Category: issues

Psychic Uri Geller, who found television fame in the ’70s, more recently has been on YouTube and other sites in old TV clips that discredit him. That’s where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act come in handy for him, even when he doesn’t own the posted content. “Using the DMCA, aggressive litigants like Geller and such copyright-hoarding companies as Viacom and Disney can simply make your work disappear if they do not like what you have to say, something that was much more difficult in the pre-digital world.”

“Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Philippe de Montebello earned $4.7 million last year, beating out presidents of universities and leading hospitals as the highest reported compensation among executives at U.S. nonprofit institutions.”

“No two cities in the same country have the degree of cultural rivalry that prevails between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.”

“To hear them tell it, downtown L.A. circa 1998 was like Montmartre, the epicenter of bohemian Paris, in 1898. And if downtown L.A. was Montmartre, the Canadian was Le Bateau-Lavoir, the squalid tenement that housed the likes of Pablo Picasso and Amadeo Modigliani in the late 1890s. Before the current attempts to turn it into a yuppie playground, downtown’s Main Street was the kind of petri dish of hunger and humanity that artists crave and thrive on. Right in the middle of it all was the Canadian, where crack and abuelas became absinthe and courtesans, and the party never ended.”

Twenty-three critics, editors and arts writers have been named to participate in this fall’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera. This is the fourth year of the institute.

Ticket sales to arts events in Houston are up this season. Why? “Arts managers have done a lot right this year with programming, marketing, pricing and customer service. But the real reason the hard work is paying off is the city’s economy.” The oil business is thriving, and there’s a lot of cash floating around.

The Chicago Children’s Museum wants to build a new home on an unused section of downtown’s popular Grant Park, and a debate over the proposal has been going on citywide ever since the plans were unveiled. Blair Kamin says that the central problem is that those running the museum and the park have yet to take “a hard look at the desultory section of the park the museum covets,” and that they have yet to consider “an expansive vision for remaking this subpar space.”

“About 70 Baltimore-area theater lovers who were left in the lurch when they bought tickets to shows that abruptly were canceled will receive refunds of about 42 cents on the dollar… The court-appointed trustee filed a final distribution notice yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court outlining the proposed liquidation of the remaining assets of Performing Arts Productions, the Baltimore branch of Baci Management Inc.”

Rose Jacobs is a fan of The New Yorker. But the magazine’s popular annual festival? Not so much. “Well, yes, but when a magazine made great for being literary, worldly, and esoteric spawns a festival just the opposite–self-satisfied and predictable–more analysis is due.”

“Does being identified really affect a critic’s experience? (Restaurants can change the service and the ingredients, but can a bad kitchen ever turn out great meals on demand?) Is the traditional rule of reviewing anonymously really just a game (or only a performance of kabuki)? And why not just come clean in a world that seems to have become one big virtual confessional?”