“What is billed as the world’s first live commercial will be performed on stage in Dublin next week, promoting London’s West End to international theatre-going audiences. Six actors, including Pauline McLynn, who appeared as the housekeeper, Mrs Doyle, in the comedy TV series Father Ted, will enact the advert. Their three minute slot will be at the Gaiety Theatre on May 16 before the evening production of Saturday Night Fever. The advert will later be staged during plays in Hamburg, New York and Pittsburgh.”
Tag: 05.09.06
Beatles To Keep Fighting iTunes
An appeal will be filed in the copyright case that pitted The Beatles’ record label against Apple Computer. The computer company this week won the right to continue selling music through its iTunes music service, but the rock group (which has a long-standing copyright agreement with the company due to the previous existence of the group’s Apple Corps record label) says that the ruling was “curious” and points out that the judge appeared to be in the thrall of Apple’s technological offerings. The judge’s ruling declared that Apple was selling “data transmissions” through iTunes, and therefore was not violating the agreement.
Freud And His Art
That Sigmund Freud remains a controversial figure to this day is testament to the impact his life and work had on the modern world. But is it possible that his impact on art and artists was greater than any scientific legacy he enjoys? “It’s not just that Freud is an influence on art history and literary theory: he is an influence on art. He has had a constant resonance since the surrealist movement first claimed him as (in Freud’s puzzled words) its ‘patron saint’ in the 1920s – which means a hostile critic of Freud has to dismiss most modern art.”
Edinburgh Plans Stage Shocker
The Edinburgh Festival is apparently hoping that a dose of controversy will boost ticket sales, announcing that it will stage an adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s controversial and explicit novel, Platform, directed by Calixto Bieito, who was last seen inserting an oral sex scene into Hamlet. Kate Bevan isn’t impressed: “Doubtless Bieito’s Platform will sell many tickets, and critics are surely already practising their choicest phrases of outrage… Yet somewhere along the line the consumer (and the critic and the commentator) will have been taken for a fool… To assume that we need grotesquerie to make us take notice of what they say is to assume that we can’t hear and understand for ourselves.”
Portrait Prize Finalists Announced
The shortlist is out for the UK’s National Portrait Gallery prize, which hands out £25,000 and a commission worth £4,000 to the creator of the best portrait of the year. Painters Angela Reilly of Scotland and Rafael Rodriguez of Mexico will go up against English photographer Andrew Tift, who has been on the shortlist four times. “This year has seen a record 1,113 entries, and 56 portraits will be displayed at the exhibition from June 15 to September 17. The winner will be announced on June 13.”
AGO Gets $2 Million Education Boost
“A prominent Toronto businessman and his wife are giving $2-million to the Art Gallery of Ontario to endow the directorship of the gallery’s education and public-programming division… The AGO was the first museum in Canada to establish an art department, and yesterday’s announcement coincided with the 75th anniversary of its founding. More than 35,000 students come to the AGO in Toronto each year, while thousands of adults and families take education programs there.”