Category: issues

Revised designs are unveiled for a new opera house in Dallas. “The opera house is the centerpiece of the $275 million Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, which also includes the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, designed by Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture; and the City Performance Hall by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago and Corgan Associates of Dallas.”

Upstate New York’s embattled Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) has elected a whole new board, taken steps to become more responsive to community concerns, and done its best to respond to a scathing internal report that blasted its previous leadership and programming decisions. All that having been said, however, SPAC’s finances have turned out to be in even worse shape than anyone had predicted, and one of the new board members speculated at this week’s annual meeting that the organization would likely have been bankrupt within a year had changes not been made.

What good are the arts, asks a new book. The answer – “not much, it answers, if you want to argue rationally.”

London’s Millennium Dome will reopen as a “first class” concert facility. “The £758m Dome was built as a Millennium project and opened in 2000. Intended as a symbol of the new, brighter Britain and funded by more than £600m of lottery money, the dome was mired in controversy from its inception.”

Defenders of traditional copyright law might have the law on their side in the battle against file-swapping and free music, but that won’t be enough to win what is basically a Quixotic war of principle being fought against simple progress, says Joshua Ostroff. The latest battle has seen courts ruling that “sampling” of other artists’ work is illegal, an absurd notion that has done nothing to stop the widespread practice. Such crackdowns might temporarily set back the advance of new media practices, but audio enthusiasts are firmly convinced that nothing can be done to stop the changes already in motion in the music industry.

According to a new book, scientists might have built the computer, but “longhairs liberated computers from I.B.M. and the military industrial complex and profoundly shaped the technology that is ubiquitous today. Formerly sequestered behind forbidding glass walls, computers went on to become accessible, usable and friendly. The industry had its consciousness raised – became a vehicle of togetherness.”

The fringe American Family Association has ended a nine-year boycott of Disney, saying the AFA’s point had been made. “The organization objected to movies like 1995’s Kids being made by Disney through its Miramax subsidiary, as well as the company’s decision to grant benefits to the common-law spouses of homosexual employees. It also wanted to put an end to gay-themed events at Disney’s parks.”

“After an outstanding 11-year record of advocating for and promoting the cause of arts journalism, the National Arts Journalism Program, the only program in America dedicated to the advocacy of arts journalism, is being closed down at the Columbia School of Journalism.”

Arts journalists who have been fellows of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia, weigh in on this week’s decision to close the program…

“Today the phrase “vanity project” is an accusation redolent of bloated ego, absence of talent, ill-used money or clout and contempt for the ethics of merit. Most of all, the phrase implies scorn for the normal artistic filters: all the editors, directors, producers, investors, curators and institutional functionaries who make things happen and bestow prestige. Lurking behind the term is the assumption that the only reason to produce, distribute and market your own creation is that nobody else will do it for you. But in this world of blogs, pocket video cameras, on-demand publishing and instant Internet distribution, dismissing an artistic undertaking for its vanity quotient has become so 20th century.”