“MPs are conducting hearings into how to save the television fund, after two cable companies announced abruptly in December they would no longer contribute to it. Cable companies are required by regulation to contribute to the fund, which is then distributed to broadcasters to pay for Canadian productions. The action has created a crisis in the Canadian television production industry, which now employs more than 16,000 people with the help of the CTF.”
Tag: 02.16.07
An Interview With The NYT’s New Chief Dance Critic
Alastair Macaulay is the chief theater critic of the London-based Financial Times and chief dance critic of the Times Literary Supplement. “Why just ballet and modern dance? Those aren’t all the dance there is. I’ve also written about dance in Disney films, dance in the Astaire-Rogers movies, Indian dance, flamenco, ballroom, Pilobolus, and other genres. I do not claim to have expertise on all forms of dance, but I do not claim that expertise is a critic’s starting-point anyway.”
Art Fairs Take Manhattan
New York has seven art fairs opening next weekend: the Art Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory and the Armory Show at Pier 94, which are coinciding for the first time in several years, and five new or newish fairs, Scope, Pulse, the Red Dot Fair, LA Art, and DiVA.
A History Of Beauty (Philosophically Speaking)
Contemporary philosophers, preoccupied with their small quarrels, have abandoned the discussion of beauty to the likes of Elaine Scarry and Denis Donoghue and their colleagues in art and English departments. It should come as little surprise, then, that beauty has been smuggled back into philosophy by Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, whose previous books have made wideranging inquiries into what he calls “the art of living.”
Some Questions About Fisk U’s O’Keeffe Sale
“Is a university’s art an asset that should be traded to support college functions that have nothing to do with art? Should a donor’s wishes ever be second-guessed? If you’re the president of a college with severe financial struggles, is it sacrilegious or simply sensible to look at your museum’s prized O’Keeffe and see green?”
The Cost Of Piracy In LA
Bootleg DVDs, CDs, prescription drugs and other merchandise such as handbags cost nine industries across Los Angeles County more than 100,000 jobs and about $5.2 billion in lost sales in 2005. The study lists the motion picture industry as accounting for about half the losses — $2.7 billion — followed by the recording industry, which sustained $850 million in losses.
Foreign Oscar’s Political Tinge
” The nominees for best foreign-language film are even more politically charged, and every bit as artistically successful, emotionally touching and accessible as the English-language candidates. Set mostly in the past, these films use a sneaky indirection that allows them to resonate with the most volatile questions of today.”
MoMA’s High Paid Director (Really)
Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry is one of the highest-paid directors in the US, with salary, bonus and benefits totaling $1.28 million in the year that ended June 30, 2005. But there’s more. “Between 1995 and 2003, that trust paid him a total of $5.35 million — in amounts ranging from $35,800 to $3.5 million a year — aside from the compensation supplied by the museum. Last year, those trust payments attracted questions from the New York State attorney general’s office.”
UK THeatre Luminaries Plead For Continued Theatre Funding
“Their extraordinary success in cinema would never have been possible, they say, without the training ground and support of publicly subsidised theatre, which could be under threat if arts funding is frozen or reduced this summer, as feared.”
US: Leave Your Ideas At The Border
“The ‘fear of ideas’ that has taken root in the United States since September 11, 2001, with the refusal to grant visas to a number of academics and intellectuals, most of whom are Muslims, strikes at the very heart of American democracy. The muffling of critical opinion should be of immediate concern to all freethinking individuals. To accept such a state of affairs is to accept that the United States, in the name of the ‘global war on terror’ and national security, requires all citizens to think the same way.”