It’s shaping up to be a dry summer in the pop concert business. Few of the bigname stars of the 60s and 70s are touring And “steadily rising ticket prices, lack of proper development for promising young artists, stiff competition from other forms of entertainment and even age-old headaches like traffic snarls and limited (overpriced) snack-bar menus, are just a few of the reasons some fans have been staying away in recent years.
Tag: 04.03.06
Merce Over Miami
Merce Cunningham is headed to Miami next year to help open the new Miami Performing Arts Center. But he’s not just doing dance. “This creative synergy, a hallmark of Cunningham’s career, will result in two MOCA exhibitions, an original work of dance and visual art in collaboration with a Miami artist, dance and music performances, classes and lectures.”
How Classical Could Be Better Online
So it turns out that classical music is popular in the download world, and retailers are setting up to serve classical music fans. Does that make classical fans happy? Well… there are a few things on the wish list…
Gone Dotty – The Secret To Mona Lisa’s Smile
A researcher has reported that the secret to Mona Lisa’s smile is “millions of invisible dots.” The expert “reported that the technique is somewhat similar to pointillism used by the French Neo-Impressionists in the late 19th century. Examples of this micro-division of tones exist since the ancient Romans. Leonardo took an existing techniques, but used it to the extreme, like nobody else.”
Christie’s Retracts Sale Offering After Protests From Spanish Government
Christie’s has removed five beams from sale from a Cordoba mosque. “The church argued that the beams should not be sold as they have strong grounds to assert that the church retains ownership of the beams,” it said, adding that the law firm had threatened an injunction against Christie’s to prevent the sale.”
Greeks Seize Artifacts From Ex-Getty Curator’s House
“In a surprise search Wednesday, Greek authorities seized 17 unregistered artifacts and a Byzantine icon from the vacation house of Marion True, the former J. Paul Getty Museum antiquities curator on trial in Rome on charges she trafficked in looted art. Among the objects seized, only a Hellenistic marble torso is thought to be archeologically significant.”
Digital No. 1: Reviving Singles With Downloads
Digital downloading has revived the singles market. “In the period between the start of the decline in sales of physical formats and the introduction of legal download services, the relevance of the top 40 was called into question. However, that didn’t spell an end to the desire for singles by music fans – it just reflected a shift in the way many of us choose to purchase our favourite new tracks.”
Why Is Covent Garden So Expensive?
“Because it has been forced to shake the collecting tin so vigorously at the private sector, Covent Garden is clearly now in an uneasy position, straddling the Atlantic. Like its European equals, it has a great annual grant from the government, but, like any first-class opera company in America, it also relies heavily on favours from the corporate sector. Which means that every night at the Opera House, the well-upholstered behinds of City donors are sitting on the best seats, which have been partially funded by the taxpayer. And although those donors are also taxpayers, it somehow grates that a publicly funded institution is essentially reserving its most glittering glitter for people who can cough up more than £100 per seat.”
Dominic Dromgoole On His Life
“Well, I was thinking about how I had developed as a person,” Dromgoole says. “And in the absence of religion, which we never had very explicitly as a family, and in the absence of politics, which I didn’t develop until I was older, and in the absence of obsessions like football, the largest voice of authority and the most important thing by which I could try to discover who I was and what I felt — well, that was Shakespeare.”
Robert Hughes: Rembrandt Reconsidered
“Rembrandt would be remembered as an extraordinary self-portraitist if he had died young at, say, forty-five. But he lived much longer and it is the work of his old age that one most admires: that intimate, unflinching scrutiny of his own sagging, lined, and bloated features, with the light shining from the potato nose and the thick paint: the face of a master, the face of a failure and a bankrupt. Life, and his own mismanagement of life, has bashed him but no one could say it has beaten him.”