Running With The Crowd The nationwide rallies this week calling for equal rights for immigrants both legal and illegal made for some stunning pictures, as hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out in cities across the US. The experience has Philip Kennicott thinking about the meaning of crowds, and the sometimes contradictory ideas they embody. "The crowd image generally reflects the latent fears inspired by those who have gathered in the streets... Just as the eye scans the multitudes in a Bruegel painting, the lens scans the crowd, and finds it festive or restive, attentive or dull, emotional or over-passionate. But those are really metaphors: The individual stands for the crowd." Washington Post 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 6:24 am
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Berlin Biennale, Thinking Outside The Usual White Box This year's Berlin Biennale has apparently outgrown any single venue, and organizers are using the city itself as the staging area for the 8-year-old event. "Visitors were not simply making their way to and from a museum or some smartly retrofitted warehouse, the usual location for a big contemporary art survey. They were waiting in the cold spring air to enter private apartments, an office, a ballroom, a shuttered school, a former horse stable, the church, the cemetery and the white-walled galleries of the Berlin Biennial's organizer, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art." The New York Times 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 6:08 am
Getting Inside Kandinsky's Head A new exhibition of work by the Russian abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky will include a collection of letters and poems written by the painter, none of which have ever before been published in English. Curators say that the written materials will "shine a light on the painter's path to abstraction." The Guardian (UK) 04/11/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:38 pm
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Oregon Symphony Prez To Head Florida Opera Company For the second time in three years, the Oregon Symphony is losing its president to another ensemble. William A. Ryberg, who is credited with reducing Oregon's annual deficits and increasing donated income during his short time in Portland, will take over as head of Florida's Palm Beach Opera this fall. It was three seasons ago that then-Oregon Symphony president Tony Woodcock resigned to accept the same position with the Minnesota Orchestra. The Oregonian (Portland) 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 5:58 am
What Do You Do When The Ride Ends? We tend to think of rock stars as having it made, rolling in dough, and assured of lifelong comfort and wealth. But the truth is that popular music is a fickle business, and even artists with long-standing track records can quickly fall out of favor. Chart-topping artists go broke every day, and why? Well, just try getting a 22-year-old phenom with a $10 million record deal interested in long-term financial planning. The New York Times 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 4:15 am
Whatever Happened To Letting The Music Speak For Itself? Charlotte Higgins has had about enough of the hyperbole and exaggeration being employed by London's opera companies in an effort to sell tickets. "It's a sad sign of an artform that's on its uppers when you have to resort to desperate measures to attract the crowds... [and] often enough promoters don't even need to make absurd claims for shows, since they tend to have carefully filleted press quotes to do it for them." Culture Vulture (Guardian Blogs) 04/11/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:22 pm
Classical Brit Noms Announced "Singer Bryn Terfel and composer Karl Jenkins have both been nominated for two Classical Brit Awards alongside Scottish teenager Nicola Benedetti... US soprano Renee Fleming and German counter-tenor Andreas Scholl are nominated alongside bass-baritone Terfel [for singer of the year.]" The Classical Brits are a major event in the UK, with listeners to the country's popular ClassicFM service picking the winners. BBC 04/11/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:08 pm
Edinburgh Sets Early Ticket Sales Record The Edinburgh Festival broke a house record this week, selling £200,000 worth of tickets on the first day of sales, a jump of 25% from last year. Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, probably the most anticipated concert on the schedule, sold out almost immediately. The 2006 festival will be the final one coordinated by Brian McMaster, who has directed Ednburgh for 15 years. PlaybillArts 04/10/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 8:49 pm
Seattle Still Hunting For The Right Leader The Seattle Symphony is approaching the two-year mark in its search for a new concertmaster, and orchestra higher-ups say they hope to have a new leader in place by the beginning of the 2006-07 season. For those who attend concerts at Benaroya Hall, the search process has been unusually easy to follow, with candidates regularly playing with the orchestra for a week or two, and a select few invited back for a second look. It's all a far cry from the usual secretive audition process most orchestra musicians go through. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 04/11/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 8:28 pm
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Boeing Gives $15m To Smithsonian "The Boeing Co. and the Smithsonian Institution announced yesterday that the aviation giant is giving $15 million to the National Air and Space Museum. The gift, the largest corporate gift in Smithsonian history, will go to the planned expansion of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the Virginia annex of the main museum on the Mall." Washington Post 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 6:31 am
Big Week For KC PAC Kansas City's long-planned (and long-delayed) $326 million performing arts center faces a major turning point this week, when the center's board will have to decide whether to break ground this year, despite having less money in the bank than they would like. Kevin Collision says that successful cities are those that recognize and leverage their civic assets, and that the center could be the centerpiece of a rebirth for Kansas City's urban core. Kansas City Star 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 5:50 am
South Bank's Tall Order "As the new artistic director of [London's massive South Bank Arts Centre], Jude Kelly has become one of the most important figures in Britain's art scene." But Kelly faces almost innumerable challenges in her new job, not the least of which is the perennial public confusion over what exactly South Bank is, and why they should care. The Guardian (UK) 04/10/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:30 pm
Psycho Inspiration's Farm Banned From eBay "Land that was once home to a murderer whose story inspired the movie Psycho was pulled from an online auction" after eBay officials decided that it violated the site's policy banning "murder memorabilia." The land, which was purchased at auction in 1958 after being seized by the state of Wisconsin, remains up for sale. Washington Post (AP) 04/11/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:14 pm
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Filmmaker Vilgot Sjoman, 81 "Vilgot Sjoman, a Swedish filmmaker whose notoriously risqué I Am Curious (Yellow), made in 1967 for $160,000, sufficiently alarmed censors to generate millions at the box office and jump-start a new cinematic explicitness, died on Sunday at a Stockholm hospital. He was 81." The New York Times 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 6:21 am
Britain's Forgotten Innovator "He ushered in contemporary drama, drew up the blueprint for a national UK company, and wrote gripping, complex plays, yet Harley Granville-Barker is little known today... Granville-Barker demanded that the text must come first, and that the director, designer and actors must serve it with clarity, lucidity, realism and grace. He established the premise of modern theatre design by showing that scenery had to be expressive and avoid being decorative or literal." The Telegraph (UK) 04/11/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:50 pm
Benadetti Nominated For Two Brits Young British violinist Nicola Benadetti, who recently lashed out at the UK press for veiled and not-so-veiled suggestions that her stardom was based more on looks than talent, has achieved some validation with her nomination for two major Classical Brit awards. "Her debut recording is in the running for Album of the Year, and she is one of three contenders for the Young British Classical Performer award." The Sctosman (UK) 04/11/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 8:34 pm
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Facelift For Toronto PAC Toronto's St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts is getting a $3 million overhaul, which the center's board hopes will reinvigorate its mission as well as its image. "The centre, conceived as one of Canada's Centennial projects, opened in 1970. It is home to seven resident companies — including the Canadian Stage Company — and is used by more than 50 other arts and community organizations annually." Toronto Star 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 6:34 am
Another UK Theatre Chooses A Woman To Lead "The Birmingham Rep Theatre has appointed a female artistic director for the first time in its 93-year history. Rachel Kavanaugh, an associate director at the venue, will replace Jonathan Church, who left Birmingham this month to run the Chichester Festival Theatre. Kavanaugh's appointment is a significant addition to the small but rapidly growing list of UK theatres steered by women." The Guardian (UK) 04/11/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:36 pm
Is Spacey Out Of His League At The Old Vic? When actor Kevin Spacey took charge of London's Old Vic, hopes were high that he would breathe new life into the place. But with the early closing of a Robert Altman-produced version of Resurrection Blues, many are saying Spacey isn't up to the job. "While the odd flop is forgiveable, Resurrection Blues is simply the latest in a series of duff experiences at the Old Vic... If Spacey is determined to run the theatre as a commercial enterprise - and he has rejected all suggestions that he should seek subsidy - he must listen, learn and quickly realise two things: that he is the Old Vic's biggest drawing-card, and that audiences are currently hungry for classics." The Guardian (UK) 04/10/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:26 pm
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Crowding The Shelves "Birds travel in flocks, fish in schools. Sometimes books arrive in cohorts, too, testing the attention spans of booksellers, reviewers and, most of all, readers... For publishers and authors, these pileups can lead to a scramble to distinguish their books from the pack, with moved release dates and changed marketing plans. Authors battle to snag talk-show spots. Book reviews often pair books, and booksellers clump them onto a themed table. For readers, this can create confusion, or worse, fatigue." The New York Times 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 6:11 am
The Monograph Solution For 2-1/2 years now, Oxford University Press has been catering to the needs of academic librarians on a budget with "a browsable database that contains the complete texts of more than 1,000 Oxford monographs, in four areas: economics and finance, political science, philosophy, and religion. As a result, participating institutions no longer have to shell out for print copies of Oxford titles in order to make them available to faculty members and students." For cash-strapped university libraries, the program is a godsend, and far from hurting print sales of the monographs, the easy and cheap availability of the database appears actually to have stimulated interest. Chronicle of Higher Education 04/14/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 5:39 am
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Is TV's Future Online? As traditional TV viewership (especially for the Big Four broadcast networks) continues to decline, networks are scrambling to find alternate methods of delivering content to consumers. "Six months after ABC struck the first deal to sell commercial-free TV episodes online, networks are rushing to offer everything from individual programs to season subscriptions. Web viewers can even watch some shows for free -- with advertising." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (AP) 04/11/06
Posted: 04/11/2006 6:52 am
Horrible, Inspiring, Terrifying: Inside United 93 Trailers for the new film, United 93, have been playing in major cities for some time now, and from the outraged reaction of some, it's clear that not all of America is ready for a fictionalized account of one of the darkest days in the country's history. But for those who worked on the film, it was a tribute to bravery, and nothing like the callous exploitation some fear it will be. "If this is a horror movie, it is an edifying one, a history lesson with the pulse of a world-on-the-line suspense film." Time Magazine 04/09/06
Posted: 04/10/2006 9:03 pm
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