The Hermitage is planning a huge expansion that will create the largest galleries for 19th Century art in the world. “In recent years, the world’s greatest museums have been expanding and reinventing themselves in response to mass tourism and a heightened interest in the visual arts. We have seen the creation of the Grand Louvre, the Tate Modern conversion of Bankside power station and a vast new building for MOMA in New York. Now it is the turn of the Hermitage.”
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Surely Serota
“Thanks to Nicholas Serota, Britain now has the most popular museum of modern art in the world. While the Pompidou Centre in Paris is visited by 3.5 million people annually, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art gained a million visitors from its reopening in November 2004 to March 2005, Tate Modern, which yesterday celebrated its fifth anniversary, is attracting more than 4 million visitors each year. This is a great coup, particularly since, by Serota’s own admission, Tate Modern’s permanent collection is fourth-rate, particularly weak in early 20th century art.”
The Greatest Painting In Britain (Uh-huh)
What is Britons’ favorite painting? The National Gallery aims to find out in a poll. “Following on from the BBC’s attempts to celebrate the greatest Briton as well as discover our most beloved book, the gallery is launching a public poll to highlight The Greatest Painting in Britain. And just as with Great Britons and The Big Read, this exercise will end up telling us far more about who we think we are than the quality of our aesthetic sensibility.”
How Marketing Killed Classical Music In America
“Half a century ago, and before, individuals of vision – conductors, composers, entrepreneurs, even critics – heroically shaped the course of America’s musical high culture. In more recent times, the fate of classical music in the US has been governed by the market place. The indulged and uninquisitive American electorate is paralleled by classical music audiences that ask for little and give little back. A tangible acuity of knowing attention still found in Berlin or Budapest is no longer much encountered in New York.”
Where Goes The Novel
Post-modernism is over. But where does the novel as a form go from here? “A novelist has to find artistic means to slow down time (Proust), to get inside a single consciousness (David Foster Wallace), and to express thought without language breaking down completely (Joyce). So the novelist still has a wide open field here. But there are so many obstacles to creating this work of art that it’s (oh, hell) mind–boggling (sorry). The novelist must make an astonishing number of judgments before a single word is written, and any of these judgments can threaten to undermine the project.”
Report: More Books, Fewer Buyers
Too many books are being published, even as sales are declining. “The number of books sold dropped by nearly 44 million between 2003 and 2004, even as the annual number of books published approaches 175,000. The Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research organization, reported estimated sales of 2.295 billion books in 2004, compared to an estimated 2.339 billion the previous year. Higher prices enabled net revenues to increase 2.8 percent, to $28.6 billion, but also drove many readers, especially students, to buy used books.”
Warner Music Losses Narrow With Downloads
Warner Music reports reduced losses as declining CD sales are made up for by online downloading. “The New York-based recording company reported a loss of $18 million for the fiscal second quarter ended March 31. That compares with the prior year’s $45 million loss. The company didn’t provide a per-share figure. Revenue grew 4.4 percent to $767 million from $735 million. Recorded Music revenue expanded 4.9 percent to $621 million, ‘led by digital sales mostly offset by declines in physical sales, the company said.”
The Website That’s Shaking Up The Poetry World
“Alan Cordle created Foetry in April 2004 after years of watching his wife, Kathleen Halme, enter poetry contests and becoming increasingly convinced that they weren’t fair. At first, it was just Mr. Cordle and his computer. But the site gained momentum and soon it was attracting hundreds of visitors each day, many of whom also believed that something was rotten about these contests. They gossiped and gathered evidence.”
WWII’s Enduring Hold On Us
Why does World War II endure as a topic of our imagination? “There are important cultural reasons for its persistence. This was, historically, the first continental war to be waged in the age of broadcasting. Radio and film conveyed its actuality and artists quickly converted its sounds and images into creative work. Art was a battlefront in itself. Dictators harnessed it to their propaganda machines while the democracies unintentionally inspired a spontaneous cultural renaissance.”
Snubbed Jukebox Musicals Here To Stay
This year’s Tony nominations ignored jukebox musicals – those that are built around the songs of pop groups or pop songwriters, inserting them into a story. But that doesn’t mean the popular shows are disappearing any time soon.