Chamber music is hot in Australia. “Melbourne is at the heart of an explosion of interest in the art form, based on the city’s international chamber music competition, which attracted 3.75 million radio listeners when last staged two years ago. This year, eight Australian groups and four from the region will compete for prizes worth $50,000 and concert engagements. There are two streams: string quartets and piano trios.”
Blog
Mailer V. Kakutani
Norman mailer has taken on New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. “In an interview with Rolling Stone [Mailer] called the Japanese-American critic ‘a one-woman kamikaze’ and ‘a token’ minority hire.” He says “authors do like to reviewed on publication day, not two weeks earlier with a heinously bad review … This is what Ms. Kakutani has been doing to my books for many years now, and that may not be politically correct, but it sure is foul.”
Will iPods Change Book Publishing?
“That folks can pick up a gadget approximately the size of a cigarette lighter at their local library, programmed with a current bestseller for their listening pleasure, is the realization of countless sci-fi movies and Philip K. Dick novels. The future has clearly arrived: Apple’s immensely popular iPod—the software company shipped 5.3 million of the variously priced and sized devices in its second fiscal quarter of 2005 alone—is making consumers more comfortable with the idea of downloading audiobooks and listening on-the-go. So could DABs—which are more accessible, hip and cost-effective than traditional formats like cassettes and CDs—be the next big thing?”
Dealers Flex Their Muscles In New Sales Deals
As the contemporary art market heats up, “several dealers of contemporary art are placing a right of first refusal in their sales documents, requiring buyers to offer the art back to the dealer before selling to anyone else. Some, including dealers, maintain that these restrictions protect artists, the market, and even collectors. However critics of these contracts disagree. While the use of such restrictions is not standard practice in the market, it is also not entirely new.”
Berlin Museums Change Course Again
Berlin’s State Museums are undergoing yet another major reorganization on Museum Island…
Old Music, New Issues
As the battle over intellectual property shapes up as one of the most important of the 21st century, classical music aficionados are increasingly finding it difficult to access classic recordings. “Now that the boom years of the compact disc are over, classical music discs often don’t make back their costs. No matter that the discs contain work by some of the century’s great artists – often in live performances never recorded in the studio. Their appeal is often so specialized that purchasers are more likely to find them on specialized international Web sites than in Tower Records.” But those recordings still belong to someone, and that someone has to be paid if someone else wants to listen, and that puts everyone in a difficult position.
NAC Theatre Taps Maverick Hinton
“Maverick playwright and auteur director Peter Hinton has been named the new artistic director of the [Ottawa-based] National Arts Centre’s English Theatre… One of this country’s most innovative theatre artists, Hinton has directed more than 70 new plays, classical texts and operas, and championed the works of a range of Canadian playwrights in Toronto, Vancouver and, more recently, Montreal, where he was dramaturge-in-residence at Playwright’s Workshop Montreal.”
Trying To Stay A Step Ahead of the Feds
A new report from Independent Sector, “a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of non-profits,” takes a hard line on executive compensation and other methods of pushing the financial envelope, calling for government intervention in cases where non-profit and charitable organizations are found to be abusing the rules that govern their tax-free existence. Why would a group representing non-profits be so tough on its own members? Maybe because the U.S. Senate is gearing up to pass new rules which would be even tougher than those being proposed by Independent Sector.
ICA Development Chief Jumps To National Gallery
“Paul Bessire, a key figure in the [Boston-based] Institute of Contemporary Art’s new waterfront building project, will leave the museum in early August to take a senior position at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Bessire, 43, has been the ICA’s director of external relations since 2000, overseeing the $62 million fund-raising campaign now underway to pay for a new museum under construction on Fan Pier… Bessire becomes the National Gallery’s chief development officer in September.”
Protecting The Paris Library
The apparent theft of 30,000 volumes from the Paris Libary is making waves in France, and has sparked discussion of the proper way to balance security and accessibility in the nation’s most important archival institution. “‘To turn the library into a locked safe would be easy, but it is not our vocation,’ [the French daily Le Figaro] quoted Agnès Saal, the library’s director-general, as saying. ‘Unlike museums, our documents are there to be consulted.'”