Ideas

Why Is Art Supposed To Be Easy? "According to current wisdom, listening to music, reading poetry or contemplating a painting should not be thought of as work, least of all as hard work. Works of art that demand serious attention, time and effort are treated with suspicion because they might not appeal to a significant section of the population.The official politics of culture of our time stigmatises such art for not being inclusive. Inclusive art is that which is readily accessible since it does not require much effort or understanding on the part of the public. From this standpoint, the engagement with art is not seen as a challenge but as an easily digestible act of consumption." The Telegraph (UK) 07/13/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:27 pm

Scientists: Man Can Control Computer Functions With His Brain "With a tiny electronic chip implanted in the motor cortex of his brain, a 25-year-old man paralyzed from the neck down for five years has learned to use his thoughts to operate a computer, turn on a TV set, open email, play a video game and manipulate a robotic arm." Chicago Tribune
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:20 pm

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Visual Arts

Adele's New Home Conventional wisdom these days says that art unfairly looted by invading armies (especially Nazis) should be returned to its rightful owner and country of origin, no matter the consequences. So it was that Gustav Klimt's famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was removed from Austria's National Gallery and returned to the model's heirs last year. Rather than keep the painting, however, the family promptly took it to auction, where it sold for a record $135 million. Now, one of the most famous paintings in the world is hanging in a New York businessman's Fifth Avenue gallery, 4000 miles from its Austrian home. New York Post 07/13/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 6:41 am

Musée du Contradiction Paris's new Musée du quai Branly has been absorbing plenty of body blows from critics since opening last month, but Lisa Rochon points out how seldom the city of light has even attempted architectural provocation, and says that the Branly "a scandalous and necessary aberration that drags its jagged edge over the lousy, looting history of the French colonial era... And herein lies the great dilemma of the museum -- its very existence is an assault on aboriginal peoples around the world." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/13/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 6:29 am

Native Museum To Go It Alone "After nearly 30 years together, Kendall College and the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian are going their own ways. On Sept. 1, Kendall plans to give title to the museum's land, building and collection, all in northwest Evanston, Illinois, to a non-profit formed to assume them." The split has been years in the making, as "Kendall wanted assurances that the new non-profit -- which was named after the museum -- had the wherewithal to sustain the Mitchell." Chicago Tribune 07/13/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 6:18 am

Met To Hike Entrance Fee 25% In an attempt to compensate for an operating deficit that has been averaging $3 million per year, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is hiking its suggested admission fee to $20. The Met's admission charge has always been voluntary, but the museum doesn't go out of its way to call attention to that fact, and some are already complaining that the hike will discourage many lower-income individuals from seeing one of New York's great museums. The New York Times 07/13/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 5:55 am

CultureGrrl: A Fake Duccio? Really? Lee Rosenbaum takes a look at claims by one scholar that the Metropolitan Museum's Duccio (for which it paid $50 million last year) is a fake. "None of this proves that the painting is a fake from the 19th century, as Beck somewhat recklessly claims, or even that it's not by Duccio. The Met's conservation lab has done a technical examination of the painting that it says provides additional support for the attribution. It should release those findings in detail (including any attempts to date the painting scientifically), to help clarify these matters." CultureGrrl 07/11/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:47 pm

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Music

OCPAC Gets A Much-Needed Pledge With only two months to go before the opening of its new concert hall, the Orange County (CA) Performing Arts Center is still frantically raising the money it needs to complete construction and manage the facility. The effort got a big boost this week with the announcement of a $5 million gift by a longtime OCPAC board member's family. The center has thus far raised $138 million for the concert hall since 1999, on a total goal of $200 million. Los Angeles Times 07/13/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 6:34 am

Talk About Suffering For Your Art... "The body of the world's most famous castrato singer, Farinelli, has been exhumed to try to find out how his virtuoso voice developed. Scholars in the northern Italian city of Bologna will measure his skull and bones and perform DNA tests... In 17th and 18th Century Italy, up to 4,000 boys a year, often from poor families, were castrated from the age of eight upwards. They became opera singers and soloists in church choirs and royal palaces. Very few actually went on to achieve success, but those who did became the pop stars of their day, and they behaved as such." BBC 07/12/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 5:48 am

Schiff: Dissing Mozart Not Right Andras Schiff is tired of some people saying they don't care for Mozart. "Why is it that certain people get such immense pleasure from this kind of iconoclasm? Does attacking the greatest artists in history make them feel better? It's good to enjoy the benefits of democracy, such as freedom of speech - let's remember the recent affair with the Danish cartoons and not ever take it for granted. But Mozart's greatest admirers included Haydn, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Nietzsche, Debussy, and Britten. Putting this list against that of a few detractors, whose side would you like to be on?" The Guardian (UK) 07/13/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:38 pm

Trudeau, The Opera Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was an operatic figure with a very big life. And now there's to be an opera about him. "Trudeau: Long March/Shining Path is being written by librettist George Elliott Clarke and jazz composer D.D. Jackson. Clarke, a poet acclaimed for his Whylah Falls and author of the novel George and Rue, has written two earlier operas: Beatrice Chancy, about slaves in Nova Scotia, and Québécité, which is the story of interracial lovers." CBC 07/12/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:01 pm

De Waart To Perth? Will Edo De Waart be the next music director of the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra? "De Waart, a former music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra and Netherlands Opera, would be quite a catch for a band in such a far-flung town as Perth. (The city is roughly 2,000 miles from Sydney and 2,400 miles from Singapore.) But de Waart's career has been concentrated in that part of the world lately: in 2004 he finished up a very successful 10-year stint as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony and went directly to the Hong Kong Philharmonic, where he is now artistic director." PlaybillArts 07/12/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 3:53 pm

• Previously: Conductor Suddenly Departs Australian Orchestra When Matthias Bamert became music director of the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra, he was touted as the group's savior. Now he has suddenly departed, and no one's talking. "The reason Bamert fell out of favour depends on who you ask, although no one can say on the record because players have received written and verbal warnings not to make any public comment. Before the China tour they signed a code of conduct that reminded them that section 70 of the Crimes Act made it an offence to publicly disclose company matters." The Australian 07/11/06

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People

Michener: We've Lost A Major Artist Charles Michener mourns Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. "On Monday, July 3, the most luminous voice I’ve ever heard was extinguished when the American mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died at the age of 52. Everything this astonishing woman did was almost too much to bear. As with Maria Callas, whom she matched in eruptive intensity, Hunt Lieberson’s performances took you so deeply into what she was singing about that the experience verged on voyeurism." New York Observer 07/12/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:15 pm

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Theatre

Changes Afoot In Chicago The League of Chicago Theatres has undergone twin shifts in recent weeks, shutting down production of its four-year-old program book, Chicagoplays. Then, at the end of June, the League's CEO quit after less than a year on the job, saying that with the demise of the program book, "an executive with technical and marketing expertise would better serve the organization as it refocuses on its longtime primary missions of selling tickets and marketing." Backstage 07/12/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 5:39 am

Spring Awakes (And So Does The Musical) John Heilpern has seen a new musical he believes will change Broadway. "If we’re very lucky, once in a generation an unexpected new musical comes along and changes everything. That is the thrilling achievement of 'Spring Awakening', which has been brilliantly directed by Michael Mayer, at the Atlantic Theater Company." New York Observer 07/12/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:12 pm

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Publishing

But It's Educational Porn, Right? Student magazines used to trend either to the ultra-serious or the supremely satirical. But these days, there's a new campus publishing trend in the mix, and it's enough to make the boys at the Harvard Lampoon blush. Student-run sex magazines have been around for years, but never before have such erotic publications gained such legitimacy as they now have on college campuses across the U.S. Chicago Tribune 07/13/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 6:11 am

Paperback Boom Why would a book that sold only modestly when it first hit stores suddenly become a huge hit in paperback? The answer is complicated, but suffice to say that book clubs, word of mouth, and the influence of big-box retailers all have something to do with it. The New York Times 07/13/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 5:59 am

What Makes A Shakespeare Folio So Valuable? The earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's works is being sold at aucion and is expected to sell for between £2.5m and £3.5 million. "What makes a book so valuable? And why would even a multi-millionaire be prepared to pay such a sum? However ludicrous the prices fetched by paintings, you can see why a wealthy person or institution would be willing to stump up. There it is on the wall: beautiful, unique, luminous. But the First Folio is not aesthetically delectable. The print quality is not wonderful and there are many printing errors. It contains an artwork, the Martin Droeshout engraving that is our only certain likeness of the bard, but it is a cack-handed portraiture. And the book is not unique. It is not even rare." The Guardian (UK) 07/13/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:32 pm

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Media

Enough With The Hallelujahs Already! Leonard Cohen's mournful paean to music, "Hallelujah," has been around for more than two decades now, but filmmakers and TV producers just can't seem to get enough of it. Chris Hewitt loves the song, but wouldn't mind never hearing it again as an all-purpose backdrop to some melodramatic plot twist that could have stood on its own. "Great as it is, the song has become the musical equivalent of a tube of toothpaste. Each time it's used, it becomes a little emptier, a little less effective." St. Paul Pioneer Press 07/13/06
Posted: 07/13/2006 6:53 am

Disney Slashing Production, Jobs Disney is slashing jobs and reducing the number of movies it produces in a year from 18 to 8. "Disney's move reflects a trend in Hollywood to cut costs amid increasing overhead, production budgets and marketing bills. Disney has said for some time it was going to cut its total number of films and concentrate on Disney-branded offerings, which make more money that those released on the studio's Touchstone label." Yahoo! (AP) 07/12/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:23 pm

Study Say LA Gained Movie Jobs In 2005 The number of movie jobs in Los Angeles increased for the second year in a year last year. "In Los Angeles, the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County and three smaller, nearby cities, 'production days' on feature films rose from 8,707 in 2004 to 9,518 last year, according to a midyear update from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. Until 2004, location production days had fallen for seven years in a row, a function of runaway production." Backstage 07/12/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 4:07 pm

Oscar Invites 83 Countries To Compete Hollywood has invited films from 83 countries to compete for this year's foreign-language Oscar. The countries "include the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, who have received their first invites this year. A recent rule change means that films entered for the award need no longer be in the country's official language." BBC 07/12/06
Posted: 07/12/2006 3:58 pm

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