Sometimes, all it takes to doom a film’s box office prospects is a slew of negative reviews in advance of the opening. As a result, more and more studios are bypassing the review process altogether, refusing to give critics an early look at flicks deemed unlikely to win them over, or unlikely to need a critical boost in any case. “In the past, a typical nonscreened movie was a studio mistake dumped to satisfy contractual obligations. Now, nonscreening is more often part of a conscious marketing policy, particularly flicks aimed at teens.”
Tag: 02.23.06
Urban Renewal Through Art
“Can there be a weirder, more alienated place than [Tijuana’s] Avenida Revolución on a Saturday night? The dark side of the moon, perhaps? Yet Avenida Revolución also is the pulsing subconscious of an exciting and restless city — one of the world’s busiest, most notorious border towns.” There is plenty of illicit “fun” to be had in the new Tijuana, as you might expect, but surprisingly, the backbone of the city’s dramatic reinvention has been its embrace of contemporary art, and of the arts in general.
Canada’s Queen Of Fluff
At 49, Lise Ravary is sitting on top of Canada’s ever-expanding world of magazines, and she thrives on a synthesis of serious journalism and celeb-soaked pop culture that publishers can’t get enough of. “Arguably, Ravary is the most pivotal force in Canadian consumer publishing today. And in both official languages — probably no one else more closely experiences this country’s two cultures of magazine journalism.”
Does Google To Be An “Instant” Publisher?
So Google has these big book digitization projects going. The project seems to violate copyrights. So what’s the point? “Some in the industry wonder whether Google’s long-term aim isn’t to set itself up as a sort of instant publisher; that once it has all those books in its index, it could generate a print-on-demand shop that would bypass publishers, shipping a book to you even though it is officially out of print.”
Dawn Of A New Day
In a classical music world where soloists are almost forced to lean dramatically towards the conventional, and seem to exist mainly to lend star power and attract cash to the box office, soprano Dawn Upshaw has carved out an unlikely niche for herself as the diva of new music. In the process, she is changing not only the way that the public thinks about contemporary music, but how the critical press perceives performers who play it.
First Told: The Destruction Of Grozny’s Museum
In 1994 in Grozny, Chechnya, the city’s Museum of Fine Art was obliterated during the war. The destruction “has gone unreported, despite the fact that it is the first museum in Europe to be destroyed since 1945. A delegation found that about 90% of buildings in the city, once home to 500,000, have been partially or totally destroyed, mostly as a result of Russian bombing. The Museum of Fine Arts, which housed a collection of more than 500,000 artefacts and works of art, was one of them.”
You Don’t Know Jack
Jack Vettriano may be the most unpopular painter of the last 50 years – unless, that is, you measure popularity by what the general public thinks. “Vettriano is far and away Scotland’s most successful contemporary painter… But critics tend either to ignore Mr. Vettriano or to swat him lazily away with the backs of their cultured hands.” Is it pure elitism on the part of the critics, or is the public simply blind to such niceties as painting skill?
Trusting The Free Market To Achieve Public Good
New York’s city government is asking developers to submit proposals to revitalize and redevelop Governors Island, a 175-acre parcel of land that sits just south of Manhattan, and which has been virtually abandoned since the Coast Guard pulled up stakes ten years ago. “In asking developers to take the lead, government officials risk quashing creativity at the outset. More broadly, their appeal raises questions about how American cities — New York in particular — are approaching large-scale urban development these days, handing over enormous swaths of public land to private interests.”
Met Museum’s Illicit Antiquities Problem Reaches Further Into Museum Community
New York’s Metropolitan Museum is returning 21 works of art to Italy. But “while Italy secured a victory in this instance, the Met remains enmeshed in a broader tangle of donors, trustees and curators, some of whom have dealt in illicit antiquities, according to Italian and U.S. court decisions. At least three members of the Met’s board or its curator- appointed committees have bought smuggled artifacts for their personal collections, according to rulings in three Italian and U.S. cases since 1999.”
Shakespeare’s Mask
“Forensic scientists claim to have proved a bust and a death mask are the exact likeness of William Shakespeare. Scientists in Germany scanned the sculptures using computerised imaging techniques to show that they match up with portraits of the Bard. The systems, used by police, map out a person’s face to identify whether they tally with known pictures. Elizabethan experts deny the claim, saying busts and portraits were not true likenesses [and] often look similar.”