Star Wars has scored record box office in its opening weekend. “Revenge of the Sith rang in a whopping $50 million on its opening Thursday, a single-day record boosted by eagerly anticipated midnight showings, and its total receipts since then beat the four-day $134.3 million opening of 2003’s “The Matrix Reloaded.” The George Lucas film has also grossed $144.7 million overseas for a total of $303 million worldwide.”
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Apprentice, The Musical?
Doesn’t Donald Trump seem a classic operatic figure? Now there are plans to turn Trump’s “The Apprentice” into a Broadway musical. “The producers, whose other credits include Chicago and Sweet Charity, are assembling a team to shepherd the new show through the development stage. It will open in the spring of 2006 in New York.”
BBC Workers On Strike
Workers at the BBC are on a 24-hour strike. “The strike is already causing disruption to overnight TV, radio and online news services. BBC employees are protesting at plans to cut 3,780 jobs and privatise parts of the corporation, which were announced in recent months. Unions say the cuts are the most damaging in BBC history. The corporation says they are needed so the BBC can invest more in programmes.”
A Battle For The Soul Of The Barnes
Over a difficult three years, the future of the Barnes Collection was debated and hammered out until finally an agreement to move the museum to Philadelphia was worked out. So how did the deal come together? Patricia Horn charts the scene behind the scenes…
The Soldier-Writer
Under an NEA program, US soldiers are learnign to write. “Is there any evidence that seeing a war first-hand will forge a better writer? Is there a correlation between what a marine experiences and what he or she writes, between seeing and doing, M-16 and pencil? Most of the writers I spoke to admitted that war had provided them with swathes of material, since, to paraphrase Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, it is life lived at maximum tension. But this reality doesn’t necessarily translate into literature.”
The Death Of The Critic
Arts critics used to wield tremendous power as American tastemakers, their words forming the crux of the cultural sphere and their opinions read as seriously as those of political commentators. These days, cultural tastes are controlled mainly by savvy marketers, and critics have become ever more marginalized, frequently reduced to bleating from the sidelines and begging for a return to serious cultural discourse. “While many lament the situation, some think the decentralization of authority means the arts — and the conversation around them — will flourish without these stern, doctrinaire figures.”
Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Tut?
King Tut is back, and back with him is a familiar argument about just how much museums should rely on flavor-of-the-month blockbuster exhibitions. “The profit-and-loss potential of blockbuster exhibitions is grounds for increasing debate in a museum world straining to reconcile traditional scholarly ideals with new fiscal realities and populist imperatives.”
Have We Lost The Taste For Imperial Art?
18th-century British artist Joshua Reynolds is widely regarded as one of the masters of his era. But in the last several decades, his work has fallen out of favor with the art-buying public. “Now I have come to think that what turns us away from Reynolds is not that he portrayed Britain badly but too well – perhaps we shun him as an ugly man avoids mirrors. We like to look at Stubbs, Wright and Hogarth because they show us a past that was scientific, modernising, creative; Reynolds shows us something else. He portrays a British history we are less eager to own up to. He portrays the rulers of an empire.”
Somewhere Between STory And Novel
Is it a novel? Is it a collection of short stories? “Genres don’t come into existence every day, but in the past few years a good number of writers have started exploring the previously blank territory that lies between the collection of short stories and the novel proper. It starts to look like a new form altogether.”
The Tortured Artist As Marketing Device
Controversial British artist Tracey Emin has made a career out of being alternately outrageous and outraged, creating works that demand attention but decrying the bad press she gets. It might be a recipe for modern pop culture success, but it doesn’t seem to make for a very stable head space. “[Emin] is, it hardly needs saying, a survivor, and her often harrowing struggle with the world, and with herself, is the narrative that threads through all her work. It’s all there – the teenage rapes, the abortions, the cruel and tender boyfriends, the depressions and suicide attempts, the memory of them stitched into her angry, appliquŽd quilts, dragged up though her scratchy, sad drawings, writ large in her scrawled, dysfunctional sentences that look like they have been scratched into the paper as if her life depended upon it.”