“Live shows were once a staple of television. Ditto game shows and shows with sponsor products interwoven into the contents. Now the Spike TV cable channel is bringing all three genres back in one fell swoop. 120 Live, a game show sponsored by the Fusion line of shaving products sold by Gillette, is to appear on Spike six times on Monday and Tuesday. The title derives from the length of the show: two minutes.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Licensing Your Music: It’s Not Selling Out Anymore
“While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Web-site pop-up ads or a brand. Musicians have to eat and want to be heard, and if that means accompanying someone else’s sales pitch or videogame, well, it’s a living.”
Time To Relax The Taboo Against Deaccessioning?
In light of the recent troubles at the National Academy Museum and MOCA, “[w]hy, several experts ask, is it so wrong for a museum to sell art from its collection to raise badly needed funds? And now that many institutions are facing financial hardship, should the ban on selling art to cover operating costs be eased?”
Dorothy Sarnoff, 94, The Original Image Consultant
“Sweaty palms, nervous laughter, a Brooklyn accent, panic-induced silences. These were just a few of the image blemishes addressed by Dorothy Sarnoff, an opera singer and Broadway star who had a much bigger second career as one of the first, and most influential, image consultants.”
Reflecting On A Pair Of American Icons
Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee Williams: Both were world-famous, gay, and profoundly affected their art forms, and both had significant anniversaries in 2008 (Lenny’s 90th birthday, the 25th anniversary of Tennessee’s death). But Bernstein received big celebrations in major classical music centers, while Williams got “small, gay-themed affairs in places like Provincetown and Glasgow.” Why the difference?
Birth Of A Ballet Collective
The story of five young women, all professional ballet dancers and adult undergrads at Columbia University, who got together at a diner one night and dreamed up the Columbia Ballet Collaborative, which provides themselves and other dancers the opportunity to perform outside the established company system.
Another Bogus Holocaust Memoir Foiled
“On Saturday, Berkley Books canceled [Herman] Rosenblat’s memoir, Angel at the Fence. Rosenblat acknowledged that he and his wife did not meet, as they had said for years, at a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where she allegedly sneaked him apples and bread.”
A Star-Studded New Transatlantic Troupe
The Bridge Project, a British-American theater company founded, by Kevin Spacey, Sam Mendes and BAM’s Joe Melillo, begins its inaugural season next month. “‘I don’t want London to feel it’s getting something from America, or America to feel it’s getting something from London,’ Mr. Mendes said.’I want to take those labels off entirely.'”
Why Does Zukerman Stay In Ottawa?
When the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada’s small-ish capital signed such a big star as music director, some observers were more than a little puzzled. “Pinchas Zukerman in Ottawa? Had the great violinist lost his bow arm? Were the tax people pursuing him south of the 49th parallel?” William Littler suggests another reason: the band itself. “‘Just wait until you hear them tonight,’ says the maestro. ‘Listen to their Tchaikovsky!'”
Lamenting The Polaroid
Michael Kimmelman: “Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one’s eyes, right before one’s eyes. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film.”