The Barnes Collection is doubling its admission price to $10 in June. “The increase, the Barnes’ first since 1995, puts its ticket prices at or below those of other major art institutions in Philadelphia and nationally. The Barnes said the price increase was necessary because of its ‘precarious financial situation, inflation, and the rising costs associated with operating our facilities and maintaining the collection’…”
Month: April 2005
Brian Eno On A Definition Of Culture:
“Culture is everything we don’t have to do. Eating is necessary, but cuisine is culture. Clothes must be worn, but couture is culture. Haircuts and Shakespeare and early Saxon burial poetry all pose some kind of unnecessary order, he said, that we accept because it stimulates our most distinctive faculty. Imagination is the only thing we’re really good at. What we’re doing [when we’re engaging with cultural objects] is exercising that part of our mind that makes it possible to imagine things being ordered differently, and most importantly, to imagine what’s in other people’s minds. . . . If something is possible in art, it’s thinkable in life.”
New Beat For Corporation For Public Broadcasting
“Typically one of the quietest bureaucracies in Washington, the quasi-governmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been unusually active in recent weeks. CPB this month appointed a pair of veteran journalists to review public TV and radio programming for evidence of bias, the first time in CPB’s 38-year history that it has established such positions. PBS officials were unaware that the corporation intended to review its news and public affairs programs, such as “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and “Frontline,” until the appointments were publicly announced.”
Bellevue Museum To Reopen With Crafts
The museum world was shocked when the Bellevue Art Museum (in a suburb of Seattle) suddenly closed two years ago, only a couple of years after it had opened a fancy new Steven Holl building. Now the museum has reconsidered its mission and is reopening as a crafts museum. Will it work?
Your Ad To Play Here
“Product placement and endorsement deals have long been staples in television shows, movies and radio programs and even, more recently, on video games. But they have been rare on Broadway. Now, advertisers, casting about for new ways to attract increasingly distracted consumers, have turned their attention to the theater world. And producers, always looking for extra cash to offset rising costs, are receptive.”
Candidate Pulls Out Of Getty Director Search
The leading candidate to replace Deborah Gribbon as director of the Getty Museum has said he doesn’t want the job. William Griswold has been the museum’s acting director. “The news has been the talk of the Los Angeles art world, as well as among Getty staff members, who would not speak for attribution. Mr. Griswold also declined to comment.”
Tour This
“Touring a work internationally can transform the artists, allow the work to evolve, build a profile, develop a larger audience, validate companies in the eyes of their home audience, recoup their investment, or just keep everyone employed.” But “touring can also be a killer, psychologically and financially.”
Hollywood Goes To Africa
Has Hollywood discovered Africa? “Africa is almost as much of a ‘dark continent’ for moviegoers today as in the past. There’s a grim irony in this, at a time when headlines about western Sudan are crying out to the world for attention, just as events in Somalia did a dozen years ago. It takes catastrophe of huge proportions to focus American minds on African issues.”
New York’s Sad Dance Season
Robert Gottlieb looks back at a season of dance that didn’t add up to much. “Large talent, of course, can’t be legislated into existence, and it’s not the fault of the Rhodens and O’Days and Kudelkas and Greenbergs that they don’t have it. But let’s not be deceived by the culture’s machinery of publicity and self-promotion or by our ardent longing for the real thing. That we have so few first-rate choreographers today is a sad fact; better to accept it than to lie to ourselves.”
Will Digitization Make Libraries Rethink What They Do?
So Google is going to digitize vast stores of the world’s books. “Most librarians and archivists are ecstatic about the announcement, saying it will likely be remembered as the moment in history when society finally got serious about making knowledge ubiquitous. But some of the same people believe Google’s efforts and others like it will force libraries and librarians to reëxamine their core principles—including their commitment to spreading knowledge freely. Letting a for-profit organization like Google mediate access to library books, after all, could either open up long-hidden reserves of human wisdom or constitute the first step toward the privatization of the world’s literary heritage.”