tribune 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 6:34 am
Philly's Summer Shed To Get Major Upgrades "Philadelphia's Mann Center for the Performing Arts broke ground Wednesday on a $14.2 million upgrade... The Mann Center, which is in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, was opened in 1976 as the summer home of the Philadelphia Orchestra... In July 2004, [the center's CEO] outlined a $30 million plan to modernize the center. Wednesday's ground breaking signals the first phase of that work. Among the improvements will be an education center to provide dedicated facilities for the 25,000 school children the center receives each year." Philadelphia Business Journal 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 5:45 am
SPAC Back In Black The much-maligned Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, which presents a popular summer slate of shows featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet, has balanced its budget for fiscal 2005 several months after a large part of its board and executive team turned over in the wake of a scandal over fiscal mismanagement. $700,000 in special gifts were arranged by the new team over the past few months to put the center in the black. (For the record, that's $700,000 more in major gifts than the previous administration managed to raise in the last three years.) However, SPAC isn't out of the woods yet: the center says it will need to raise an additional $10 million to bring its endowment back up to healthy levels. The Saratogian (NY) 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 5:16 am
Miami PAC Selling Off Name The over-budget behind-schedule Miami Performing Arts Center is negotiating to sell naming rights to the Center for $20 million. "Representatives are in negotiations with a corporation and two individuals interested in buying naming rights for the downtown facility that's due to be completed Aug. 4 and open two months later." Miami Today 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 8:12 pm
Cultural Treaty - America Against The World Last week 148 countries voted to approve a UNESCO Treaty on Cultural Diversity. The US and Israel were the only no votes. "One major problem for the United States in the 21st century will surely be our lack of ability to grapple with the proliferation of international instruments and regimes, like the Treaty of Cultural Diversity. These treaties are key tools for those who want to constrain American influence in the world. In UNESCO, the United States was at a huge disadvantage, as was our hard-working Ambassador Louise Oliver, who fought heroically to change the result." Washington Times 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 7:15 pm
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Books For People Who Don't Read Books By People Who Don't Write Books Simon & Schuster would like to sell more books to the twenty-something crowd, and its new imprint, SSE, is taking an unconventional route towards that end. SSE's publishers don't spend their time at international book fairs, scouring the booths for the next hot author. They're more likely to seek out creative and interesting individuals who've never written a book in their lives, and cajole them into giving it a shot. Call it Pop Culture Lit, call it amateurish dreck, but one thing is sure: SSE is making money. The New York Times 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 6:17 am
The Lolita Before The "Lolita"? Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" is 50 years old this year. But a researcher has dug up "a 1916 short story by the aristocratic German writer Heinz von Eschwege (1890-1951), a German newspaper journalist (and descendant of the Grimm Brothers) who wrote under the pen name Heinz von Lichberg and later became a Nazi Party propagandist. The story involved a cultivated middle-aged man bewitched by a preteen beauty named Lolita. It appeared as one of a collection of 15 tales published by Falken Verlag in Darmstadt under the title, The Accursed Giocanda." Philadelphia Inquirer 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 7:25 pm
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Profits Aside, They're Still Suing Remember back before recording companies started to make buckets of money from downloadable music, when they were so desperate to stop illegal file-trading that they started suing hundreds of college kids for millions of dollars? Yeah, well, they never actually stopped doing that. This week, the Recording Industry Association of America filed 745 new "John Doe" lawsuits against users of various peer-to-peer networks whom the RIAA suspects of passing copyrighted material. Why the "John Doe" caveat? The RIAA doesn't actually know who the offenders are, so they effectively sue the user's IP address, then try to sue or intimidate colleges and other internet providers into revealing the identities of the people behind the computer signature. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 6:49 am
Is CBC Managing Itself Into Irrelevance? The CBC lockout is over, and programming has returned to normal for most Canadians. But why did such a fiasco have to occur in the first place? Since CBC president Robert Rabinovitch was hired in 1999, there have actually been four work stoppages, and Michael Posner says that all fingers should be pointing squarely at Rabinovitch and his overly aggressive, even evangelical style of management. "By some bizarre inversion, the obsession with process and efficiency had actually become the primary operational focus. An entire generation of journalists and producers were being trained to think like actuaries." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/27/05
Posted: 10/27/2005 6:38 am
Record Number Of Movies Compete For Foreign Oscar A record 58 movies have been entered in contention for the Oscars. Iraq, Costa Rica and Fiji have movies under consideration for the first time. BBC 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 5:57 pm
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Remembering Ballet's Color Barrier Raven Wilkinson, who joined Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1955, was "not the first black ballet dancer to be given a regular post; that honor belongs to Janet Collins, hired by the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in 1951. Nor is she the most famous of such pioneers. Arthur Mitchell originated important roles in several seminal Balanchine ballets in the 1950s and '60s, then founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem. But Wilkinson was the first black ballet dancer to tour the nation - not only to towns in the east, west and north but also to St. Louis, Macon and Savannah, Ga., Charleston, S.C., and Hattiesburg, Miss." Newsday 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 7:37 pm
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