“Literature is conventionally taught as a person-to-person aesthetic experience: the writer (or the poem) addressing the reader. Teachers cut out English’s middlemen, the people who got the poem from the writer to us, apparently confirming his point that we have to deny the economics of cultural value in order to preserve the aesthetics. But, once we’re outside the classroom, how rigidly are these conventions adhered to? How many people today really imagine “art” as a privileged category, exempt from the machinations of the marketplace?”
Blog
The Met: Volpe’s Legacy
Joseph Volpe caps 16 years running the metropolitan Opera. “Through various crises—a singer dying onstage, a bloated supersta cancelling, attendance figures falling in the wake of September 11th, Cuban billionaire patron turning out to be neither a billionaire nor Cuban—Volpe kept the great old house trundling along. Was he visionary? No. Did rival American companies—particularly the Sa Francisco Opera, with its history-making productions of Messiaen’s “Saint Francis” and John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—challenge th Met’s preëminence? Yes. But the chaos that has surrounded many bi houses elsewhere has been absent from the Met, and in this busines the absence of chaos is a considerable achievement.”
Has Book Reviewing Gotten Creepy?
“For those of us who are serious about book-reviewing, here are a few of the questions that nobody—not even the New York Times—has yet been able to answer: In the world of serious literary criticism, where do newspapers belong? The credentials of their editors are often more journalistic than literary, an interesting conundrum assuming that literary merit is the stated goal. Regarding the visual and performing arts, newspapers are mostly event-oriented, with a dominant focus on what’s commercially viable (rock music, blockbuster museum shows). Yet book sections often feature books that will sell a relative handful of copies compared to those they overlook.”
Buying Music As A Political Act
“Once upon a time, it wasn’t so. Thirty years ago, you just walked into your local music retailer, found the LP you wanted, then went home and cranked up the stereo. No thought was necessary. Thanks to the Internet, those carefree days are gone. To go to the trouble of actually walking into a record store and paying full price for an actual CD is now a transaction that carries with it all kinds of meaning. It signifies that a music lover is making a choice to support a particular group or musician.”
Guitarist Derek Bailey, 74
Yorkshire-born guitarist Derek Bailey, who “has died aged 75 of complications from motor neurone disease, was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture without ever believing he knew all the answers – or maybe any at all. With his passing, the world has lost an inimitable musician and an implacable enemy of commercialised art.”
Detroit Listeners Sue Radio Station
Detroit isteners angry over recent programming changes have gone to court, charging the city’s NPR station with fraud. “The fury in Detroit over program changes at WDET-FM has listeners claiming they were tricked into contributing money to the station during a pledge drive while station operators were secretly planning to junk locally produced programming and replace it with national talk and public affairs shows. In a public radio world known for lowered voices and reasonable behavior, the class-action lawsuit filed in Wayne County Circuit Court last week is nothing short of incendiary.”
When American Kid TV Meets China
“While every American industry that comes here faces its own obstacles, the bar that exporters of children’s television programming must vault is particularly high: a traditional culture of respect for parents and authority reinforced by decades of Communist discipline and the ruthless competitiveness of an educational system that favors rigor over imagination. Still, Viacom, which dominates youth-oriented programming in the United States and other parts of the world with its MTV and Nickelodeon networks, is aggressively courting Chinese youngsters, hoping to introduce them to its brand of playfully antiauthoritarian programming.”
A Great Year For Broadway Theatre
The League of American Theaters and Producers reports that paid attendance on Broadway this year ‘was the highest since 1985 – just shy of 12 million people, an increase of almost 6 percent from last year. And those theatergoers paid an average of $68.86 a ticket, about $2.75 more than last year. Gross sales reached $825 million for Broadway’s 39 theaters, a jump of more than 10 percent from 2004. The total number of performances, another indicator of the industry’s health, increased by about 4 percent, and attendance per performance was up, too, by about 1.5 percent.”
The Producers: A Flop That Shows Why Theatre Works
“The Producers has a litany of things that are wrong with it as long as Elton John’s wedding guest list. But the faults are instructive in the ways that they demonstrate why theatre has survived the onslaught of cinema and TV and why movies can be turned into great musicals, but seldom the other way round. The flaws flap around the film like munchkins in the Wizard of Oz.”
Why Rural Museums Are Dying
Over the past few decades, while museum attendance at big city museums has soared, the numbers at smaller rural museums have fallen by about half. Why? “Numerous causes have been cited for this precipitous decline, including the weather and 9/11. But one factor stands out among the reasons behind this consistent, decades-long trend: the 1978 deregulation of the airline industry and a new era of cheap air travel.”