Author: Laura Collins Hughes

For Hardcovers This Fall, No Jacket Required

Books by David Byrne, Colin Beavan and Stephen Elliott will hit the shelves with “cover art [that] is not printed on dust jackets but instead stamped directly onto the boards that hug their pages. The result is a handsome, eye-catching look that reflects a heightened awareness on the part of publishers that books these days cannot be counted on to simply sell themselves. “

Despite Bard’s Best Efforts, Wagner Resists Illumination

“[A]s a musician and a man, Wagner cast a spell, and that was as palpable at [the Bard Music Festival], if sometimes as oppressive, as the heavy rain clouds overhead. And however much the festival was designed to dispel the Wagnerian clouds and show you how he did it, revealing the mechanism was never enough. The better you know this master musician, the more mysterious he seems.”

Subscribers Down, Single Tickets Up For Dudamel’s Debut

“Gustavo Dudamel, the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, may be the hottest conductor on the classical scene, but box-office figures from Walt Disney Concert Hall show that even the young Venezuelan isn’t entirely recession-proof. Subscription tickets, which went on sale in February and account for a majority of total sales, have fallen 7% from last year, the final year of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure with the orchestra. That was at least partly offset by an uptick in the sale of single tickets.”

UK Spent 550,000 Pounds On Artworks In 2008-09

“Details obtained through a freedom of information request reveal that, despite the economic downturn, the Government Art Collection has spent £556,911 on acquisitions in the year 2008 to 2009. This is a 34 per cent increase from the previous year and more than double what was spent on artworks in 2006 to 2007. … The GAC is home to approximately 13,600 works of art, from the 16th century to the present day, and … supplies art for official buildings in Britain and around the world.”

Shakespeare In Vegas, By Way Of The Playboy Mansion

“Neither Shakespeare nor British director Peter Brook probably imagined the staging of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ like the setup at the Palms pool, which was redone on Saturday into a pirate’s ship with skulls, plunder and sexy pirate babes dressed in red.” Aside from the title, which has been amended with the subtitle “A Pirate’s Guilty Pleasure,” what’s “left from the Bard’s play is a love of the physically sensual and a celebration of a naughty imagination.”

Web Matchmaker Gives Micropatronage A Personal Touch

Brooklyn-based start-up Kickstarter “uses the Web to match aspiring da Vincis and Spielbergs with mini-Medicis who are willing to chip in a few dollars toward their projects. Unlike similar sites that simply solicit donations, patrons on Kickstarter get an insider’s access to the projects they finance, and in most cases, some tangible memento of their contribution. The artists and inventors, meanwhile, are able to gauge in real time the commercial appeal of their ideas before they invest a lot of effort — and cash.”

Christie’s Goes To Red Hook

The auction house has signed a 30-year lease on a Brooklyn warehouse that currently houses “piles of dust and detritus as it looms over the weeds and gritty businesses of Imlay Street. But come January, Christie’s executives say, the building will boast infrared video cameras, biometric readers and motion-activated monitors, as well as smoke-, heat- and water-detection systems. Inside, the warehouse will hold the likes of van Gogh, Monet, Picasso and Brancusi, with each collection potentially worth more than the building itself.”

A Fuse Blows, And It’s Lights Out For Concert Hall

“What cruel irony … that it was the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment that was plunged into darkness mid-performance at the Usher Hall – just days after a £25 million makeover was unveiled. One of the [Edinburgh International Festival’s] flagship concerts was delayed by almost half an hour of ‘endarkment’ on Saturday night when the stage lighting failed as soprano Joyce DiDonato was performing.”