The Recording Industry Association of America is filing supoenas as quickly as it can draft them for ISPs, compelling them to turn over names of suspected copyright infringing downloaders. “This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Filing information subpoenas is exactly what we said we’d do a couple of weeks ago when we announced that we were gathering evidence to file lawsuits.’ The trade group said it would probably file several hundred lawsuits this summer.”
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A Guggenheim Lifeline?
“The Taiwanese city of Taichung is the latest to pin its hopes for international cultural recognition and economic regeneration on the Guggenheim Foundation. The plan is for a trademark signature museum building, this time an eye-catching design with moveable sections by architect Zaha Hadid, an opera house and other cultural projects. The Guggenheim will decide in September whether to approve the plan, but these are uncertain times.”
Recording Industry – Our Of Touch With Consumers?
Is the recording industry’s aggressive attack on music downloaders doomed to fail? “What has emerged through numerous interviews in person and over the phone is the voice of a new generation that says the industry is out of touch and needs to get with the times – stop charging so much for CDs, move its business online where millions of consumers already are, and stop trying to make criminals out of people who love its product.”
Cleveland’s Arts Industry Takes A Big Hit
A new study showing that Cleveland’s arts industry has lost 163 jobs and millions of dollars in the last year is raising serious red flags among the area’s cultural and political power players. The arts are hurting all over, of course, but in Cleveland, which has never made arts funding a priority, the economic pain is multiplied, and arts advocates are saying that only a large infusion of cash can hope to turn around the city’s slumping cultural fortunes.
Milwaukee Ballet Exec Steps Down
Robert Bondlow has unexpectedly resigned as the executive director of the Milwaukee Ballet. Bondlow had been on the job for only six months, and neither he nor the company are commenting on the reason for his abrupt departure. The company is in “somewhat precarious” financial shape, but doesn’t expect to run a deficit for the fiscal year just completed. Bondlow had a tough act to follow in Milwaukee: his predecessor, Christine Harris, was widely credited with stabilizing the business side of the organization and making it an attractive group for big-money donors to support.
LA Exhibit To Open Despite Court Challenge
“The Los Angeles County Museum of Art said its upcoming exhibition of a major art collection from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow, would open as planned July 27 — despite a lawsuit, filed against the museum by the grandson of a Russian aristocrat, which alleges that 25 of the works in the collection were looted from his family by Lenin’s Bolshevik government in 1918.”
Newly Discovered Debussy Work To Be Performed In Sweden
“A piano piece by French composer Claude Debussy found two years ago will be played officially for the first time in a small church in central Sweden today. Debussy, the founder of the Impressionist movement in music, wrote the piece in 1917 during the First World War.” The work, which was discovered in a trunk in Paris two years ago, is less than three minutes long, and seems to have been written as a musical thank-you note to the composer’s coal supplier.
The Ultimate Topical Art
Editorial cartooning increasingly seems to be a dying art form, with one cartoonist after another falling prey to the budget axe in the increasingly profit-driven and corporate-dominated newspaper industry. But the tradition of the editorial cartoon is a vital part of American art culture, says Patrick Reardon, and deserves to be recognized as such. “Editorial cartoons are savage snarls. They’re rude and gross, crude and unfair. They ridicule the high and mighty. They slap down the pompous. They sting. They get the blood boiling. And they make their point — with the clarity and nuance of a right uppercut.”
Fortifying An ‘Arts Neighborhood’
“Standing by a South Boston construction site, Mayor Thomas M. Menino yesterday quoted Pablo Picasso, as the Fort Point Cultural Collaborative announced plans for Midway Studios, a 200,000-square-foot development that will house 89 new artists’ live/work studios, a gallery, a black box theater, and other cultural facilities in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood.” The project is designed to combat the seemingly endless cycle that sees artists move into a run-down urban neighborhood and breathe new life into it, only to be forced out by the rising property values that their good work makes inevitable.
Jordanian Culture Comes To The Queen City
“The Cincinnati Art Museum announced Wednesday a joint exhibition with the American Museum of Natural History in New York of 200 objects from the southern Jordanian city of Petra. Presented under the patronage of Queen Rania of Jordan, Petra: Lost City of Stone is the first major cultural collaboration between Jordan and the United States… The exhibition’s more than 200 objects include stone sculptures and reliefs, ceramics, metalwork, stuccowork, ancient inscriptions and a selection of 25 paintings, drawings and prints from the 19th century.”