“Art museums across the country are beginning to realize that they are the hip new version of a lonely hearts club. Scrambling to fill the role they didn’t know they had, they are increasingly open at night and making space for dining and dancing. In Seattle, all of the area’s major museums are open till at least 8 p.m. on Thursdays, and nearly all are trying to enlarge their piece of the seeking-soul-mates market.”
Tag: 02.14.03
Proposal For Tax Breaks For Hollywood Spending
A recent study estimates that movie and TV productions that have left the US to be shot in Canada have cost the US $10 billion in lost spending, as “studios seek to save cash by taking advantage of more generous tax regimes elsewhere.” Now two California politicians have proposed tax breaks to help keep productions in the US. “If passed, the new law would offer a 25% wage tax credit to each employee on wages of up to $25,000.”
Art Isn’t For The Rest Of Us!
What’s all this about trying to get the masses interested in art? They only spoil it for those who actually care… “The row in front of me was occupied by a family — let’s call them the Odious-Halfwits — who spent the entire evening smooching, snogging, conducting and, literally, jumping up and down in their seats in time with the music. They behaved exactly as they would have done in their own home, making not the slightest concession to the fact that, as part of an audience, they were surrounded by thousands of people trying to concentrate on a masterpiece. The truth is that art, by its very nature, is not for the masses. The attempt to prove otherwise is self-destructive.”
Why So Serious? Oscar’s Death Obsession
Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are a sombre lot. “So what’s new? Hasn’t drama always relied on at least one killing, just to keep the action ticking along? Surely murder has been a staple of storytelling ever since Cain and Abel. But there is a difference with the movie crop of 2003. In film after film favoured by the academy this week, death is not just a useful plot pivot or even a narrative climax. It is a theme, a puzzle probed and examined from the movie’s beginning to its end.”
Did Courtauld Take Cash For Paintings? That’s The Charge
The Getty Museum in LA gave London’s Courtauld Institute $10 million towards its endowment. Then the Getty “asked the institute to lend it some of its world-class collection of old masters, Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings and sculptures.” Some of the paintings are covered by a bequest that prohibits lending them outside of London, so the Courtauld applied to change the bequest. “The request has upset many leaders of the London art world.” Some charghe that “the Courtauld was accepting cash for paintings. ‘There has to be a connection between the two things’.”
The Case Of The Disappearing Diva
Soprano Sumi Jo’s reviews in Opera Australia’s “Lucia” were good. She seemed happy, according to her New York agent. So why did she suddenly bolt from Australia before her final performance, without even telling the opera company’s management? “The hotel staff told us about a change in her reservation; that’s the first we heard of it. She didn’t let us or her personal management know, but we gather she left for Rome on doctor’s orders.”
The Song Of Love…
“Why is starry-eyed romance so tied to music? Nothing touches people like a good love song. The love theme has been around from the birth of music in general. ‘It’s a timeless kind of a medium. It runs the gamut of emotion. There’s always a little sadness hidden in a love song because it reminds people of something that might not last’. The most-recorded song of all time, after all, is the lovelorn ode, ‘Yesterday,’ by Paul McCartney, reports the Guinness Book of World Records.”
Network Solutions…
“How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior? As simply as it can be asked, this is one of the most fundamental and pervasive questions in all of science. A human brain, for example, is in one sense a trillion neurons connected in a big electrochemical lump. But to each of us who has one, a brain is clearly much more, exhibiting properties like consciousness, memory, and personality, whose nature cannot be explained simply in terms of aggregations of neurons. What makes the problem hard, and what makes complex systems complex, is that the parts making up the whole don’t sum up in any simple fashion. Rather, they interact with each other, and in interacting, even quite simple components can generate bewildering behavior.”
A Mechanical Duck That Pooped
Inventors have been trying since forever to create mechanical devices that move or act like live beings. “The eighteenth century was ‘the golden age of the philosophical toy,’ and its most celebrated engineer was Jacques de Vaucanson. For Vaucanson, recreating life meant imitating its processes and movements — most famously, its bowel movements. While he entertained audiences with automata that played the flute and the organ, his most celebrated invention was a copper duck that realistically ‘gulped’ food through a flexible neck and then excreted it on a silver platter. First displayed in 1739, the duck caused a sensation.”