There’s not much suspense about this Sunday’s Tony Awards. “Think ‘Hairspray,’ ‘Take Me Out’ and ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ and you could be more than halfway there. Still, hopes are high for the entertainment portion of the telecast, particularly with Hugh Jackman as host and the decision by CBS to devote three hours of network time to the show, after several years of letting PBS broadcast the first hour. The Tonys may be perennially low-rated but the ceremony attracts those upper-income viewers certain advertisers love.”
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Art Or Cruel Exploitation?
Santiago Sierra creates “art” that uses people – exploits them, actually. They make powerful messages, but are they really art? He has “created pieces that involved workers from the local underclass being paid to do meaningless tasks: support a piece of Sheetrock at a 65-degree angle for an entire day; sit inside a cardboard box; or push around two-ton blocks of concrete. By designing such deliberately pointless ‘jobs,’ he highlighted the disjunction between such workers and their work, showing labor as an imposed condition rather than a choice one makes. ‘The remunerated worker doesn?t care if you tell him to clean the room or make it dirtier. As long as you pay him, it?s exactly the same. The relationship to work is based only upon money’.”
70s Stars Are The Stadium-Sellers
“While new artists like Norah Jones, 24, dominate the airwaves and sell millions of albums, the old folks are cleaning up at the box office. Last summer, five of the top 10 grossing tours were artists that came of age in the ’70s, including Billy Joel and Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Neil Diamond and The Eagles. Three others were acts that debuted in the ’60s: Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, and Cher. Creed and The Dave Matthews Band rounded out the top 10.”
Will Fans Outgrow Harry?
Publishers of the new Harry Potter installment are having 8.5 million pcopies printed in the US. But “as the young wizard enters adolescence in the series’ fifth book, will his original fan base follow, now that many of them are teens themselves? That is the question facing Rowling and her U.S. publisher, Scholastic, with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”
Christo Project To Raise Money For Central Park
Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always raised money for their big projects themselves. But their Central Park project – due to take place in 2005 – might cost $20 million. And there are environmental concerns about protecting the park. “While the potential for marketing products related to these project is almost limitless, the artists have never allowed any licensing or taken any such initiatives themselves. Until now.” The artists have allowed a foundation to license worldwide marketing rights to the project, with all the proceeds going to protecting an restoring Central Park.
All About The Piano
It’s the 150th anniversary of the founding of the American Steinway company. Time was when pianos were a big status symbol. “By the end of the 19th century, about one in six New Yorkers worked in some piano-related job…”
Artists Angry Over Plans For Arts School
Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a “self- proclaimed champion of the arts,” has hundreds of artists mad at him. He’s proposed expanding his Oakland School for the Arts, but he wants to expand it into a building that already houses artists, and the plan would evict them. “To displace working artists who are serving thousands of kids and adults for a school for the arts that will serve maybe 400 students at most is perverse. It makes no sense.”
Selling Saatchi
“For many, this is a veritable freak show – one now worth an estimated £50 million – in large part due to the yBas, a group of young British artists who fought a frenzied fight for attention in the late 1980s and ’90s. It was a conflagration that Saatchi, advertising man to the core, had an instinct for uncovering and promoting. One suspects that Saatchi perceives himself as a kind of magus, someone whose primary motive is control. It seems quite possible that his pleasure comes from the manipulation of taste, the general public and art community.”
The Problem With Jazz Criticism
Jazz critic Stanley Crouch was fired from JazzTimes magazine last month, and he says there’s much wrong with the field of jazz criticism today. “There is such consistency in the jazz press, and its predilections, that it represents a virtual conspiracy?not one that includes clandestine meetings or muttering in code?but a conspiracy of consensus based in modernist European ideas of avant gardism. It?s stapled to concepts that Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg pushed into the art world during the 1940s and 1950s, championing the narrows of Abstract Expressionism as ‘advanced’ because they ignored the body of basic classical skills in the interest of autobiographical methods devised by the painters themselves. But right now, while mouthing those theories, jazz criticism is actually dominated by an adolescent vision of rebellion that arrives from the world of pop music, rock in particular. That is why I was fired last month from JazzTimes.”
Publishers In A Price-Chopping Mood
What were publishers thinking about at last week’s annual BookExpo? “Lower prices were on many people’s minds at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where BookExpo America, the industry’s annual national gathering, ended Sunday. Publishers and booksellers agreed that in a slow economy they needed to find ways to conform to the budgets of their customers. With hardcovers often costing $25 or higher, publishers are cutting the price of some hardcover editions and going straight to paperback.”