Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. museums have struggled to obtain works for major exhibitions from overseas due to skyrocketing insurance rates and jittery art lenders who fear losing their pieces in a terrorist strike.” Now legislation has been introduced in the US Congress that “would raise the amount of indemnity coverage that can be provided at any particular time from $5 billion to $8 billion. It also increases how much coverage the program – run through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) – can provide to one exhibition, from $500 million to $750 million.”
Tag: 03.06.03
Melbourne’s Arts Funding Woes
Melbourne’s arts institutions are suffering from underfunding they say. “Critics of the Government have questioned its commitment to the arts, saying there is no obvious cultural policy and that it is operating in a policy vacuum.”
That Arts Degree Will Earn You Less
So you have that arts degree and feel you’re not earning what you should? Turns out the statistics are against you. Researchers have concluded that university graduates with arts degrees – including history, English and sociology – “should expect to make between 2% and 10% less than those who quit education at 18.”
Hickox To Head Opera Australia
British conductor Richard Hickox has been appointed new director of Opera Australia. Hickox “replaces local conductor Simone Young, whose contract with Opera Australia was not renewed at the end of last year amid controversy over her vision for the company. However, she will remain in the position until Mr Hickox takes the reins in January 2005. Mr Hickox, 55, is now the principal conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and is also an associate guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.”
Live And In Concert (And Recording)
Bootleg live concert recording is booming, with fans trading recordings of thousands of concerts over the internet. “It is not just that the recordings of live performances are of far better quality than the scratchy cassettes of 40 years ago. It is that copies of such a recording, and subsequent copies of the copies, are better.”
Arnold’s Last ‘Books Column
After five years, Martin Arnold is packing in his “Making Books” column in the NYT. “I’ve had 212 opportunities to pronounce on what I still believe is the world’s primary cultural conduit. I have chronicled and commented on all sorts of literary trends, disputes, ups and downs, but the enduring consistence of what I have learned, the unrolling thread, has been about the durability and incandescence of books themselves; the bravery of those who write them; and the instinct to gamble by many, but not all, who publish them.”
Norman Mailer On Writers
On DH Lawrence: “He was perhaps a great writer, certainly full of faults, and abominably pedestrian in his language when the ducts of experience burned dry, he was unendurably didactic then, he was a pill, and at his worst a humourless nag…On Jonathan Franzen: “It is too full of language, even as the nouveaux riches are too full of money. He is exceptionally intelligent, but like a polymath, he lives much of the time in Wonkville Hollow, for Franzen is an intellectual dredging machine.”
Norah Jones Gets Big Grammy Boost
Norah Jones’ Grammy wins have done wonders for sales of her album. “Come Away With Me,” sold 621,000 copies after her Grammy sweep, almost 500,000 more than the week before, the biggest post-Grammy sales spike ever, according to her record company.”
One-Minute Opera – How To Write Better For The Stage
There aren’t enough good operas being written. Why? Poor music, bad stories, awkward librettos. Aldeburgh is trying to help. So it invited a group of writers and composers to spend a week together exploring one another’s craft. First assignment? team up and write a one-minute scene. It’s tougher than it seems…
Why People Don’t Read “Serious” Fiction
Terry Teachout writes that “it’s common to run across ‘well-read’ people who no longer read any new literary fiction at all, American or otherwise. I don’t, and neither do many of the professional writers I know. Like most Americans, we go to the movies instead.” So why is that, he wonders. “Our ‘major’ writers tend to be chronically verbose, stylistically ostentatious and agonizingly earnest (though the flippant Irony Lite of Generation X now appears to have replaced earnestness as the style du jour). Such books are unreadable, and so nobody reads them, save under academic duress.”