Theater is a competitive business, and theaters in the same city rarely join forces for any reason, for fear that success for one will mean failure for another. But a Twin Cities-based website is attempting to draw the region’s many theaters together on matters ranging from marketing to the hiring of actors. “Want to post your resume or audition listing? You can do so on the site. Need a set designer or a stage manager? You can cull the hundreds of techies and off-stage talent on the site’s searchable database… Maybe you’re a theater in need of a friendly audience for a free preview performance? [The] site will send out an e-mail to almost 1,000 subscribers giving them all the particulars.”
Tag: 01.25.04
Faking It
How good are today’s art forgers? So good that some of them make quite a nice living selling their work to collectors who are fully aware that they aren’t buying the original painting. “The pursuit of authenticity can encounter nasty opposition,” as many would-be whistleblowers have discovered, and after all, isn’t the desire to own “the real thing” nothing more than a greedy desire for prestige? “A beautiful artwork does not cease to be beautiful once its authorship is cast in doubt, but it can cease to be precious.”
Desperation Tactics
The Louisville Orchestra is changing the way it does business, it says, but it’s difficult to tell exactly what that means, or how it will improve the fortunes of the financially distressed ensemble. Louisville fired its music director largely because of poor ticket sales, and is loudly declaring to anyone who will listen that it is going to give its audience whatever it asks for. That sort of marketing strategy is bound to backfire, says Andrew Adler. “The orchestra is so afraid of anything that smacks of elitism that it’s hurtling headlong in the opposite aesthetic direction: celebrating small-d cultural democratization to the exclusion of more challenging repertoire.”
Bono & The F-Word: The Next Cultural Battleground
Ever since the FCC ruled that the pop singer Bono hadn’t violated any obscenity laws by uttering the word “fucking” on a live awards telecast, with the rationale being that he used the word as an adjective, conservative watchdog groups have been up in arms. Congress is considering a bill which would ban such language outright from the public airwaves, and the Supreme Court may even have to weigh in eventually. Such histrionics often miss the point, says Brian Lambert, and the fact is that the Supreme Court is already on record concerning what constitutes obscenity. Not that such niceties as facts have ever stopped culture warriors on either side of the political divide…
Always Get Written Permission For Your Corpse Art
Dr Gunther von Hagens is not a popular man in the art world to begin with, having made his name by embalming human corpses with plastic, skinning them, and then displaying them with organs exposed. But Svetlana Krechetova is no ordinary art critic: according to a lawsuit she has filed against Hagens, the good doctor used her father’s body without permission, after corrupt mortuary staff told her that the body had been cremated. Hagens is also facing charges that he recently accepted the bodies of executed Chinese dissidents.
The Voynich Code: Gibberish For Profit
“A British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century’s best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars.” As it turns out, the entire thing is a bunch of meaningless gibberish, designed to mystify scholars and make a substantial profit for its author based solely on the mystique of the unknown. Worked like a charm, apparently.
Thinking Small(er)
Some days, it seems as if every museum in America is mounting a major expansion, or at least talking about it. But at The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, the desire for more space is tempered by the realities of the marketplace, and the museum’s directors are anxious to do more with less. Rather than attempt a massive new building project, MOCAD is planning a modest expansion with a price tag of less than $4 million, which it hopes will generate buzz without endangering the institution financially, or alienating the public with demands for government subsidies in a notoriously conservative state.
Grilling The New Guy
As James Cuno prepares take over the leadership of the Art Institute of Chicago, he faces not only the scrutiny of the local critics, but the pressure of leading a major art institution at a time when much of the industry is looking for a way out of the “blockbuster” trend, without risking irrelevancy in the eys of the public. Cuno seems unfazed by the challenge: “Increasingly, people come to museums at different times of their life. We shouldn’t only think of the learning museum as something for young people. Increasingly it’s for older people. Our generations have been aging differently. So we need to be responsive to young and mature and senior learners as much as anything.”
Why Crossover Singers Almost Always Sound Stupid
From the first time the Three Tenors stepped up to a microphone and began belting Broadway tunes, discriminating listeners have known that there is a serious disconnect between the vocal styles of classical musicians and, well, everyone else. In fact, the real failure of the “crossover” genre is not that it has dumbed down the classical market, but that the singers almost always sound like fish out of water, says Richard Dyer. “Too many opera singers have had the wrong tonal quality, the wrong diction, the wrong rhythm — and the wrong arrangements. There is a kind of arrangement that knows no period; Las Vegas lies in a land beyond time and place, and that’s where the hearts of too many arrangers lie.”
Sony Not-So-Classical
Casey Stratton is a talented singer-songwriter from Michigan, who recently got himself a record deal. But the record company he signed with is Sony Classical, which has never marketed a pop singer before, and observers have been left wondering exactly what Stratton and Sony think they’re doing. The truth is, of course, that classical labels are willing to try anything to stay afloat these days, and if that means trying to balance the books on the back of a talented non-classical performer who would never have been given a chance by the increasingly risk-averse pop labels, then so be it.