“A new art gallery is shunning the usual launch party etiquette by banning guests from air-kissing and calling each other ‘darling’.”
Tag: 09.21.04
Abu Ghraib Photo Show Polarizes Patrons
The photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib riveted the world, but are they worthy of a museum exhibition? The Andy Warhol Museum, where the show opened Friday, is getting vociferous responses from both sides.
A New Character In Romantic Fiction: Jesus
Novels that mix Christianity and romance are no longer a niche to be ignored. “The Christian Booksellers Association estimates that total sales of Christian fiction have topped $2 billion a year, and the market share of Christian romance has grown 25 percent a year since 2001, the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association reports. As a result editors have begun targeting younger people who enjoy both Christian and romantic fiction.”
Indian Museum Architect Boycotts Its Opening
Canadian architect and Blackfoot Indian Douglas Cardinal, the original designer of the Smithsonian Institution’s much-hyped National Museum of the American Indian, will not attend today’s opening “because he is still angry after being taken off the project in 1998 and not paid what he says he is owed.”
Beaverbrook Suspends NB Grants
“The Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation is suspending hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to New Brunswick institutions and using the money saved to help fund its controversial legal action to gain clear ownership of 200 art works at Fredericton’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery.”
At Major Orchestras, Talks Keep Strikes At Bay
“By extending its contract negotiations, the Philadelphia Orchestra has joined three other top American orchestras working on borrowed time, all four struggling to navigate issues in an economy less generous to nonprofit organizations and less conducive to growing endowments.”
Phil Orch Musicians’ Novel Strategy: Dialogue With Board
Seeking to avoid a strike, the players of the Philadelphia Orchestra tried an unusual but seemingly effective tactic. “Convinced that management’s negotiating committee had no real authority to change the parameters of the deal, orchestra musicians wisely cut out the middlemen and -women and went directly for those who hold the orchestra’s pocketbook: the board.”
‘Da Vinci’ Author Sues Accuser
“Best-selling author Dan Brown is suing a California novelist who accused him of stealing ideas for his blockbuster ‘The Da Vinci Code’ from two 1980s novels.”
At Least They’re Not Throwing The Cell Phones
Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey, who is spending part of his time these days as the artistic director of London’s Old Vic, is instituting a series of recorded messages before performances instructing audiences to turn off their phones, stop crinkling candy wrappers, and just generally sit still and keep quiet. Such admonitions have become common in the U.S., but some in London’s theatre world have a longer memory: “The behaviour of modern audiences is dramatically better than in previous centuries, when armed guards were frequently posted to stop the mob in the pit from storming the stage, and performers were sometimes knocked out by objects thrown from the gallery.”
But They Can’t Give Us A Browser Immune To Ads?
A new internet streaming service offered by Microsoft has traditional radio stations fuming, and many are accusing the software behemoth of copyright hypocrisy. The service consists of multiple live CD-quality streams of commercial-free music which duplicate exactly the publicly available playlists of nearly 1000 North American radio stations. Listeners can even select their favorite station by location and call letters, and hear the same music mix that traditional radio listeners hear, minus the commercials. Microsoft insists that it is doing nothing wrong, and legally, it probably isn’t.