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Increasingly – TV Execs Negotiate With Themselves For Shows

Increasingly, American TV networks buying shows are the same people who produce the shows, and the complicated relationship is changing the rules of the business. “Such incestuous discussions are increasingly common in the industry, where a handful of giant companies occupy both sides of the negotiating table, produce much of the programming on the air and increasingly play financial hardball to offset their ratings losses. The squeeze is being felt not just by talent but also by the agents and managers who represent them. Independent producers, meanwhile, have been pushed to near-extinction. Only 11% of last year’s new prime-time programs came from companies other than major studios – and most of those were low-cost reality shows.”

In Opposition To Modern Art

The founder of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow has little use for modern art. “I have met plenty of people who have told me that I ought to like modern art. There is some place for ‘ought’ in life, but none at all in art; art is a gift, not a duty. A benighted view of art has a stranglehold on the few who choose what little art we are aloud to see. And the public acquiesce, because what else can they compare it with? It is one of the most pernicious myths of modern art that we have discovered the great art of our age when, in fact, we have hardly begun to look for it.”

FBI Investigated Aaron Copland For 20 Years

The FBI was convinced that composer Aaron Copland was a Communist and spent “two decades and more monitoring Copland’s whereabouts, analyzing his comments and taking note of his friends and associates. The result is an inch-thick FBI file, replete with blacked-out passages, released to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from late 1997. The papers make clear that the government’s interest in Copland did not end with his 1953 testimony at Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist hearings – transcripts of which were released this month.”

When Book Clubs Need Help

The very words ‘book club’ can bring to mind the peace of a bright living room, where women balance plates on their knees, listening eagerly to one another’s opinions, not letting anything distract them from serious literary discussion. The reality is something different. As in any leaderless group, people do what they want: show up or not, read the book or not, talk the entire time or sit mute, or ignore the book and do a lot of just plain catching up with one another.” Enter the paid book club facilitator.

Sorting Out What’s Missing At Iraqi Museum

Reports of what’s missing from Iraq’s National Museum after looters got done have been contradictory. “The number of items stolen during and after the war from one of the world’s premier collections of early-civilization antiquities appears now to be much smaller than first suspected. Thousands of pieces, however, are missing. Although many of the thefts are being attributed to looters, some appear almost certainly to be the work either of insiders or experts.”

Western Scholars, Curators Offer To Help Iraq Museum

Concerned archeologists, scholars, conservators and arts administrators in the West have been meeting in recent weeks to try to find ways to help Baghdad’s National Museum, which was looted in April. There still isn’t enough information about losses at the museum to take definitive definitive action, but “we are also very concerned that the inventory of the museum’s collection be done by individuals with academic and museum qualifications, not the military, and that guards and other people who worked in the museums be rehired.”