X-rays show that Degas worked and reworked a painting over the course of 40 years as his ideas changed. “The x-ray shows flurries of reworking, as figures become more and less distinct, the teenagers turn towards one another and then look away, the detailed background landscape is softened into a blur. At one point, Degas scrubbed out their classically handsome faces, and replaced them with Parisian urchins.”
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When The Bad Stuff Endures
“Pop music has often been described as a disposable commodity, yet the music industry’s relentless repackaging of the past tends to ensure that pop songs are for life and not just for three minutes. But what happens when the artists themselves cannot but cringe at the enduring success of their more pathetic efforts?”
Downloading Flourishes Despite Industry Lawsuits
In the past year, the recording industry has sued thousands of music downloaders for copyright infringement. “Previous studies reported that music downloading dropped as much as 50 percent after the RIAA started suing individual file traders.” But a new study says that’s not true. Indeed, file-trading is flourishing…
Is American History-Writing Broken?
Charles Hoffer writes that the field of American history is “two-faced – split between celebratory popularizers who often value rousing narrative over scholarly rigor and academic specialists whose jargon-riddled, often dour monographs ignore the ordinary reader. Meanwhile, Hoffer accuses the American Historical Association (AHA), where he has served as an adviser on plagiarism and a member of its professional standards division, of abdicating its responsibility to enforce basic scholarly principles in both realms.”
Davis: What’s Up With The Levine Hype?
Peter G. Davis marvels at the James Levine phenomenon: “Not since the days of Arturo Toscanini has a conductor been so extolled in the local press as a musician without flaw.” But Davis wonders why: “Despite his ubiquity, Levine’s musical personality remains, for some of us at least, just as mysterious as his private nature. I’ve read the raves over the years, but I can’t recall one that attempted to describe, let alone analyze, the specific nature of his interpretive aims and how they change our perception of the music.”
Looking For Canada’s New Film Czar
Who’s in line to run Canada’s Telefilm? Someone a little more Toronto-friendly? “Telefilm also needs someone who can make peace with key English-language producers in Toronto. They have become increasingly critical in public of Telefilm’s recent emphasis on movies it deems commercial rather than artistic (though many of these have tanked at the box office).”
Pod People And The PodCast
What is a podcast? It’s the latest in shared music. “A sort of TiVo for amateur online audio, podcasts are radio-style audio files posted inside blogs as MP3s that can be downloaded to an iPod or other portable player. And they represent the next wave of peer-to-peer content sharing – unlimited by available FM/AM spectrum, untouched by FCC regulation, portable and full of possibility.”
A Suffi Shakespeare?
Was Shakespeare a member of a mystic Muslim sect? “While it has been suggested that Shakespeare dabbled with espionage and Catholic political activism, the new theory will attempt to persuade Shakespeare scholars that the playwright was a member of a religious or spiritual order which can best be compared to the philosophy of Sufism.”
It’s All Politics…But Is It Good Theatre?
This is the year of political theatre; it’s everywhere. But is it effective as theatre? “Much recent political theatre is informed by the desire to be either a report or an essay. Getting the facts out there is good – putting them on stage gives them electricity they would otherwise lack – but it is not the same as a play.”
Better Times For Fund-raising?
Giving to America’s 400 most successful fund-raising organizations was up 2.3 percent last year. So does that mean we’re out of the fund-raising hell that has dried up contributions in the past several years? Not necessarily…