Clear Channel Takes On The Arts

Media giant Clear Channel is getting into the arts in a big way. “Starting next year, Clear Channel Communications Inc. plans to send a large wooden version of the Trojan horse on a tour of U.S. museums as a frontispiece to an exhibition on ancient Greece and Troy. Clear Channel’s empire-building in the arts extends further — to touring Broadway musicals, where its omnipresence as a producer and presenter can mean trouble for competitors and cause wariness even among its partners. Cultural gatekeepers, including art critics and museum directors, have begun sounding a warning: Beware of a conglomerate bearing art.”

More Men, Humor Too, At This Year’s fFIDA

This year’s fFIDA International Dance Festival in Toronto featured 75 choroeographers. “The most startling aspect about this year’s fFIDA was the presence of men. In fact. there were probably more real live, honest to goodness male dancers on stage than in all the previous 13 years combined. Humour made a welcome return, even to the point of bizarre, and surprisingly, solos, usually the fFIDA mainstay, were almost equally matched by duets and ensembles. Angst-ridden, navel-gazing choreographies were on the wane, while abstract, philosophical and/or cerebral subjects reflect a new trend.”

Hundreds Of Dali Fakes

Hundreds of works presented in a Finnish show marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Salvador Dali have been declared fake. “360 works supposedly by Dali were forgeries or tampered copies. A further 150 works purportedly by artists including Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, were also thought to be forged. Police were tipped off by “dozens” of collectors who bought suspected fakes.”

Remembering Ballet Russe

The legendary Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo disbanded 42 years ago A new documentary about the company is “a saga of human indomitability and courage. ‘To see people that old who relied on their bodies for their whole careers, finding their bodies betraying them and still carrying on with optimism and exuberance, still working every day, is remarkable. These people are examples of lives well lived’.”

Tower Of Pisa’s Condition Stable

The Leaning Tower of Pisa isn’t motionless, but its tilt at last has been stabilized. “Reporting on the present conditions of the monument at the 32nd World Geological Conference in Florence, Italy, Turin University’s Michele Jamiolkowski, president of the committee for the protection of the tower, said that the famous tilt has been finally halted.”

How PG-13 Became A Favorite Rating

The PG-13 movie rating is 20 years old. Back in 1984, “with no middle-ground between PG and R, the ratings board of the 1980s frequently wrestled with the right way to classify movies that should and should not be viewed by children. The flaw in the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system was that it lumped all children — from infants to 17-year-olds — into the same group.” Then along came Steven Spielberg, who “invented the category. And “instead of being solely an extra warning to parents, as it was originally conceived, it has evolved into the preferred rating of studios and filmmakers. PG-13 puts “hot sauce” on a movie in the viewer’s mind.”