Members of American for the Arts gather in Austin for the group’s annual meeting. “Robert Lynch, AFA’s president and chief executive officer, presented findings from the organization’s latest research effort: an analysis of municipal, state, and regional arts agencies in 2003, the first year that saw a decline in arts funding after six years of increases. As the national economy has crept back from its post-Sept. 11 slump, however, arts funding has either increased or plateaued.”
Blog
Why The Movie Slump? Poll Says Look To Home…
A new poll says that 73 percent of those asked prefer to see movies in their home on DVD or videocassette rather than in the theatre. “The same poll found that only 22 per cent of people preferred to see movies the old-fashioned way – in a movie theatre. The numbers may provide fodder for those who believe the proliferation of at-home entertainment technologies is permanently changing moviegoing patterns.”
Radio You Can Interact With
“A team of students from Carnegie Mellon University have developed Roadcasting, a collaborative, mobile radio system that will allow car drivers and anyone else with a computer, a wireless connection and digital music files to not only broadcast their own station, but influence the play lists of other Roadcasting DJs transmitting in the area.”
Want To Live Longer? Get Some Friends
A new study says that having close friends is more important to a healthy happy life than close family ties. The study reports that “those with the strongest group of friends and confidants were found to have lived longer than those with the fewest friends. Close contact with children and relatives had little impact on survival rates over the 10 years.”
Tough Times For Critics?
“Serious arts criticism is looking beleaguered these days in the face of forces ranging from a celebrity-besotted media to the rise of critic-bloggers on the Internet to falling newspaper circulation to suspicion of anything that might be considered “elitist.” The age of great critics – popular, influential writers such as Virgil Thomson on classical music, Clement Greenberg on visual art, Edwin Denby on dance or Pauline Kael on movies – is long gone. Today, critics are more likely to be glorified touts giving thumbs up or down than probing thinkers and literary stylists.”
Ross Stretton, 53
Stretton was “a leading ballet dancer and a successful artistic director of the Australian Ballet, but failed in the larger arena of the Royal Ballet – for a year in 2001-02 he was its most short-lived, and most disastrous, artistic director.”
Remembering Ross Stretton
“All who paid tribute to Ross Stretton, who died yesterday, agreed on one thing: that the former artistic director of the Australian Ballet and, briefly, head of the Royal Ballet, was an intensely private person, so vigilant about his self-imposed line between home and work that even the senior dancers he worked with, such as Steven Heathcote, cannot recall seeing the inside of his Melbourne home.”
Bringing Music To Kids
How do you get children hooked on classical music? “Much has been written about music’s ability to act as a means of expression and communication in both healthy children and those with difficulties; it frequently gets through where speech fails. Then there are the benefits of taking part in a creative endeavour, the interplay and team spirit of singing in a choir or playing in an orchestra or band.”
Exploring The Wagner/Hitler Connection
“Brigitte Hamann’s new biography of Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English-born daughter-in-law, brings to light fresh evidence of the family’s involvement with Hitler and its complicity in his crimes. It took great ingenuity on the author’s part since the Wagners squirreled away their papers and refuse access to outsiders. But Hamann, a Viennese scholar, laid hands on Winnie’s letters to her best Nazi girlfriend and, with other sources, has assembled a dossier strong enough to have landed several Wagners in the Nuremburg dock.”
The Freud Phenomenon
“In the late 1980s, not yet antique but merely old-fashioned, Lucien Freud was shunned by the museums and his practice seemed to have reached a dead end. And while there are particular circumstances that explain Freud’s resurrection–above all the simple fact of his survival which illogically confers on a career the stamp of authenticity and sincerity–it is also linked to the much remarked upon revival of painting in the last few years.”