Museums everywhere are facing funding crunches. But none so bad perhaps, as Copenhagen’s Royal Cast Museum, which holds “the world’s second-largest collection of plaster casts, and a rich selection of works representing the past 3300 years of art history from ancient Egypt to the 19th century.” The Royal Cast’s problem is not how to get more visitors, but how to keep them away – funding cuts have shrunk the museum’s hours to five a month – the “last Wednesday of every month between the hours of 10.00-15.00.”
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An Arts Alternative
Should anyone be surpriseed that popular culture holds such a firm grip on teenagers? It’s all around. Unavoidable. A ten-year-old program in San Francisco offers kids an alternative – an art alternative. Art and Film for Teenagers “offers Bay Area teens Friday night art movie screenings; Saturday outings to galleries, museums and commercial films; group trips to the symphony, opera and ballet (often three or more times a week); dinner parties and picnics, and an opportunity for mingling with peers passionate about the arts – an antidote to adolescent isolation.”
Re-Cast And Re-Bait
“A look at the latest Broadway casts of ‘The Producers,’ ‘Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune’ and ‘Oklahoma!’ has confirmed one basic truth of the theater: if the chemistry of casting is an elusive and mysterious science, the alchemy of recasting is even more complicated. No matter how much electricity performers give off naturally, when you plug them into roles that don’t fit, short-circuiting is to be expected.”
The Art Of Dating
“Art museums across the country are beginning to realize that they are the hip new version of a lonely hearts club. Scrambling to fill the role they didn’t know they had, they are increasingly open at night and making space for dining and dancing. In Seattle, all of the area’s major museums are open till at least 8 p.m. on Thursdays, and nearly all are trying to enlarge their piece of the seeking-soul-mates market.”
Getting Under The Hood Of Human Hardwiring
Are personality, intelligence, gender, and the moral sense in the genes or are they the stuff of culture? A new book argues that “new sciences of human nature — combining cognitive science, neuroscience, genetics, and evolution—strongly suggest that our minds are partly ‘hardwired’ at birth. This hardwiring likely underlies many human universals—forms of behavior and mental structures shared by all peoples in all cultures, e.g., baby talk and incest avoidance. But it also seems likely that such hardwiring underlies some differences among people.”
San Jose Turns Down Ballet Company Emergency Funding
Last week San Jose Silicon Valley Ballet said it might have to close if it didn’t raise $1.2 million. So the company applied to the San Jose city council for emergency funding. In the meantime, the company raised the money from other sources, so despite pleas from the company’s director that the city money was the “linchpin” to the company’s fundraising efforts, the city council turned down the dance company’s request for a $100,000 emergency grant.
Proposal For Tax Breaks For Hollywood Spending
A recent study estimates that movie and TV productions that have left the US to be shot in Canada have cost the US $10 billion in lost spending, as “studios seek to save cash by taking advantage of more generous tax regimes elsewhere.” Now two California politicians have proposed tax breaks to help keep productions in the US. “If passed, the new law would offer a 25% wage tax credit to each employee on wages of up to $25,000.”
Art Isn’t For The Rest Of Us!
What’s all this about trying to get the masses interested in art? They only spoil it for those who actually care… “The row in front of me was occupied by a family — let’s call them the Odious-Halfwits — who spent the entire evening smooching, snogging, conducting and, literally, jumping up and down in their seats in time with the music. They behaved exactly as they would have done in their own home, making not the slightest concession to the fact that, as part of an audience, they were surrounded by thousands of people trying to concentrate on a masterpiece. The truth is that art, by its very nature, is not for the masses. The attempt to prove otherwise is self-destructive.”
Why So Serious? Oscar’s Death Obsession
Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are a sombre lot. “So what’s new? Hasn’t drama always relied on at least one killing, just to keep the action ticking along? Surely murder has been a staple of storytelling ever since Cain and Abel. But there is a difference with the movie crop of 2003. In film after film favoured by the academy this week, death is not just a useful plot pivot or even a narrative climax. It is a theme, a puzzle probed and examined from the movie’s beginning to its end.”
Did Courtauld Take Cash For Paintings? That’s The Charge
The Getty Museum in LA gave London’s Courtauld Institute $10 million towards its endowment. Then the Getty “asked the institute to lend it some of its world-class collection of old masters, Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings and sculptures.” Some of the paintings are covered by a bequest that prohibits lending them outside of London, so the Courtauld applied to change the bequest. “The request has upset many leaders of the London art world.” Some charghe that “the Courtauld was accepting cash for paintings. ‘There has to be a connection between the two things’.”