Seven arts journalists have been chosen 2005 Fellows for the University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program. A committee of six journalists chose the Fellows from an international pool of approximately 70 applicants from Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, Nigeria, Romania and the United States.
Tag: 02.25.05
Conductors Petition For South Bank Acoustics
Thirty top conductors have signed a letter demanding that improving acoustics at London’s South Bank should be the top priority in a renovation. “The roll of names includes such sworn enemies as Daniel Barenboim and Christian Thielemann; Riccardo Muti and most other Italian maestri; Simon Rattle and several of his less guarded professional critics. What unites them is a concern for London’s premier concert venue and a fear that it may suffer as a result of declining political regard for classical music and the general decay in British arts policy.”
WebSide Story… (The Web For TV Shows)
“The days of promoting a TV show with a basic website are over. Network executives now are developing elaborate Web productions for many of their shows to create buzz, earn extra advertising dollars and, by strengthening viewer loyalty, keep ratings up. “Reality” shows blazed the trail by putting outtakes on the Web. Now producers of scripted prime-time dramas have joined the trend, bringing some interactivity to a historically one-way medium.”
Ford Pulls Out Of Detroit Jazz Fest
The Detroit International Jazz Festival is in dancer after the Ford Motor Co. declined to renew its $250,000 title sponsorship. “If Music Hall, which produces the festival, cannot replace Ford’s annual contribution — 21 percent of the proposed budget for 2005 — then one of the city’s signature cultural events could fold on the brink of its 26th anniversary.”
An Unexpected Ouster In Chicago
“The resignation of Eileen Mackevich as president and executive producer of the Chicago Humanities Festival, where she had worked as a founding force for 16 years, came as quite a surprise,” and not just to outsiders. Many inside the Festival’s organization were unprepared for the announcement, and Mackevich herself has admitted that she didn’t expect to be leaving at this exact moment. But conflict with the Festival’s board chair and disputes over the direction of the organization apparently sealed Mackevich’s fate, even as the Festival continues to thrive in Chicago.
Strike Settled In St. Louis
The 8-week strike by the musicians of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is apparently over. One day after the SLSO management played its trump card, winning a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board that declared the strike illegal on a paperwork technicality, the two sides returned to the bargaining table and hammered out a tentative agreement. Details of the deal will be unavailable until the musicians vote to ratify it, but it is believed to be a three-and-a-half year contract.
Artistic Paneling
One year after abandoning the practice of using an expert advisory committee to select American participants for international art exhibitions, the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. State Department are reconstituting the panel. The new committee will be made up of nine diverse curators, museum directors, and artists from across the U.S., and is expected to be in place within months.
Groundbreaking Curator Dies
“Harald Szeemann, an influential Swiss museum curator whose groundbreaking exhibitions helped redefine his profession, died last Friday in the Ticino region of Switzerland. He was 71. His death was announced by the Venice Biennale and the Kunsthaus Zürich, for which he worked. Mr. Szeemann was often said to be the first independent, or freelance, curator. He invented the curator as art star, a globe-trotting, deal-making, usually male impresario of large-scale exhibitions that bore the imprint of a single vision and succeeded or failed on the strength of site-specific works executed specially for the show.”
Designs Submitted For New NYC Rail Hub
New York City’s seemingly Quixotic quest to build a major new train station in midtown Manhattan has finally become a reality, and three developers are competing for the right to design it. “The design proposals all incorporate what has playfully become known as the potato chip – a shapely glass and steel canopy that will encompass the new station’s entry lobby. That canopy, designed by David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, would envelop a series of concourses that slip under the post office building, letting light flow onto the train platforms below ground.” The new station would replace New York’s dilapidated and congested Penn Station.
Is Hollywood Tired Of Itself?
“In the days leading up to the movie industry’s most glamorous night, the Oscars, the word heard frequently around Hollywood this year is not glitz, or hype, or excitement. It is fatigue. Strange, perhaps, and unexpected. The same millions of dollars as in years past have been spent on pitched Oscar campaigns, with their color, full-page newspaper advertisements and their earnest television spots. The same publicity muscle has been put into cocktail parties and question-and-answer sessions led by Oscar nominees at the guilds and the movie industry’s home for the aged. But the fatigue is palpable nonetheless.”