Who's To Blame When Students Don't Graduate On Time? "About 50 colleges across the country have a six-year graduation rate below 20 percent. Many of the institutions serve low-income and minority students. Such numbers have prompted a fierce debate... in national education circles about who is to blame for the results, whether they are acceptable for nontraditional students, and how universities should be held accountable if the vast majority of students do not graduate." The New York Times 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 5:53 am
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Richard Serra On How Public Sculpture Is Challenging Architecture "Public sculpture used to have a code. There was a given iconography written into the way we worshiped our heroes. Public sculpture had to do with the depiction of a historical time or event. Once the work came down from its pedestal and became organized in relation to its present time and space, it began to challenge architecture in a way that it hadn't before." Christian Science Monitor 09/15/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 7:06 pm
Christie's Widens Its Business Lead "Last year, for the first time in decades, Christie’s claimed ascendancy over Sotheby’s. In the first half of 2006 Christie’s extended its lead, selling $2.13 billion, up 38% on 2005, while Sotheby’s turned over $1.96 billion. Since the 1960s, Sotheby’s has always claimed the lead, although the gap between the two narrowed through the 1990s." The Art Newspaper 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 5:26 pm
The Art Investment Fund And The Museum "Art funds are a relatively new phenomenon, spawned by the financial markets’ constant search for new gizmos and by the booming art market, particularly the contemporary art market. About 12 funds have been created in the past three years, playing off the contrast between the surging art market and the flat stock market. Those that have stayed the course include The Fine Art Fund and The China Fund. Notwithstanding their financial marginality, art funds raise interesting dilemmas when their holdings are shown in public museums."
The Art Newspaper 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 5:25 pm
Tate, National Beaten To Painting By Dealer The Tate Museum and Washington DC's National Gallery were both in the hunt to buy Turner’s masterpiece, The Dark Rigi. But both were outmaneuvered by a crafty London dealer... The Art Newspaper 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 5:22 pm
Seattle Art Museum Agrees To Public Disclosure The Seattle Art Museum considers a reporter's suggestion that deaccessioning records be made public and agrees. "It’s never come up as an issue before. We want to be open and perfectly honest, and we try to be transparent as times change. I had to think it through, but it makes perfect sense." The Stranger (Seattle) 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 5:01 pm
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Diabetes Stalls Baritone's Career "The Canadian Opera Company announced yesterday that baritone Pavlo Hunka has withdrawn from singing in its current production of Richard Wagner's four-opera Ring of the Nibelungs cycle, which concludes on Oct. 1. He will also not be singing in the company's October production of Mozart's Cosí fan tutte. Hunka walked out of Ring dress rehearsals eight days ago. At a release party held yesterday at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts for the singer's new two-disc set of Ukrainian art songs, Hunka revealed that he has been diagnosed with diabetes." Toronto Star 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 7:06 am
Tanglewood Dips, Thanks To Mother Nature Ticket sales at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony's summer home in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts, were down nearly 3% this year, a drop BSO officials attribute to an uptick in rainy days (much of the Tanglewood audience sits on the lawn outside the main shed.) Another factor may have been that perennial Tanglewood superstar James Taylor only played one concert this summer instead of his customary two: one more sellout would have pulled ticket sales even with last year. Boston Globe 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 5:22 am
Paris Finally Gets A Home Back For Classical Music "Paris had become one of the last major western capitals without a world-class space devoted exclusively to symphony concerts and a permanent home for its orchestras. But the French government yesterday set out to reclaim the city's classical music heritage, unveiling a €30m refurbishment of the Art Deco Salle Pleyel in Paris." The Guardian (UK) 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 6:10 pm
Ravinia's Record Summer The Chicago Symphony's Ravinia Festival had a record summer, with 640,000 attending. "We had an excellent year, and there were so many factors in expanding our audience. But the two key things were our strong pop lineup and the Full House initiative designed to build back CSO attendance in the pavilion." Chicago Sun-Times 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 6:00 pm
Universal: YouTube, MySpace Are Stealing Music giant Universal says YouTube and MySpace are enabling the theft of music by Universal artists. "We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars. How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly." Yahoo! (AP) 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 5:35 pm
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Embracing The Suburbs A new Denver-area arts center aims to demystify a topic that many in the urban-centered cultural world would rather ignore: namely, "what is the relationship between culture and the suburbanization of America?" Denver Post 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 6:48 am
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Insanity As A Business Model "In its increasingly aggressive campaign to establish itself as a showcase of Canadian theatre, Ottawa's National Arts Centre is hiring a controversial Quebec director who says he plans to go mad on the job... In accepting the task of programming a nine-production playbill in a city with small and conservative theatre audiences, [Wajdi] Mouawad boldly announced that art is born from artists' hallucinatory perspectives that change the way we see the world, and that his job was to promote this kind of madness." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 6:52 am
John Drummond, 71 A short-tenured but highly influential director of the Edinburgh International Festival has died. John Drummond, who ran the legendary fest from 1979 to 1983, was credited with turning "what had been a rather formal presentation of classical music into a kaleidoscopic celebration of many arts. [He] diversified the festival’s programs to include an assortment of ethnic musicians, dance performances, book fairs, art exhibits, a film festival and what he called 'street happenings.'" The New York Times 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 5:50 am
Rowling Nearly Loses Harry To The Luggage Hold JK Rowling nearly missed a flight back to London when airport security wanted her to check her in-progress manuscript for the new (and last) Harry Potter. "A large part of it is handwritten and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the US. They let me take it on thankfully, bound up in elastic bands." The Guardian (UK) 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 6:20 pm
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Hard Work + Luck = Cheap Tix Broadway tickets are impossibly expensive and hard to find, so you might as well not bother, right? Wrong. "Broadway is also one of New York’s great bargain districts, with a range of incentives and discount programs — some well known, some obscure — to lure bodies into seats. It is still possible to attend even the most in-demand shows at remarkably good prices, but it’s not easy." The New York Times 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 5:42 am
Cost Of Restoration Proves Too High Plans for the renovation of an old Philadelphia movie palace into a theater capable of hosting touring Broadway shows have been scrapped after construction costs began to rise at "an alarming pace." Local preservationists have been working to save the Art Deco-style Boyd Theater for four years, but its future as the anchor of a newly refurbished neighborhood is now in doubt. Philadelphia Inquirer 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 5:32 am
Met Opera Looks To Theatre World For Talent The Metropolitan Opera's new boss Peter Gelb is intent on bringing more theatrical talent to the Met's stages. "It's essential, in order elevate the theatricality of our operas to the high musical standards that are already there, that we need to bring in the world's great directors. Many of them are theatre directors who occasionally dabble in opera. Some are opera directors who branch off into theatre." Playbill 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 6:48 pm
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Prairie Home Star Power How do you open a successful new indy bookstore in a town where such storefronts have been closing by the dozens? Well, you could convince Garrison Keillor to be the owner. The "Prairie Home Companion" host and author has announced plans to open just such a store in St. Paul's historic Cathedral Hill neighborhood. Rumors of Keillor's interest in such a project had been floating around the Twin Cities for some time. The Star Tribune (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 5:57 am
Books In Brooklyn. You Gadda Problem Wid Dat? What better place for a festival celebrating the great tradition of literature than... um, Brooklyn? "Is there such a thing as a Brooklyn aesthetic? A Brooklyn voice? You could make an argument for it, though the Brooklyn voice has evolved... For more than a century Brooklyn was, for writers, a place where fractured English constituted the lingua franca." The New York Times 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 5:44 am
So Men Can't Write Romance Novels? That's the claim by Brit TV presenter Daisy Goodwin. Ray Connolly begs to differ: "Admittedly, men's names don't crop up so often on those displays of books with pink, frilly covers in Waterstone's and Borders, but in truth the history of literature is filled with romantic stories written by men." The Telegraph (UK) 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 6:33 pm
Booker's Solid Shortlist Chosen Six finalists are chosen for this year's Man Booker Prize. "The shortlist was chosen from a 19-book longlist described by the Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armitstead, as 'respectable but not startling'." The Guardian (UK) 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 6:18 pm
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Lawyer: FCC Shredded Study Unfriendly To Big Media Ten years after Congress passed a law which led to ever-greater consolidation of America's radio and TV stations by giant multinational corporations, a former FCC staffer is claiming that the regulatory agency suppressed a 2004 study which concluded that the consolidation was hurting the quality of local TV news. "The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (AP) 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 6:59 am
Unmasking That Shadowy Ratings Board The Motion Picture Association of America, which, among other things, issues age appropriateness ratings for every film released widely on American screens, operates with a level of secrecy generally reserved for international espionage organizations. A new documentary attempts to blow the lid off what the filmmakers see as an irresponsible and arbitrary process through which serious films are made or broken by their ratings. "The board's members seem to have it in for independent films and hold scenes of sex, especially gay sex, to far more stringent standards than they do acts of violence." Boston Globe 09/15/06
Posted: 09/15/2006 6:30 am
Toronto: Politics And Empty Gift Rooms Political films have dominated this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Also: "The gift lounges are reportedly eerily unpopulated this year, ever since the IRS announced that stars must declare gifts from award shows - which sometimes total thousands of dollars in swag - as taxable income." Christian Science Monitor 09/15/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 6:41 pm
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Guillem: Of Fame And Dancing Dance superstar Sylvie Guillem is moving in yet another direction. "During the past five years, however, Guillem has finally been able to push her career in a radical new direction, turning the page on tutu roles and working with choreographers from modern dance." The Guardian (UK) 09/14/06
Posted: 09/14/2006 6:15 pm
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