Adam Weinberg is the new director of the Whitney Museum. “Weinberg, who has been director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., since 1999, is no stranger to the Whitney. He has worked there twice before, most recently as a senior curator. He succeeds Maxwell L. Anderson, who resigned under fire in May.”
Month: August 2003
The Next JK Rowling? Yikes!
Children’s book writer Louisa Young was briefly touted in the press as “the next JK Rowling.” That’s good, Young supposes, but who wants to be the next JKR? “Why would anyone want a New JK Rowling? The old one works perfectly well. I’m not sure another one is practical. Are there enough trees? Well, I blame the papers. It’s them wot want one, because JKR has become one of today’s sure-fire, never-spiked topics.”
The Best German… Er, Austrian Of All Time?
A German TV poll to name the “best German of all time” “got off to a shaky start yesterday after the Austrian ambassador to Germany complained that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose name appears on a list of eligible candidates, is Austrian.”
The CD DJ
DJs perform by spinning vinyl records to get the sounds they’re after. Now a new spinnable CD player offers DJs the opportunity to go digital. “The key to the system – which resembles a small version of a vinyl deck – is a grooved, touch-sensitive jog wheel, which allows records to be stopped and scratched at any time. Until now, the inability to do this was one of the key reasons DJs had shunned performing with CD decks. Deck has a memory card that recalls edit points for tracks. Additionally, the system has an internal memory that can remember cue and loop points, and allows tracks to be remixed live.”
Where Are The Comics For A New Decade?
The 70s, 80s and 90s each had their hit comics, those strips that seemed essential to their age. “Doonesbury and Bloom County—and heck, while we’re at it, let’s throw in Dilbert for the ’90s—each managed to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the decade in which they were created. So what of our current decade—nearly four years old, without even a proper name to its credit (the Zeroes?). Are we still subsisting on fond memories of the long defunct Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side?”
Record Crowds At Australian National Gallery
Australia’s new National Gallery of Victoria is a big hit with crowds. “About 1.5 million people have visited the Potter Centre in its first nine months.” The gallery is so popular and “donors are so keen to be part of the action they have contributed more than $70 million under three different schemes in the past four years – a record for Victoria, if not the country.”
Should National Gallery Be Concerned About Digital Piracy?
The movie and music industries are warning London’s National Gallery that the museum’s digitization project is an open invitation to image piracy. “The National Gallery has been working with computer giant Hewlett-Packard for eight years on a scheme to digitise all of its 2300 paintings. The images have been captured with a digital camera that steps backwards and forwards over the painting, a technique that improves the resolution of the image to 100 megapixels, 20 times that of the best consumer cameras. When someone places an order, a six-colour printer in the gallery’s shop will print out a high-quality copy in just five minutes. The gallery hopes to generate extra revenue by allowing accredited print shops around the world to sell copies as well.”
Tiny Charleston Symphony Asks Musicians For Pay Cut
The 46-member Charleston Symphony is facing money problems like every other orchestra in America. So the orchestra is asking its musicians to take an 18 percent pay cut. “The musicians make $21,000 a year on average. An 18-percent reduction would bring that figure down to $17,220.”
Jack of All Trades, Master of Arts
“Over the course of a 40-year professional career he has been a musician, composer, conductor, educator and nationally renowned arts administrator. But now the founding director of the Baltimore School for the Arts, who retired in 1996 after leading the school through its first 16 years of existence, is debuting in an entirely new role: David Simon, American realist painter.”
Weinberg To Head Whitney?
“Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover [Massachusetts], is expected to be named the new director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at a Whitney board meeting tonight, according to a museum-world source close to the search… Whitney directors have had notorious difficulties with the post. The last director, Maxwell L. Anderson, resigned in May after disputes with the board. Anderson’s predecessor, David A. Ross, who was director of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art before going to the Whitney in 1991, left in 1998 to head the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.”