Austria’s Leopold Museum made an offer to art lovers Saturday: Show up naked and you get in free. “Scores of naked or scantily clad people wandered the museum, lured by an offer of free entry to The Naked Truth, an exhibition of early 1900s erotic art, if they showed up wearing just a swimsuit – or nothing at all. With a midsummer heatwave sweeping Vienna, the normally reserved museum decided to make the most of its cool, climate-controlled space.”
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Chinese Art Boom Fallows The Economics
China’s rising prosperity has led to a boom in the market for Chinese art. “The boom has several causes. It is a product of an economy that has grown at more than 8% a year for two decades and also reflects a change in China as it rediscovers a passion for art. But with prices rising and hidden works becoming available, there are fears that a free market in art might be detrimental to China’s heritage.”
Hollywood Slump – The Best Thing That Could Happen?
Hollywood is frustrated by this year’s movie box office slup. “But what if the slump lingers? That could turn out to be the best thing that’s happened to Hollywood in years. Maybe the powers that be would be forced to take chances once again. Studio heads might begin to think smaller and therefore be more willing to risk giving fresh voices with new ideas a chance to express themselves. It’s a path that may be fraught with peril, but that’s always been how the greatest and most enduring Hollywood movies have come into being. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a Hollywood like the one in the ’70s…”
Brazil Is Mad For Musicals
“Two distinct but interrelated types of musical theater have won a following here over the decades: traditional imported Broadway musicals and home-grown, often quirky Brazilian musical shows that draw on a variety of sources but add distinctly local twists.”
Audio Guides With Some Hollywood Spin
Museum audio guides are getting more and more sophisticated. “Changing expectations on the part of gallery-goers primed by a media-saturated society are prompting museums to demand Hollywood-style production values coupled with star power. If you can watch a movie on your phone and tote your entire music library in an iPod, why should your audio guide be any less entertaining?”
Philly Orchestra And Philly Pops Talk About Combining Forces
The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Philadelphia Pops are talking merger. “The orchestra and the Pops are very different kinds of organizations. The orchestra has a much larger budget, listenership and season schedule. Each has its own distinct board and audience. There is some small overlap in musicians. Still, many U.S. orchestras maintain both a serious-repertoire ensemble and a pops series or pops orchestra – most notably, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which also operates the Boston Pops.”
Cuppa Joe With Your CD?
One of the hottest new markets for CD’s? Your local coffee shop. “The Seattle-based coffee merchant Starbucks, which sold its first Blue Note Records jazz compilation in 1995, is flexing its marketing muscle by providing the very thing that the beleaguered music industry has been so desperate to find: a new outlet where music fans will eagerly spend their money on full-length, full-price CDs.”
Online Video A “Modern-day Gold Rush”
“With the phenomenal growth of high-speed Internet connections, more and more people are choosing their entertainment, news and sports by clicking a mouse, not a remote. The untapped potential of this market has set off a modern-day gold rush.”
Pittsburgh Symphony Deficit: Pops Up, Main Season Down
The Pittsburgh Symphony ends its season with a $500,000 deficit. The orchestra’s main season suffered from lower ticket sales. “This year, ticket sales for the classical subscription series generated $2.6 million, $400,000 short of projections. By contrast, revenue for the pops series, conducted by Marvin Hamlisch, exceeded the projected $2.65 million in sales by $30,000.”
In Cleveland: A Public Broadcasting Partnership Struggles
It’s been four years since Cleveland’s powerhouse public radio station WCPN joined forces with public TV station WVIZ in an attempt to forge a new multimedia empire. But so far the partnership doesn’t seem to have worked out well for radio side. “Several radio insiders who have a lot of respect for WCPN lament the deflating of a once-soaring news operation at a station they say is increasingly besieged by hiring freezes, overloaded reporters and lousy morale. ‘The feeling was that TV management, which basically took over, didn’t understand how public radio was done successfully’.”