Washington’s new Museum of the American Museum tries for so much. But does it deliver? “Although architect Douglas Cardinal’s building has powerful moments, and several of the exhibits are intriguing, the $220 million museum is mostly a disappointment, a casualty of political infighting, scholarly temporizing and curatorial confusion. But the exhibits are the bigger letdown, mainly because with 800,000 artifacts in its possession, including the fabulous Heye Collection, the museum is in a position to do something spectacular. Yet the exhibits are technology-rich and object-poor and so badly organized that it is difficult to know where you are or how one section or theme relates to another.”
Tag: 03.09.05
The Funny Pages Move Online
Many of the best young cartoonists are moving out of newspapers and on to the web. “In many ways the migration of comic strips to the internet is a sound business decision. Reacting to the twin pressures of rising newsprint costs and dwindling readerships, newspaper publishers over the years have drastically reduced the space devoted to strips. As a result, most strips today run at about half the page size that Little Orphan Annie did 50 years ago. The diminishing importance of comic strips, combined with a reluctance to recognize new talent, has resulted in a whole generation of cartoonists who see newspapers as a fading relic. Since 2000, dozens of young cartoonists have used the web as a self-syndication scheme.”
Sellout: The Modern Museum, College
James B. Twitchell argues that church, college, and museum have lately become “just one more thing that you shop for, one more thing you consume, one more story you tell and are told.” No longer serving as “gatekeepers” to the worlds of spirituality, art, and higher learning, these institutions, Twitchell says, have collectively become mere “ticket- takers” peddling an experience of uplift and status-conferring affiliation, while individually laboring to project a distinctive brand “fiction.”
Music For All! (And Profits Too)
A Canadian professor has an idea he thinks would breathe new life into the music business. He “proposes putting all recorded music on a robust search engine — Google would be an ideal choice, but even iTunes might work — and charging an insignificant fee of, say, five cents a song. In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers — two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven’t had to compensate artists. The assumption is that if songs cost only 5 cents, people would download exponentially more music. The extra windfall for musicians and those who own the publishing rights to the songs could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, Pearlman.”
What Is It About “The Da Vinci Code”?
“If the “Harry Potter” books stand as the essential popular read for young people, then “The Da Vinci Code” has captured the crown for grown-ups. A word-of-mouth sensation from the moment it came out, Brown’s controversial mix of storytelling and speculation remains high on best-seller lists even as it begins its third year since publication. Twenty-five million books, in 44 languages, are in print worldwide and no end is in sight. Booksellers expect “The Da Vinci Code” to remain a best-seller well into 2005.”
Court To Hear Barnes Appeal
A Pennsylvania court will hear an appeal of a judge’s decision to allow the Barnes Collection to move to Philadelphia. “The court ruled yesterday that an appeal of December’s Montgomery County Orphans’ Court ruling, which allowed the Barnes Foundation to move its gallery and change several other key governing rules, can proceed. In yesterday’s decision, the Superior Court ruled against a request by the Barnes Foundation to quash the appeal by a Barnes Foundation student.”
The RSC’s Home-In-A-Shed
The Royal Shakespeare Company has a new temporary home. “Those who have seen images of it might call it a large, rusty, flat-roofed shed resembling a giant container that has fallen off a cargo ship steaming up the Avon in Warwickshire. The theatre, a sonnet’s throw from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) in the centre of Stratford-upon-Avon, is a key element in plans for a reshaping of the company’s principal performance space.”
Ode To John Tusa
The BBC3 radio interviewer is refreshing, writes Gillian Reynolds. Tusa’s series, monthly interviews with people significant in the arts, regularly restores my faith in the media in general and radio in particular with its honesty, directness, seriousness and sensibility. In other words, it is not pegged to some new volume or show and therefore not part of that promotional circus whose noisy parade daily fills the airwaves.”
Hall: Arts Funding Crucial To A Healthy Country
Tony Hall, chief executive of London’s Royal Opera House, says increasing funding for the arts is a “no-brainer” for government. “If you put the arts in the bigger picture, and talk about them as part of the framework of the creative and cultural industries, the argument that asks ‘can the arts really make a splash, do they really matter?’ becomes very clea. “They are part of something fundamental and big, which is the creative economy, which is now what we live off. And when you look at it like that then arts funding becomes a no-brainer … our future depends on creativity.”
Qatar Sheik Loses Government Art Post
“A wealthy sheik from Qatar who has emerged over the past three years as the world’s single biggest buyer of art has been dismissed as his country’s art acquisitions chief after a disagreement with the emir of Qatar over his spending habits, art world figures familiar with the case said.”