As this year’s Sundance Festival showed, digital technology is finally taking over the movies. “Recent breakthroughs have already demonstrated the ability to make movies with the same clarity as 35-millimetre film using high-definition video cameras, and then project them digitally in theatres with no loss in image quality. In 1998, the number of digital video films presented at the film festival could have been counted on one hand. This year, more than 40 per cent of the festival’s 200-plus films were either shot on digital video or projected digitally. The audience has barely noticed the difference.”
Month: April 2004
London’s Newest Opera Company Debuts
Raymond Gubbay’s Savoy Opera opens. With cheap tickets, the opera attracts an audience you don’t typically see at Covent Garden. “It’s a myth that opera is posh; it’s the most visceral of art forms, preoccupied with love, sex and death. It’s just opera-goers who have given it a bad name. If Gubbay can reclaim it for coach parties who might otherwise go to Mamma Mia!, good for him.”
Artist Smuggles Rat Into Museum
“The graffiti artist Banksy has managed to smuggle in his latest work, a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, into the Natural History Museum where it was exhibited on a wall for several hours. Staff did not notice that the rat was out of place amid the museum’s usual fare of dinosaur bones and artefact from the animal kingdom.”
British Museum – Art Palace Or Coffee House?
“Has the British Museum gone a cafe or two too far? Ever since the V&A found itself at the centre of a storm in a teacup with its Saatchi-devised ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’ campaign of 1988, museums have taken over where the 18th-century coffee house left off. More than mere icing on the cake, they have become the bread and butter (or perhaps that should be ciabatta and olive oil) of many visits.”
A High-Tech Solution To Plagiarism
“For years, educators at colleges and universities have marshaled software tools to ensure that their students’ work is original. Now, tainted by scandals or leery of the Internet’s copy-enabling power, a growing number of newspapers, law firms and other businesses are using data-sifting tools that can cross-check billions of digital documents and swiftly recognize patterns in just seconds.”
New Dispute Over Shroud Of Turin
Archaeologists are upset over a TV documentary that claims the Shroud of Turin might be authentic. “Experts have widely considered the 14-foot-long linen sheet, which has been kept since 1578 in a cathedral in Turin, Italy, a forgery since carbon-dating tests were performed in 1988. Those tests placed its origin at A.D.1300.”
Library of Congress To Receive 4,000 Artifacts
The Library of Congress will announce today that it is to be the beneficiary of a major gift from Florida real estate mogul Jay Kislak, which includes a $4 million map of the New World dating from the 16th century, as well as 4,000 other early American artifacts. The map, known as the Carta Marina, is a matching piece to another similar map purchased by the library last year. “Items in the collection date back as far as 1200 B.C. and primarily involve what is now the southeastern United States, the Caribbean and Mesoamerica.” No official monetary estimate of the value of the donation has been released, but Kislak’s complete personal collection has been assessed at over $100 million.
Philly Summer Season Looking Awfully Pops-Heavy
The Philadelphia Orchestra’s summer series at the city’s Mann Music Center is taking a decided turn towards light pops programming, reports David Patrick Stearns. While orchestral summers are frequently lighter than winter programming, there’s no mistaking the direction the orchestra is taking, with fully 40% of the concerts scheduled for the Mann categorized as more pop than classical. Attendance figures from the last several summers seem to suggest that the orchestra, which is coping with a nearly $6 million deficit, will benefit financially from the increase in lighter fare.
So That’s $450,000 Per Centimeter, Right?
“One of the art world’s most significant — and expensive — trials… concluded yesterday at the High Court in London with the judge reserving decision until later this month. The trial, which began March 10, pitted Taylor Thomson, 45, (née Lynne Lesley Thomson), the only daughter of Toronto businessman Kenneth Thomson, who is one of the world’s 15 wealthiest men, against venerable Christie’s auction house and the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, 43. The British media estimates legal costs of the trial exceeded $4.5-million. The dispute has revolved around a pair of allegedly 18th-century urns, each about 5 centimetres tall.”
‘Blue Metropolis’ Comes Of Age
“Montreal’s Blue Metropolis writers’ festival, which ended on Sunday, has ballooned into a major Canadian literary event in just six years. With a million-dollar budget, and headliners including Paul Auster, Yann Martel and Pico Iyer, the Blue Met is now an event on the scale of the International Festival of Authors in Toronto or the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival.” The festival still has a hard time drawing the superstar authors who roam the Toronto and Vancouver fests, but the lack of star power is made up for with the distinctively ‘Montreal sensibility’ of the whole event.