Category: issues

Ticketmaster is going paperless on the Miley Cyrus tour. “Concert-goers won’t receive an actual paper ticket. Rather, as they enter arenas, the credit cards they used to purchase the tickets will be swiped and they will receive a seat locator.” Which means parents will either have to go in with their kids or send the moppets in with their credit card. “It also means that if four tickets are purchased on one credit card, the concert-goers all need to enter the venue together.”

“Katherine G. Farley, a senior managing director at the real estate company Tishman Speyer and head of Lincoln Center’s redevelopment project, has been appointed the chairwoman of Lincoln Center. Ms. Farley, 59, will serve for a year in tandem with the current chairman, Frank A. Bennack Jr., the chief executive of the Hearst Corporation, who will step down next June after five years in the job.”

“In almost every area of the arts, genres are spilling into each other, cross-pollinating, refusing to remain in neat boxes. You go to the theatre expecting actors under a proscenium arch, and you get videos, animation, and intricate dance routines. Go to the opera expecting corsets and coloratura, and you get electric guitars and costumes designed by Viktor & Rolf.”

The $20 million center in suburban Burnside, Minnesota, opened in January, and it has almost nothing booked to perform inside…

“I wish I could say there’s a formula all newspapers and all critics follow in making such decisions, but it’s an arbitrary process: Theaters whose work will be seen by lots of people tend to have an advantage. Companies with a track record of accomplishment, ambition and excellence tend to have critics in the seats on opening night. At the Pioneer Press, theaters on the east side of the Mississippi might enjoy a slight edge over their west-of-the-river fellows. And then there are a host of intangibles.”

Is it possible that higher education might be the next bubble to burst? Some early warnings suggest that it could be.

“Every day, visitors from around the world flock to the hot sites of Hollywood, the historic birthplace of America’s entertainment industry. But so far this year, the crowds are thinner, tourist spending is down and merchants are nervous.”

“We now feel small and medium-size arts organizations need additional funding to stay afloat because they have no endowments of their own or a financial cushion.”

“The Malibu Performing Arts Center – a performance venue and recording studio used by A-listers such as Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and, recently, Sting – will be auctioned to the highest bidder on June 19 as part of the bankruptcy proceedings of its owner, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Malibu.”

Twelve Philadelphia-area artists have won $60,000 Pew Fellowships in the Arts, “the largest unrestricted grants of their kind for which artists may apply. Pew received nearly 400 applications for this year’s awards in media arts, works on paper, and fiction and creative nonfiction.”