Cash remains tight at the museum, which still hasn’t recovered from the loss of a third of its endowment’s value in the 2008 crash. Charles Venable is focused on increasing attendance with attractions from an upcoming Matisse show to an art-of-the-automobile exhibition that has some observers fuming.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Computer-Assisted Choreography
Hiroaki Umeda: “I already had an idea of a dance I wanted to do, but no dance style seemed to fit into my vision.” And no money to pay collaborators seemed to make it into his budget. “[But] I already had a computer, which became my tool of creation.”
Can This Project Convince The Suspicious That The Arts Really Aren’t Elitist?
Chloë Booker, founder of Platform33: “The idea came to me a few years ago, after trying to convince a friend to come to a classical orchestral concert with me. She didn’t want to commit her money and evening to something she knew nothing about and saw as pretentious, boring, and just not for her. Platform33 is designed to be the introductory step, where you see artists from completely different genres perform in intimate, unconventional venues.”
Apple Settles iTunes Case, Will Give Away $100M In Free Credits
“Apple has agreed to hand out more than $100 million in iTunes store credits to settle a lawsuit alleging that its iPhone and iPad apps allowed children to make purchases without their parent’s knowledge or consent.”
Metropolitan Opera To Reduce Ticket Prices
“Attendance is down this season at the Metropolitan Opera, and officials there acknowledge that the fault is their own. They made going to the opera too expensive. So in a rarity in the rarefied world of the performing arts, the Met said it would reduce ticket prices next season. The average cost of admission will drop by 10 percent.”
Denis Forman, 95, Producer Of Legendary British TV Series
“One of the founding executives of Granada TV in the mid 1950s, Forman went on to become is joint managing director and chairman between 1974 and 1987. He was responsible for a new generation of programmes that helped to redefine British TV,” including Coronation Street, World in Action, Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown.”
Is Barnes & Noble Backing Away From The Nook?
“A person familiar with Barnes & Nobles’s strategy acknowledged that this quarter, which includes holiday sales, has caused executives to realize the company must move away from its program to engineer and build its own devices and focus more on licensing its content to other device makers.”
Montreal’s Just For Laughs Fest Branches Into Large-Scale Musicals
The producers of the Cannes of stand-up comedy are launching Just for Laughs Theatricals, a New York-based production company that plans to develop musicals for Broadway and the West End and to license French versions of those shows for Montreal.
Theft Of Ancient Babylonian Glazed Bricks Much Bigger Than We Knew
“Four hundred fragments of bricks from Babylon’s Ishtar Gate and Processional Way have been stolen. The local Iraqi press reported the loss of 33 pieces last October, but in February the minister of tourism and antiquities, Liwa Sumaism, gave the much higher figure.”
Could Smart Appliances Start Bossing Us Around?
“A revolution in technology is allowing previously inanimate objects – from cars to trash cans to teapots – to talk back to us and even guide our behavior. But how much control are we willing to give up?”