“Museum attendants should be stopped from ‘shushing’ children and displays should be hung low enough for youngsters to see properly, according to a manifesto to make museums more family-friendly published today.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
What Good Editing Does (And How We All Do It)
“More and more of our reviewers are complaining that too many elementary mistakes — clichés, faulty grammar, even errors of fact — are finding their way into finished books. … Some readers — and probably a lot more authors — may shrug and say, so what? Isn’t editing an extra, and a pretty artificial one to boot: lofty standards imposed upon manuscripts by prissy librarian types who love to justify their existence by catching errors? But editing, I believe, is something we all do, a fundamental human tendency.”
‘Fundamental Flaws’ In Fringe Ticketing, Report Finds
“An independent report into the box office fiasco at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe has found ‘fundamental flaws’ in the way it was run. The world’s largest arts festival was plunged into chaos last summer when its new box office system malfunctioned. Thousands of people were left without tickets and many performers claimed their shows were undersold.”
For Chart Nerds Only: A Space For The Strictly Classical
“A new chart for ‘purely classical’ music has been launched, the Official Charts Company has announced. The specialist classical chart,” which debuts in the March issue of Gramophone, “will be based on weekly sales of recordings which are 100% classical. The OCC’s long-running combined classical albums chart requires 60% of an album’s repertoire to be classical.”
Brandeis President: We’ll Sell ‘Minute Number’ Of Artworks
Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz on selling off pieces of the Rose Art Museum collection: “We’re going to take our time. We’re not unaware of the fact that the art market is depressed. It’s not like we were born yesterday. Everything is depressed. Housing is depressed. The arts is depressed. Everybody is depressed.”
Sustenance, Sanctuary, And Why Art (Still) Matters
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing when it comes to the arts in America. The good news is that President Obama wants to include the arts in his bailout package. Conservatives, however, are up in arms. The one constant in all this is that art in America has come to be seen as a frill, by everyone from right-wing talk-show hosts to the trustees of Brandeis.” Why, then, should we care about art?
The Anxiety Radar: Will $50M NEA Stimulus Fuel Backlash?
“While the NEA money is a minuscule portion of the $819 billion House [stimulus] bill, it has become a lightning rod for some critics, who question whether the dollars for the arts will create many jobs – and who see the money as a symbol of House Democrats trying to lard up the plan with spending wish lists that have been pent up for years.”
Shepard Fairey Is A Pretender, Cartoonist Says
Editorial cartoonist Dan Wasserman takes on poster artist Shepard Fairey: “I understand that we live in a world of rampant sampling and remixing, but claiming to be hip or leftist is not an excuse for ripping off other creators. It’s not even fundamentally a legal issue (though it may be that as well) — it’s respect for other artists. And the argument that the art is ‘transformative,’ so no nod to the original is necessary, is a weak one.”
AP Seeks Credit, Compensation For Obama’s ‘Hope’ Poster
“On buttons, posters and websites, the image was everywhere during last year’s presidential campaign: A pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and captioned ‘HOPE.'” Artist Shepard Fairey based the image on an Associated Press photo. “The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation.”
Kindness Of Strangers Has LImits: School Threatens Artist
“The University of the South, which owns the intellectual property rights for [Tennessee] Williams’s ‘Streetcar Named Desire,’ has threatened legal action to stop performances of the one-man show ‘Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire,’ which is scheduled to run through March 15 at SoHo Playhouse.” The play is about “a modern-day Blanche weathering Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Superdome and a subsequent job placement as a cashier at Popeye’s.”