Listeners to the UK’s Classic FM radio station have voted Vaughan Williams’s work Lark Ascending the most popular piece of British classical music. “Edward Elgar came second and third with Cello Concerto in E minor and then Variations on an Original Theme. Welshman Karl Jenkins – the only living composer in the top 10 – was fourth with The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace.”
Blog
The Art Of Book Blurbing
“The blurb is a longstanding practice in publishing — nowadays, it’s jarring to find a book that isn’t garnished with adoring verbiage. While there’s no empirical proof that blurbs help sell books, no publisher would dare print a book without one.”
Broad Foundation Buys 570 Beuys Works
“The Broad Art Foundation has purchased 570 works by the late German artist Joseph Beuys, an influential thinker and socially conscious force in avant-garde 20th century art. The acquisition comprises a nearly complete collection of the artist’s ‘multiples’ — groups of mostly three-dimensional works produced in more than one edition to make them widely available. These works are regarded as the essence of his production.”
Behind The Book “Packager”
What exactly is this “Alloy Entertainment”, the book packager responsible for the now infamous Kaavya Viswanathan book now withdrawn for plagiarism? “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.”
Why Paintings Don’t Work On TV
Visual art is unlikely ever to be a ratings success on TV. “The problem is that there is only so much footage of paintings an audience will tolerate, so TV tends to turn art history into a series of easily digested dramas. Tales of struggling artists, eccentric collectors, sexy models and huge prices are the staples of art telly and can overshadow the art. But maybe part of what makes a work of art great is its story.”
Study: Girls Come Out Ahead On Technology
“After one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion in media choices of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls.”
Is Michael Frayn Retiring?
That’s the rumor about the playwright, at least. “What seems to have happened is that Frayn, asked by a reporter the traditional question as to what he was writing at the moment, replied with an absolute honesty that honours both his old NUJ card and his hobby of philo- sophy: nothing.” Not to worry, though. “A few weeks on, he is about to begin a screenplay of Headlong, his 1999 novel about an art-theft, but has no inklings of new books or plays, and is too scrupulous or superstitious to assume that they will come.”
Acocella: The Troubled Graham Legacy
The troubled Martha Graham Company season was down to one performance – a gala – this year. And there’s plenty that’s not working right, writes Joan Acocella. “So certain things didn’t work. And for a portion of the Graham audience, I suspect, [artistic director Janet] Eilber’s whole effort to renovate this repertory is not going to work. No artist ever had a greater reputation for high-mindedness than Graham. That was part of her mystique, and so, for some of her old fans, a program like this is going to look like a cheap sales job.”
Film Festival Threatened By Lawmaker
“The Ann Arbor Film Festival could lose its state funding under a legislative amendment that singles out the annual event, and one lawmaker is accusing the festival of showing pornography.”
$50 Million For Canada Council
The new Canadian government has promised $50 million over two years for the Canada Council for the arts. “That’s well short of the more than $150 million over three years that had been promised by the previous Liberal government.”