Australian aboriginal art is getting more and more popular – “the industry is worth $143 (£83m) annually, growing 10% a year.” But along with that popularity there’s a growing problem of fraud, including some recent high profile cases. So the Australian government is setting up a database to help ensure what’s real…and what’s not.
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Lloyd Webber To Buy Warner Chappell?
Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is apparently going to try to buy Warner Chappell, the music publishing business of Time Warner. The company is valued at about $1 billion. “Andrew is seriously interested. He is confident he can get a consortium together.”
Court: Bolshoi Dancer Illegally Fired
Russian ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, who was fired in September for being “too big,” has won her case in court appealing the dismissal. “The court ruled that she was illegally dismissed and ordered the Bolshoi to pay the equivalent of $6,400 in damages. The Bolshoi’s lawyer said the Theatre would appeal the court’s decision.”
Record Album Sales (But Lower Revenues)
Better music in the past year helped sell 232 million albums last year, a record amount. But “heavy discounting by stores has seen the total value of music sales drop 4.6%, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Singles sales fell 31% in the 12 months up to September, the BPI said.”
Where’s The Balanchine 100th Birthday That Really Matters?
New York City Ballet is marking the 100th birthday of George Balanchine with a season of tributes. Tobi Tobias writes that something seems lost in the celebrations. “I believe that a good part of the problem is that no one is as deeply and unremittingly concerned as Balanchine once was with the nature of individual dancers’ specific personas and gifts. He was acutely conscious of such matters when he created his ballets and when he recast them over the years as well. He developed his dancers not merely in the classroom but through the roles he gave them. Nowadays, casting often seems thoughtless.”
Scottish Theatre’s Poor Fortunes Coming For A Long Time
Scotland’s 7:84 Theatre is suddenly in a precarious place, after the government announced it was thinking about quitting the theatre’s subsidy. That subsidy accounts for 48 percent of the theatre’s budget. “While 7:84 will tell you this has come out of the blue, concern has been growing about the company for some time. Reviews of recent productions have been mixed, two board members have resigned, and the company took a long time to appoint artistic director Lorenzo Mele. The job was, in fact, advertised twice.”
Eco: Books Trump Computers Any Day
Umberto Eco is a fierce defender of the printed page: “In the course of many interviews I have been obliged to answer questions of this sort: ‘Will the new electronic media make books obsolete? Will the Web make literature obsolete? Will the new hypertextual civilisation eliminate the very idea of authorship?’ As you can see, if you have a well-balanced normal mind, these are different questions and, considering the apprehensive mode in which they are asked, one might think that the interviewer would feel reassured when your answer is, “No, keep cool, everything is OK”. Mistake. If you tell such people that books, literature, authorship will not disappear, they look desperate. Where, then, is the scoop?”
Zephaniah: Why I Don’t Want Royal Honor
Poet Benjamin Zephaniah doesn’t want the Royal honor for which he has been put forward. “This OBE thing is supposed to be for my services to literature, but there are a whole lot of writers who are better than me, and they’re not involved in the things that I’m involved in. All they do is write; I spend most of my time doing other things. If they want to give me one of these empire things, why can’t they give me one for my work in animal rights? Why can’t they give me one for my struggle against racism? What about giving me one for all the letters I write to innocent people in prisons who have been framed? I may just consider accepting some kind of award for my services on behalf of the millions of people who have stood up against the war in Iraq. It’s such hard work – much harder than writing poems.”
Saatchi Dumps Hirst Work… Did They Feud?
Collector Charles Saatchi – long one of Damien Hirst’s biggest collectors, has sold a dozen of the artist’s works back to Hirst’s gallery. “A spokeswoman for Mr Saatchi refused to comment on a report in The Times that he and Hirst had been in ‘a feud’. She said visitors to the Mr Saatchi’s London gallery could still see famous Hirst pieces such as the pickled shark.”
Did Hirst Get Back His Best Work?
Evidently Saatchi’s sale to Hirst signals a truce between the two. “There was speculation last night that Hirst had reclaimed arguably his most powerful work, A Thousand Years, a rotting cow’s head on which flies hatch only to perish moments later on an electric trap, which had some delicate souls retching when it was first shown at the Royal Academy. The installation has been missing from the Saatchi gallery since September, as has One Little Piggy Went to Market, another example of Hirst’s taste for the grotesque.”