“If the current anarchy leads to cheaper music for all of us and a fairer distribution of profits to artists, it can only be a good thing. It is to everyone’s benefit — artist, fans and industry — that there is now greater access to music of all ages, provenance and genre than ever. Piracy may be rife, but the appetite to consume and produce music is also booming. What the current developments also point to is the decrease in the cost of making music, which has accelerated dramatically with the cheapening of technology.”
Month: April 2004
Running The Poetry Foundation And Its Cash
John W. Barr is in charge of the Poetry Foundation and caretaker of its $100 million windfall. “I don’t see any reason why a cultural organization can’t be run like a good corporation. If we can do that, we’ll not only be on the road to success ourselves but may even be able to give some ideas to other arts groups.”
One Store Fits All?
How is it that everyone on earth seems to be happy shopping at Walmart? “Eight out of ten American households shop at Wal-Mart at least once a year. Worldwide, more than 100m customers visit Wal-Mart stores every week. Photographs circulated over the internet and purporting to come from the Exploration Rover show NASA’s recent discovery of a Wal-Mart on Mars. The mathematics of big numbers suggests that Wal-Mart’s growth must slow. Amazingly, the opposite appears to be happening.”
The Battle For Florida
The state of Florida slashed arts funding last year. But arts supporters were cheered in the past few weeks when members of the legislature proposed a cultural trust fund that would provide long term funding for the arts, restoring last year’s cuts. But Governor Jeb Bush has been throwing cold water on the plan: “The priorities of the future should be established by future governors and legislatures. That’s the general principle that I support and believe in.”
The Curious Mindest That Puts Brooklyn On The Fringes
“When people talk about N.Y. as the cultural capital of the world, they usually mean Manhattan. The rich institutions in the other four boroughs live marginalized lives, always clamouring for a sliver of mindshare and deeply resenting the inertia that keeps people stuck on the island in the middle of the city. Take the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Built more than a century ago as an expression of the manifest dreams of Brooklyn, which was still its own city, at 560,000 square feet it is the second-largest museum of art in the city, and one of the largest in the United States, with an outstanding collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts.”
TV Commercials – From Rage To Oblivion
People are reported to watch 714 commercials a week, or 37,000 a year, yet it is difficult to think of five of them offhand. For a decade or so, watching ads was as fun as joining the kind of religious cult that plays heavy-metal albums backward, laboriously noting the various shout-outs to Beelzebub. Such fun insists that pop culture is a game run by evil, Orwellian masterminds, who can’t fool us! If a certain innocence predated our almost insane distrust of the advertising industry, then this same distrust has now melted into ennui and fatigued resignation. If any of you have ever lived near a smelting plant or airport, you understand perfectly this process, from novelty to rage to obliviousness.”
Arts Against Bush
“Anti-administration politics are busting out of their usual homes in music, books, fine art and standup comedy, and crossing easily over into feature films, theatre, and even mainstream television shows in the run-up to this November’s U.S. presidential election. At the same time, many of the flag-waving, administration-friendly movies that Hollywood rushed to produce in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, either foundered in development or are bombing at the box office, including the current The Alamo.”
Scottish Opera On Hold
“Scottish Opera has put planning for its coming season on hold after it was told not to enter into any binding contracts. The crisis-hit company now has to wait for the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) and the Scottish Executive to agree on its financial future. In the latest sign of continuing problems, Scottish Opera’s accounts for last year have not been signed off by an auditor.”
Two Decades Of AIDS And Theatre
In the past 20 years an astonishing number of plays have been influenced by the AIDS epidemic. “With all the loss, it would be a mistake to ignore the astonishing theater that has grown in the dark soil of cataclysm. We can almost put our arms around a definable body of AIDS dramatic literature that has energized the theater in the years between the first “Normal Heart” and this one.”
Reinventing Scottish Ballet
Ashley Page took over Scottish Ballet a year ago as the company relaunched itself as a modern dance company. In that time, he’s reinvented everything. “Page is reclaiming the past while updating the repertoire with his own works, curator as well as creator. How Scotland reacts to this policy has yet to be determined. The Festival Theatre was by no means full, though Edinburgh audiences are notoriously wary of Glasgow-based culture, and Scottish Ballet has a damaged reputation still to repair.”