Total ticket sales for all performances reached $6.87 million, up 3.8 percent compared with last season. Even though there are three fewer concerts this year, attendance rose more than 1 percent to 190,817, officials said.
Month: July 2016
Composer For Blue Man Group’s Early Shows Sues For $150M In Royalties
“[Ian] Pai, who helped compose many of the show’s wordless songs and served as the musical director for shows in several cities, … [is] asserting that he only recently learned that he’s been underpaid for decades for contributions integral to Blue Man’s success.”
Photographer Puts Her Images In Public Domain; Getty Picks Them Up And Charges Others To License Them; Photographer Sues Getty For $1 Billion
“In December, documentary photographer Carol Highsmith received a letter from Getty Images accusing her of copyright infringement for featuring one of her own photographs on her own website. It demanded payment of $120. This was how Highsmith came to learn that stock photo agencies Getty and Alamy had been sending similar threat letters and charging fees to users of her images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress for use by the general public at no charge.”
The Women Of Abstract Expressionism – Why Were They Written Out Of Art History?
“We talk to Denver Art Museum curator Gwen Chanzit about her important exhibition, speak with the artist Judith Godwin – an Abstract Expressionist who has largely been ignored in the history books, I travel to the Upper West Side to get feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s thoughts on the matter, and finally I chat with curator and critic Karen Wilkin, who was friends with Helen Frankenthaler.” (podcast)
The Problem With Yahoo: The Snapchat Generation Barely Even Knows What It Is
Om Malik: “The $4.8-billion acquisition of Yahoo … by a telephone company, Verizon, is a watershed moment in the history of the Internet. It caps off an era – Web 1.0, for lack of a better term – that will soon be remembered much like telegraphs and rotary phones.”
The Real Problem With Playing Pokémon Go At The Holocaust Museum Isn’t (Just) A Lack Of Respect
“The museum, like the video game, relies on careful curation to furnish an alternate experience of reality. Playing Pokémon Go at a memorial isn’t just disrespectful – it interferes with the augmented reality you’re already in.”
Why Are Zombies Scary? It’s Not Because They Want To Eat Your Brains, Even Metaphorically
“Zombies belong to the realm of horror stories that reappear over and over throughout history – from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day sci-fi – because they raise a more terrifying fear than merely that of a gory death: the threat of eternal life.”
Here Comes The First Feature Film (Co-)Written By Artificial Intelligence Software
Perhaps fittingly, it will be a horror film. “Impossible Things will be partly written by software that has analysed successes in the genre [and] uses that data to formulate a script that [incorporates] successful plot points. The goal: engineer a hit film.”
Einojuhani Rautavaara, Dean Of Finnish Composers, Dead At 87
He was, after Sibelius, “the most famous and popular of Finnish composers … In an output running to over 150 compositions, with dozens of orchestral pieces, Rautavaara’s eight symphonies are one of his important contributions to 20th-century music.” The Seventh, titled Angel of Light, “marked a new breakthrough for Rautavaara to a newer, wider audience, his music no longer the preserve of the critics and cognoscenti.”
Pope Julius III’s Nymphaeum Restored By Mysterious Japanese Donors (What’s A Nymphaeum?)
A nymphaeum is a type of old Roman monument meant to honor nymphs, and this 16th-century version in the Villa Giulia (Julius’s palace) was moldy and monochromatic and overgrown until these anonymous Far Eastern donors came forward.