Critics are oohing and ahing over Amazon’s new search feature that throws the pages of thousands of books in a search engine. One of the things you can do is find which public intellectuals get the most citations. Probably doesn’t mean anything, of course. A few years ago Richard Posner came up with a ranking of intellectuals based on article mentions. The new ranking? It’s different…
Tag: 10.27.03
The Music Biz’s New Biz Model
“In the trickle-down economics of the music industry, the travails of the Big 5 major labels – who have suffered steeply declining sales for the last three years – are having an impact on the smaller bands, record companies and media who make up the rock and rap underground. The idea of the Big 5 multinationals as viable distributors of music becomes a less likely scenario every year; a new business model that is emerging sees the big record companies as glorified marketing companies, expert at spending money to get consumers to spend even more money.”
Malaga’s New Picasso Museum
Fulfilling a longheld wish by the artist, a new Picasso Museum has opened in Malaga, Spain. “Yesterday Malaga was festooned with bunting heralding the new museum and events organised to “receive the maestro”. A bullfight, with leading toreros, advertised with a suitable Picasso painting, will be held this afternoon and six bulls will be dispatched in his honour. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia will open the museum.”
After The Lottery… Now What?
In the past decade, a flurry of ambitious lottery-funded attractions went up around the UK. Opened in a blaze of publicity, some of them are now finding the going tougher as they try to earn their way. Can we expect a rash of lottery-funded cultural failures in the next few years?
Buy A Beethoven
A movement of a Beethoven string quartet, written in the composer’s hand, is coming up for auction. Earlier this year a manuscript copy of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony sold for $3.47 million. “Unlike that manuscript, which was prepared by a copyist but had Beethoven’s corrections and comments on most of its pages, the quartet movement is entirely in Beethoven’s hand. Sotheby’s says it expects the manuscript to bring between $1.6 million and $2.5 million.”
Choosing The Next Whitney Biennale
Three curators have chosen 108 artists for 2004’s Whitney Biennale. “While the 2004 biennial may be considered more conservative than biennials of the recent past, with its balance of midcareer and senior artists and unknowns, the mix has been intentional. ‘We deliberately set out to be very intergenerational. The last biennial focused on so many younger people, but some midcareer and senior artists we discovered are making the best work of their careers.”