According to a leading index tracking art sales, “over the last 50 years, stocks (as represented by the S&P 500) returned 10.9 percent annually, while the art index returned 10.5 percent per annum. And in the five years between 2001 and 2005, art trounced stocks. But not all art performs equally. In recent years, old masters haven’t done so well, while American art before 1950 has been soaring—up 25.2 percent in the last year alone. And across categories, masterpieces (like the Klimt that Lauder just bought) tend to underperform lower-priced paintings by a substantial margin.”
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Hadid – The Over-Rated Architect
Zaha Hadid gets a lot of buzz these days as architect of the future. But Witold Rybczynski thinks she’s over-rated. “The urbanism is slightly frightening—a vision of the city that appears unrelated to either human use or occupation. Brasilia on speed. Walter Gropius once said that an architect should be able to design a city or a teacup. Whatever the merits of such a dubious claim, even Gropius wouldn’t have suggested that teacups and cities were interchangeable. In Zaha’s world, they are.”
Free Mobile TV A Hit In Asia
Japan and Korea have launched free broadcast TV to mobile devices, and they’re a hit. “According to analysts Informa Telecoms and Media, more than 210 million people across the world will be watching TV on mobile devices by 2011. Asia-Pacific will lead the way in mobile TV growth. Informa forecasts more than 95 million subscribers in the region by 2011.”
Vienna State Opera Opera Sacks Mezzo
Last week Olga Borodina was to have made her debut at the Vienna State Opera. “Instead, just as the performance was about to begin, a State Opera representative gave a statement from chief executive Ioan Holender that ‘an atmosphere has developed which required the Staatsoper to distance itself from this commitment [to Borodina],’ that Agnes Baltsa was replacing Borodina at short notice despite an injured leg, and that the company would not be working with Borodina in the future.”
“Corrie” To Make It To NY
My Name is Rachel Corrie will be coming to New York after all. A planned production was canceled earlier this year. But “Pam Pariseau and Dena Hammerstein, partners in James Hammerstein Productions, are bringing the play, critically acclaimed in London, to the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Previews are to begin on Oct. 5, with an opening scheduled for Oct. 15. The play is to run for 48 performances, closing on Nov. 19.”
Sex Sells. But What’s The Point?
“When you talk to people about raunch culture in terms of a specific company or corporation they just say: ‘Oh, well, sex sells.’ That’s our justification for everything. And Barbie-doll images of women – long legs, fake breasts, blonde hair – are a glossy advertising shorthand that simultaneously appeals to everyone and no one, shifting units in a way that more complex, varied and substantive sexual images never could. ‘My book is not an attack on the sex industry,’ says Ariel Levy. ‘It’s about how the sex industry has become every industry.”
Singing Praises Of Temporary Theatres
The Royal Shakespeare’s new temporary theatre, built to house the company while its new permanent home is being built, is a real stunner. And that poses the perhaps heretical notion that “the best theatres aren’t always those over which architects have laboured long and hard…”
On Broadway – Enough With The British, Already!
“When God created the middle class, He had only the British in mind. New York theatergoers’ Anglophilia is an incurable case of reverse snobbery, however, and the ghost of Noël Coward, for one, wishes to say from his chaise lounge in the sky, ‘Ta ever so’.”
FCC To Consider Media Ownership Rules
The Federal Communications Commission says it will reconsider media ownership consolidation rules. “The rules are of great concern to giant media companies in an era of mergers and convergence of print and broadcast media inside individual companies. But they also affect every American through their impact on the credibility of news outlets, on the quality of public debate and on ‘whether TV and radio offer entertainment that is creative, uplifting and local or degrading, banal and homogenized’.”
Moonves: CBS In The Movies?
CBS president Les Moonves says the network might get into the movie business. “He said the television and radio broadcaster would be interested in producing six to eight movies a year on smaller budgets of $20 million to $30 million. We could get in a small way, doing six to eight movies a year in a risk-free way’.”