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LA County Museum To Destroy Garage Art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is “about to destroy art. On Dec. 1, the museum will tear down its parking garage. The plan is to erect in its place a $60-million building for the display of contemporary art. The problem isn’t that LACMA is demolishing a garage so that it can add gallery space, the problem is that LACMA isn’t saving the art it commissioned for the garage.”

Arts: Ticket Prices Are Up, But Expenses Even More

Ticket prices for arts events have been rising faster than the rate of inflation over the past decade. But “for arts organizations, artists fees and construction materials costs have risen steadily. Groups that don’t own their performance venue are paying more for rent than they did in 1995, while those that do own their space pay more for such items as building maintenance, utilities and security.”

Radio Is Abandoning Rock

“Rock’s share of overall music sales has remained steady at about 20 percent of the market, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But on the radio, rock’s numbers — both in audience share and in number of stations — are on the decline, in part because rock fans are moving to the Internet and satellite radio for their music and in part because the rock audience doesn’t spend nearly as much time listening to radio as do audiences for black and Hispanic music.”

Punk Ballerina Returns

“Karole Armitage was part of the city’s cultural zeitgeist in the 1980’s – she had a high-profile relationship with the artist David Salle (with whom she still collaborates) and choreographed for Michael Jackson and Madonna on the side. But by 1989, she was fed up trying to carve out an artistic life in the increasingly mass-market environment of New York.”
Now she’s back…

Who Will Succeed “The Most Powerful Man On Broadway”?

Gerald Schoenfeld is by most accounts “the most powerful person in American theater. A round, wryly funny man whose formal manner seems held over from another era, Mr. Schoenfeld is the chairman of the Shubert Organization, the largest Broadway theater chain. He took over sole leadership of the organization in 1996, when Bernard B. Jacobs, its president, died at the age of 80. Now that Mr. Schoenfeld is in his 10th year in that role and his ninth decade on the planet, his succession and what it means for Broadway remains a dominant mystery in an industry famed for its uncertainties.”

Recording Companies Want To Use Anti-Terror Laws To Catch Downloaders

“Big firms including Sony and EMI want to use new powers designed to track terrorists on the internet to crack down on music and film pirates – including the parents of children who download music – who are estimated to cost the industry £650m a year. Internet companies will have to log all the pages visited by surfers for at least a year so the security services can track terrorists using the web for fund-raising, training or swapping information. But the move has been greeted with alarm by human rights campaigners who say that the step is an example of the ‘mission creep’ of draconian new anti-terror powers.”

Museums – Looking For Permanent Solutions

“Museums have taken great efforts to tend and build their permanent collections. Most own far more art than they could ever show at any given time. And yet these treasures hardly matter to a generation of art lovers reared on temporary exhibitions. Museums are looking for remedies. Not many have done what the Hirshhorn has done — put the entire exhibition schedule on pause, focusing solely on the permanent collection. A good number, however, are returning our attention to the great art they own.”