While many foundations are cutting back arts grants, the Warhol Foundation has increased the amount it is giving away this year by 20 percent. “It isn’t that the foundation is such a smart investor, although putting lots of money into bonds has helped. And it isn’t just that the foundation continues to profit from sales of Warhol’s work. “We wanted to send a message. Even in bad times, a lot of people have a lot of money. Sometimes they can do more, spending some of that money in bad times than in more plentiful times.”
Tag: 01.26.03
Going Off-Formula – The Norah Jones Case
The huge success of Norah Jones in a format that isn’t the standard pop formula has the recording industry rethinking… “In an era full of great voices, from Mariah Carey to Whitney Houston, that have been plugged into formats that make them more manufactured than memorable, her success is leading record executives, always on the lookout for the next big thing, to search for singers again, not just voices with hit formulas.”
Utica Symphony May Close Because of Deficit
“The Utica Symphony Orchestra, upstate New York’s oldest continuing orchestra, may be forced to shut down if it does not get at least $112,000 by mid-February.”
Motown Turns Up To Dispute Author
Gerald Posner goes to Detroit to talk about his new book chronicling the history of Motown and gets an earful from the audience. “Only in Detroit could you write a book and have all the main characters show up at your book lecture.” Mostly they were critical.
A $600,000 Tree Stump?
John Davis saw a giant rootball unearthed in a tornado 27 years ago and decided to dig out the roots and make a sculpture out of it. After 2 1/2 years he was finished revealing the 14 foor-by 16 foot, 3000-pound piece. Then he listed it on Ebay for $2.7 million and got no offers. Now he wants $600,000, but the artworld doesn’t seem interested. “From the photograph, it looks like an incredible object. A question that I’m asked a lot is, ‘What is it really worth?’ And there are different qualifications for intrinsic artistic value and what the art market will bear. … On the art market, it’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it.”
Movie Critics Vs. Movie Audiences
“Are movie critics out of touch with the public? Is that necessarily bad? And if so, should average moviegoers or Oscar voters pay any attention to this deluge of critical voting, rehashing and listmaking? Looking over the lists of movies anointed by the critics so far, compared with 2002’s top grossing box-office hits, you can understand why some observers – especially movie studio and marketing executives and their cronies – become exasperated.”
Crossover – Getting Artists To Think About Science
How do you get people to think creatively about science? The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation believes the arts can help. “Sloan’s Public Understanding of Science and Technology program spends $8 million to $10 million a year funding a slew of projects in film, theater, public television, books, radio, and new media. “We need people going back and forth between the [science and lay worlds]. And I thought the best way is through media such as film, TV, and theater. It’s very powerful.”
City In The Sky (And Under)
The World Trade Center project is about more than big buildings. “The process of thinking about this unique site expanded into an exercise in imagining a new future for the skyscraper in an increasingly dense and urbanized world. In a number of proposals, the towers are interconnected rather than autonomous, so that they work horizontally as well as vertically. In effect, they create another ground plane to accommodate the kinds of public spaces historically limited to the street: parks, gardens and cultural facilities. The nine diverse schemes all conceive of urban life as a vertical proposition – cities in the sky.”
Good-For-You (And The Environment) Housing
A new eco-friendly energy-efficient way of building housing in Britain makes minimal impact on the environment. It’s oh-so-good for you. Yet it’s the style and aesthetics that win buyers. “It’s ingenious: tapping into the power of the raw consumer, making eco-homes as easy to buy as an organic swede. Now, that’s how real revolutions start, you see. By playing capitalism at its own game. By stealth.”
Torture By Art
Was modern art used as a torture device in the Spanish Civil War? “A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country’s bloody civil war. Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere.”