Month: April 2005

Bellevue Art Museum To Reopen

The Bellevue Art Museum in a Seattle suburb plans to reopen in June as a crafts museum. When the museum abruptly closed in September 2003, the “museum was running out of money and faced low attendance after moving to a new $23 million building downtown in 2001. Some of the problems were attributed to lackluster exhibits, a cold, unwelcoming feeling inside the building, an unclear mission and poor management.”

Pompidou Picasso Recovered

A Picasso painting stolen last year from the Pompidou, has been recovered. “Following a tip-off, police traced the painting – worth 2.5m euros (£1.7m) – to a house in Paris where the painting was hidden behind a wardrobe. Cubist painting Nature Morte a la Charlotte, completed in 1924, was reported missing in May last year from a restoration workshop.”

Study: Video Games Beats Music

A new study says that men are now spending more on video games than they do on music. “The survey by Nielsen Entertainment shows that DVDs are the number one purchase for men each month. It also found that games are starting to attract significant numbers of players beyond the core target market of males aged eight to 34.”

Knowledge – Of Art And Science

“In the modern world, we have seen scientific knowledge assume a status as the most valuable or authoritative kind of knowledge, while artistic knowledge and intelligence is relegated to a secondary status. Science usually struggles when that which is unquantifiable can’t be squeezed into an equation, while music and the arts often stretch perception away from the steady state. Yet equations are metaphors for reality and perhaps have more similarity to art than we might usually accord them.”

Brook: Ticket Prices Are Killing Theatre

” Director Peter Brook is on a mission. “Wishing to make theater accessible to all, he’s the first internationally known director to lead the way by insisting that ticket prices must come down. Mr. Brook is saying, in urgent effect, if so many people can no longer afford to go to the theater, what’s the point of theater? It’s the most pressing question of all. The cost of tickets is killing the audience. They’re also killing the future. Kids can’t afford to go. Broadway will always be opportunistic Broadway. The bottom-line choices, the safe, star-driven revivals, are by now normal. We’ve come to expect no better. But in our proudly multi-ethnic city, the loyal audiences at our big nonprofit institutions remain noticeably white, middle-class and aging.”

Australia Arts Council Restructured

A plan restructuring the 30-year-old Australia Arts Council that was loudly opposed by many has been approved. “The boards that give grants for community cultural development and new media projects will be killed off and their responsibilities spread across existing boards and two new departments. A $9million pool will be set up to fund projects the council deems significant. And an internal restructure will help staff become more active in finding projects to fund, rather than simply reacting to grant applications.”

Capturing Margot Fonteyn (Not Hardly)

They’re trying to make a biopic of Margot Fonteyn. But it doesn’t seem doable, writes Norman Lebrecht. “What Fonteyn possessed, more than the gift for dance, was a presence that transcends charisma or any of the usual qualities of attraction. She was not a woman of great intelligence. Her conversation was mundane and her interests narrow. Unlike world leaders she was not driven by raging ambition or a desire to improve society. She was Peggy Hookham by birth, and Peggy Hookham by nature, pleasingly down to earth. Yet she could enter a crowded room and everyone present knew she was there. Those who worked with her speak of an aura, an impermeable state of being.”

TV Failing At The Arts

TV isn’t showing arts very well in the UK. Everyone’s bored with it, and it’s easy to criticize. The question is how to make it better. “TV has lost a sense of self-esteem, even if it has plenty of arrogance and self-assertion. It has lost that 1960s mandarin view of art that took its responsibilities very seriously. I’m not saying we should turn back the clock, but TV should be proud of what it does.”