A UK survey reveals that those asked could identify a quote from Star Wars more easily than one from Shakespeare. “When asked to complete the line ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your…’ from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, some people said swords or money rather than ears.”
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Top 25 Photography Collectors
Photography is becoming more and more prized as a collectible. “You know you are truly obsessed when you buy something that is destined for your print cabinet—not your wall.” Here is ARTnews’ list of the world’s top 25 collectors.
In Appreciation Of Ann Miller
Ann Miller was one of the movie greats, writes Rex Reed. “She couldn’t sing like Judy or swim like Esther, but they couldn’t machine-gun tap, either. She loved the spotlight, she loved the attention, she loved the camera, and she loved to dance.”
Does Money Equal Art?
Is it true that “nothing great ever happens in art unless there’s some big money somewhere on the scene?” That “there must be some kind of economic boom and not too much warring” and that “peace tends to equal commerce and commerce equals art?”
Promoting Smoking Through The Arts
In Seattle, the company that makes Lucky Strike cigarettes has become a patron of the arts. The company spreads money around, promoting Luckys in subtle ways – such as hiring attractive young people to sit in bars passing out tickets to alternative arts events (and talking up smokes). “Instead of battering the brain of the target audience, Lucky slides neatly into consciousness, trailing clouds of glory gathered from discreet arts funding. Credit spreads by word of mouth, making the product — which was launched as a brand in 1871 — appear modest and friendly.”
Cheap Music (And Movies) For All!
How to make all this file-sharing business legal and profitable? Harvard professor Terry Fisher (a very smart guy, and a leading thinker on intellectual property issues) has devised a system that would pay artists and their recording labels and make the trading of music and other digital media cheap and plentiful. And what would it cost? Six bucks a month, and painlessly collected…
Saving Angkor Wat
A huge campaign to save Cambodia’s Angkor Wat is being hailed as a model for other preservation. “Involving some 40 major monuments and hundreds of smaller sites spread over 160 square miles, the restoration work in the region may take another 25 years or more. Yet an initiative — led by France and Japan and coordinated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — has demonstrated a rare commitment to preserving a miracle of human ingenuity in a country too poor to do so itself.”
Death Of Classical Recording? Nahhh!
Norman Lebrecht predects the end of the conventional classical recording business. But Anthony Tommasini begs to disagree: “Smaller labels like Nonesuch and Naxos, which once just filled in the gaps with records of specialty repertory and adventurous artists ignored by the majors, are proving that it is possible to release important recordings at midrange prices and still pay the bills. And though the financial repercussions from the downloading of CD’s have the recording industry feeling besieged and impotent, some bold orchestras have, like many rock groups, taken matters into their own hands and released self-produced CD’s, recorded live and available on the Internet.”
What Is It About Architects?
“In general, architects are not appealing characters in movies or other fiction. That’s because in reality they seem to be darn difficult people. I searched recently for architect jokes and found, well, none. Apparently the phrase “architect humour” is an oxymoron. Yet they dominate the news sometimes and dominate our city landscapes.”
Judge Sentences Man To Opera
A judge in Miami Beach sentenced a man to listen to opera for 2 1/2 hours after convicting him of breaking the city’s strict anti-noise ordinance by playing rap music loudly in his car. Said the judge: “You impose your music on me and I’m going to impose my music on you.”