“I have yet to see a performing arts museum that fires the theatregoer’s imagination. Vienna’s House of Music and London’s Handel House Museum are thin stuff for a rainy day and St Petersburg’s Museum of Performing Arts is positively soporific. Digital interaction might help but the only way to put on a show about the performing arts to involve a showman.”
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UK Tops Arts Spending
Citizens of the UK lead all nations in per capita spending on arts and culture. “In the UK, the average household spending on recreation and culture as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) is 7.9%. This figure, which has risen from 6.5% in 1991, puts the UK at the top of the table of OECD countries, ahead of countries such as France and Germany, who spend 5.2% per household and 5% respectively, and above even the leisure-loving Australians, who come in second at 7.2%.”
NBC-On-Demand
Comcast had made a deal with NBC to make NBC’s programming available on demand. “The deal makes available top prime-time and late night programs from the NBC broadcast network, as well as popular shows from NBC Universal’s USA, Bravo and Sci-Fi cable channels.”
Blockbuster Art In Seattle’s Music Museum
Billionaire Paul Allen shows off a bit of his (reputedly terrific) art collection in a show at his Experience Music Project in Seattle. “Allen’s $250 million museum could use the sales boost. Since opening in 2000, annual visits have dropped from a peak of 531,000 to 378,000 last year. Advance ticket sales for the $8 art show have been “brisk”. Entrance to the entire museum is $33.”
Maastricht Gives Lie To Shortage Claim
Conventional wisdom has it that the supply of Old Masters for sale is drying up. Don’t tell that to the participants of the Maastricht Fair. “Once again, exhibitors proved they are still able to find amazing works of top quality across a range of fields. Where else can you see, under one (admittedly vast) roof, two major Rembrandts, a Fra Angelico fresh from a show at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, a Clouet, a whole kunstkammer of amber including a piece from the lost Amber Room at Tsarskoye Selo, an elephant folio of Audubon’s Birds of America, and a throne from the Royal Palace of Warsaw?”
Congress To Smithsonian: Make Your Own Money
Officials from the Smithsonian Institution were on Capitol Hill yesterday to testify to the deteriorating condition of the landmark D.C. museum complex, and to beg Congress for more money to make repairs. In response, at least one Democratic Congressman is strongly urging the Smithsonian to scrap its free-admission policy in order to raise the money on its own.
CBC Gets A New Arts Chief
Hollywood veteran Fred Fuchs, who served as head of Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope studio, has been hired as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s new executive director of arts and entertainment programming. He arrives at the CBC as pressure is mounting on Canadian broadcasters to focus more on homegrown content and less on American imports.
And We Think Avenue Q Is Subversive?
Sometimes, it must seem to South Koreans that their primary goal in life is to avoid offending, annoying, or otherwise poking at the repressive (and unbelievably sensitive) North Korean government. After all, when a neighboring country makes a habit of threatening to turn your capital city into a “sea of fire,” you tend to make special efforts to placate them. So one can only imagine the consternation in Seoul when officials heard of plans to mount “a new musical about love, torture, and survival in a North Korean prison camp.”
British Dealer Drawn Into True/Hecht Trial
“The activities of Robin Symes, a London antiquities dealer who has done business with many of the world’s top collectors, came into sharp focus on Wednesday at the trial of Marion True, a former curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Robert Hecht, an American dealer.” Specifically, prosecutors are bringing to light details of “Mr. Symes’s elaborate use of offshore companies and warehouses to buy and sell ancient artworks. Italians contend that some of these works were illegally excavated and exported.”
Schenk’s Last New York Stand
The opera director Otto Schenk, 76, says that his current production of Don Pasquale will be the last work he does for New York’s Metropolitan Opera – in fact, it took some prodding from the Met’s Joseph Volpe and the presence of legendary Anna Netrebko to coax Schenk out of his semi-retirement at all. “He is a link to an earlier, even a prewar tradition of German-language theater, down to the earthy dry humor that harks back to cabaret traditions of the 1920’s.”