One of Scotland’s “pioneering” online galleries has made a deal with a hotel chain to provide 1,500 works of art for hotel rooms. “We believe that art is part of daily life and we are challenging the way that people normally view and buy art.”
Blog
Develop This – Another Gatekeeper On The Road To Getting Published
“Some 13,000 new novels are published each year, a 45 per cent increase since 1998. But the deluge conceals a depressing reality for new writers. The slush pile – the derogatory term for unsolicited manuscripts that land on publishers’ desks – has been all but abandoned in this efficient age of corporate accounting and executive accountability. Publishers no longer read novels by unknowns. Nor, increasingly, do literary agents. If you are a first-timer, your chances of getting into print are almost non-existent.” Enter a new form of literary life – literary development agencies that for a fee will read and critique your work and make recommendations…
Best In Show Outside New York
The American section of the International Art Critics Association has chosen the “Eva Hesse” show, co-organized and launched on its tour by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as best monographic exhibition outside New York.
Twenty Years Of Opera Supertitles
Twenty years ago the first supertitles were used at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. “The first titled opera was Strauss’s ‘Elektra’: As Orestes busied himself axe-cleaving his mother and stepfather to death, the audience — its eyes cast upwards at the titles — understood opera as never before. There were a few dissenters, but for most it was love at first sight. We had purists who said, ‘I’m German-speaking, I already understand every word.’ And some people said, ‘I have to look up, and it takes away from the action.’ But in an audience poll, approximately 80 per cent gave their approval.”
Colorado Springs Cancels Concerts
The Colorado Springs Symphony has canceled upcoming performances in a dispute with its musicians. “A spokesman for the symphony musicians and their union local, said they view the postponement as a lockout, a description the orchestra’s management rejects.”
Slash And Burn In Massachusetts
The state of Massachusetts made the biggest cuts in arts funding of all states in 2002 – slashing its budgest 62 percent. Now arts leaders are surveying the damage – reduced and discontinued programs, a few closings, and more difficulty raising money in the private sector…Arts groups just hope that this year’s budget won’t be cut even more.
The Thousand-Page Harry
Within days of the announcement that the new installment of Harry Potter would be published in June, Amazon reported 30,000 orders. Book stores plan to be open at midnight on the first day the book is sold, and already it’s a bestseller before a single page is printed. But this installment looks to be more than 1000 pages long. Isn’t that a little long for a kid’s book?
When Van Gogh Met Gauguin
An interactive website put up by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam traces the interactions between Van Gogh and Gauguin. Attaching colors to sounds, allowing the viewer to change the color palette of the website, and linking pictures to paintings, the site explores the artists’ lives and work.
What Place Animals In The World?
“Along with other ecologically concerned citizens, scholars are trying to articulate the place that animals occupy in our world – or, less anthropocentrically, how human and nonhuman animals share this world. This work involves deconstructing the divisions and prejudices that separate people from animals, going all the way back to the Great Chain of Being in Aristotle’s scala naturae and the proclamation of human mastery over animals in Genesis. Much of the most exciting current research comes out of the humanities and social sciences rather than the natural sciences.”
Stealing Reinvention? Are Others Stealing Jonathan Larson’s Ideas?
A writer goes through the boxes of papers left by “Rent” author Jonathan Larson. “The cynic in me knows that Larson’s tragic death on the day before his long-labored-over Rent was about to go into previews fueled the hype that made the show ‘the breakthrough musical for the ’90s,’ as Newsweek wrote. But having been an eyewitness to the paper trail left by Larson’s perspiration and inspiration, I also know he deserved the Pulitzer and the Tonys. And the long career he never got.” Did Larson “reinvent” musical theatre? And these new musicals on Broadway merely rip-offs of Larson’s ideas?