“Marketing books has always been a tough business, but these days authors are joining forces with the publicity machine and working everything from fashion layouts to product endorsements to keep their amazon.com rank at the top.”
Month: June 2008
Viewers Down For Network TV But Advertisers Commit More Money
The Big Five nets will get $9.23 billion in upfront commitments this year, up 1.2% from last year’s $9.12 billion.
NEA Steps In To Help New Plays
“The National Endowment for the Arts is kicking in $280,000 for developing and producing new plays during the next 2 1/2 years. The NEA New Play Development Program has $90,000 each available for two scripts; they must be already written and attached to theater companies planning to stage their world premieres by the end of 2010.”
Musicians Cozying Up To Wal-mart (And Vice Versa)
“The deals highlight the changing dynamics of the music industry as once-powerful labels decline because of the migration to digital downloads. To fill the gap, musicians are scrambling to connect with fans, and Wal-Mart is using these exclusive deals to assume a new role: hit maker.”
This Year’s Broadway? All In All A Good Season
Straight plays made a comeback, and despite a strike, attendance was strong too…
Is Google Training Us To Be Dull Thinkers?
“Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking–perhaps even a new sense of the self.”
Protests After California City Takes Down Art Exhibition
The show was deemed not appropriate for public display.
Ohio Cutting Back Arts Funding
The Ohio Arts Council is cutting seven positions from its staff of 35 and reducing unpaid grants by 7.7 percent to offset a $2.5 million, or 10 percent, reduction in state funding.
Canadian Police Recover Some Of The Stolen Haida Gold
“Police in B.C. say some of the artwork stolen from the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology has been recovered. Twelve works of gold jewelry by Haida artist Bill Reid and three Mexican necklaces comprised of gold coins were stolen from the museum overnight May 23 in a highly sophisticated break-in.”
The Architect’s Inner Music
Before he was an architect, Rafael Viñoly was a musician. “There is no piece of music that could relate to anything else but itself and its world. It is truly an independent. The one thing coplanar with music is the compositional aspect, the fact that you are composing something. Architecture is essentially a score, and what happens with it depends on the people who play it, enjoy it, use it, or hate it.”