Critics are oohing and ahing over Amazon’s new search feature that throws the pages of thousands of books in a search engine. One of the things you can do is find which public intellectuals get the most citations. Probably doesn’t mean anything, of course. A few years ago Richard Posner came up with a ranking of intellectuals based on article mentions. The new ranking? It’s different…
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The Music Biz’s New Biz Model
“In the trickle-down economics of the music industry, the travails of the Big 5 major labels – who have suffered steeply declining sales for the last three years – are having an impact on the smaller bands, record companies and media who make up the rock and rap underground. The idea of the Big 5 multinationals as viable distributors of music becomes a less likely scenario every year; a new business model that is emerging sees the big record companies as glorified marketing companies, expert at spending money to get consumers to spend even more money.”
Malaga’s New Picasso Museum
Fulfilling a longheld wish by the artist, a new Picasso Museum has opened in Malaga, Spain. “Yesterday Malaga was festooned with bunting heralding the new museum and events organised to “receive the maestro”. A bullfight, with leading toreros, advertised with a suitable Picasso painting, will be held this afternoon and six bulls will be dispatched in his honour. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia will open the museum.”
What Matters, The Booker?
So much controversy and hoopla over who wins a literary competition like the Booker. “Perhaps the Booker wars would end if the participants realized that, according to a recent study by one economist, very little is at stake: Judges in aesthetic competitions, according to Victor Ginsburgh, a professor at the University of Brussels, are simply not very good at identifying art works that future generations will acknowledge as great.”
OC Register Cuts Back Arts Columns
The Orange County Register cuts back its arts coverage, cutting its classical music column back from once a week to once a month. “Behind the change, of course, is the thinking that classical music is a marginal art form, patronized by a very few.”
Connecticut’s New Super Culture Agency
Connecticut creates a “super-agency” of culture that combines all the state’s cultural programs under one roof. “What there is plenty of, are politicos. This could bode well when it comes time to go after significant state dollars beyond the $24.48 million the new agency now oversees this fiscal year ($20 million comes from lodging tax revenues) and at least $20 million for the next; but when it comes to allocating those funds politicians haven’t the best of track records of fairness, merit and accountability.”
Measuring The Origins Of Ideas
Charles Murray did a statistical analysis of humankind’s greatest accomplishments in history. “According to his statistics, a whopping 72 percent of the significant figures in the arts and sciences between 1400 and 1950 came from just four European countries: Britain, France, Germany and Italy. But after weighing a number of possible explanations, including the effects of war, civil unrest, economic growth, cities and political freedom on achievement rates, Mr. Murray still was not satisfied. Why, he wondered, when he factored in population growth, did the achievement rate in Europe appear to plummet beginning in the mid-19th century, a period when peace, prosperity, cities and political freedom were steadily increasing?”
After The Lottery… Now What?
In the past decade, a flurry of ambitious lottery-funded attractions went up around the UK. Opened in a blaze of publicity, some of them are now finding the going tougher as they try to earn their way. Can we expect a rash of lottery-funded cultural failures in the next few years?
Wasting Away In Principal
“The Royal Ballet’s Zenaida Yanowsky has been a fully-fledged principal since 2001 but, despite countless one-act triumphs, these meaty full-evening roles continue to elude her. The 28-year-old Spaniard isn’t the first Royal Ballet dancer to be principal in name only – Deborah Bull seldom got to carry a three-act ballet at Covent Garden – but Yanowsky, with her cool blonde beauty, sure technique and dazzlingly broad dramatic and stylistic range represents a serious waste of resources” writes Louise Levene.
The Scariest Film Scene Of All
What’s the scariest scene in all of movies? According to a new British poll, it’s Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johny!” in “The Shining. “The scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining topped a poll for a Channel 4 special on The 100 Scariest Moments on TV and film. It beat classic terror scenes such as the head-spinning scene in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist and the moment a severed head tumbles from a hole in a boat in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.”