Even in the face of financial setbacks, the Guggenheim presses on with expansion. Latest addition was Rio, announced a few weeks ago. Where will it stop? How about Antarctica? “Two ice-walled galleries will display the last 10 artworks from the permanent collection of the Guggenheim, the rest having been gradually sold off to cover debt service and other costs associated with the museum’s 18-year expansion program. ‘We cannot be a truly Global Guggenheim until we have a foothold on each continent,’ observed Mr. Krens at last week’s Guggenheim Summit in New York, attended by the directors of the Guggenheims Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, Rio, Taichung, Nairobi and Perth.”
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How To survive In Publishing
To compete with other media vying for consumers’ attention, publishers need to promote themselves more and cut prices, says a consultant. “Although the combination of lowering prices while spending more on marketing may seem a recipe for shrinking already slim profit margins, it is the best way for the industry to fight to get its share of consumer spending in an entertainment marketplace that is glutted with products.”
Dissing Jerry Springer… Like He Doesn’t Deserve It…
Jerry Springer – The Opera has been getting glowing reviews. But Arnold Wesker writes that the praise isn’t deserved. “I have no religious sensibilities to offend but I do have an intelligence that can be offended. It’s not the poor black actor looking absurd in shit-filled diapers that offends, or the fat lady having no greater ambition than to pole-dance which so obviously is beyond her size and weight; it’s that in both the live Springer show and this celebration of it we are invited not to understand but either to laugh at them – which insults them – or, because they are all rather intimidatingly jolly about their offbeat desires, to laugh with them – which is patronising!”
How To Support Poetry On $100 Million
When Poetry magazine was given $100 million to promote poetry last year, naturally everyone wanted to know what was to be done with the money. Just as naturally, everyone has ideas about what would put the money to best use in promoting the cause of poetry…
Decline Of A Chicago Classic
Chicago classical music fans recall the time not so long ago when radio station WFMT was “the most cultured radio station in North America.” But “much of what made WFMT truly distinctive seems to be eroding in slow but perceptible degrees, a decline driven by the difficulties of making classical radio commercially viable but also by economic reverses suffered by the fine-arts station’s corporate parent, Window to the World Communications, which also owns and operates public broadcasting station WTTW-Channel 11. The Arbitron ratings evidence a decline of another sort…
Tate Modern, Three Years On
In its first year, the Tate Modern drew five million visitors; it quickly became the hottest thing in modern art. The numbers have tailed off some, but “despite a drop in visitor numbers, Tate Modern has reigned as the only major gallery offering contemporary art in the capital on a massive scale. But after nearly three years it saw its first threat to its crown with the opening of the Saatchi Gallery, at nearby County Hall.”
The Patriotic Thing – Oppose The Patriot Act
Led by librarians across America, the campaign against the US Patriot Act is growing. The Patriot Act requires libraries and others to spy on American citizens. But so far, “103 cities, towns, and counties have passed resolutions against the USAPA, covering roughly 10 million people in the US. ‘The more the USAPA and other similar repressive legislation are “outed” as misguided and paranoid, to say nothing of unconstitutional and quasi–legal, the more we can return to being a society that really encourages and appreciates the free exchange of ideas, not one that pays lip service to ideals and then locks up its librarians’.”
The “Great” Books We Hate?
“We are all impressed, and a little cowed, by great reputations; so when we confront the works themselves but fail to appreciate their achievement, their technical skill and their freight of wisdom, we assume that the fault must lie in ourselves in our limited grasp, our philistine blindness. But sometimes we hit back and allow ourselves the luxury to say, ‘No, no, it’s this damn book that is wrong; it’s this crappy plot and its flat-as-a-flounder characters, and this dismal dialogue’.”
Robo-Reader On The Job
The downside to digitizing millions of books waiting to go online? Scanning them into a computer. Now there’s a new robot enlisted in “the march toward digitization. Inside the room a Swiss-designed robot about the size of a sport utility vehicle was rapidly turning the pages of an old book and scanning the text. The machine can turn the pages of both small and large books as well as bound newspaper volumes and scan at speeds of more than 1,000 pages an hour. Occasionally the robot will stumble, turning more than a single page. When that happens, the machine will pause briefly and send out a puff of compressed air to separate the sticking pages.”
Whitney Museum Director Resigns
Maxwell Anderson has resigned as director of the Whitney Museum in New York. “Rumors of trouble between Mr. Anderson and the Whitney’s board had been circulating around the gossipy art world for some time. Mr. Anderson said in a statement that it had “become clear in recent months that the board and I have a different sense of the Whitney’s future, in both the scale of its ambitions and the balance of its programming.”