“A Canadian grocery magnate handed out a $50,000 contemporary art award yesterday to Vancouver artist Brian Jungen… The jury of curators from across Canada limited their selection to artists who were under 40 years old. The Sobey Art Award will be handed out every two years and is among the richest in the Canadian art world.”
Tag: 12.06.02
No Shortage Of Cash In Boston
Chicago may be struggling, St. Louis and Toronto may have had near-death experiences, and Houston may be on the verge of an all-out labor war, but things are just dandy at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As the BSO prepares to kick off its holiday pops season, it is pulling in the kind of ticket revenue which would be enough to fund some orchestras for a year without a single dollar donated. Never an organization to underestimate its own importance, the BSO’s managing director brags, “There are (smaller) orchestras that for the entire 52-week year will have not even $10 million of sales, We do almost half of that in basically three weeks. We are the biggest orchestra operation in the world by a big margin.”
La Boheme Meets Moulin Rouge
If anyone can make a 19th-century opera relevant to young 21st-century audiences, you can bet it’s Baz Luhrmann. The Australian director behind Moulin Rouge, is using many of the same pyrotechnics and storytelling techniques of that movie in his new Broadway production of Puccini’s La Boheme. But Luhrmann insists that, despite the updated look of the show, he is against modernizing a classic operatic plot just to “be groovy.”
On Behalf Of All Directors…
Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York could be the most important movie released this year. Here’s why: Time was (back in the 70s) that directors were the main push behind what movies got made. Nowadays, a small number of A-list actors seems to call the shots. Scorcese’s $100-million Gangs is a director-driven project, and despite its long messy birth, if it sells, directors may get back some of the influence over what gets made…
How Do You Build An Orchestra When The Top Guy Doesn’t Stay?
The Melbourne Orchestra has had something of an indifferent past, attended to by a series of guest conductors and maestros who never seemed to stay for long. The absence of a continuous guiding hand made for years of rough and unsteady concerts. All the same, this turnover of visitors kept audience numbers high, and supplemented a sense of cultural inferiority.” Now the orchestra has appointed a new chief conductor. “Oleg Caetani will take over the chief conductor’s position in 2005 and should make a significant impact on the city’s musical life.”
Celestial Sounds (As Music)
When the Voyager space probes shot past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on their 25-year journey into deep space, machines in the probe captured the whistles and chirrups the probes encountered, and transmitted them back to earth. Now composer Terry Riley has written a piece incorporating the sounds into a piece for the Kronos String Quartet and a 60-voice choir. “The string quartet was NASA’s idea, the product of an arts programme that, over the past 30 years, has commissioned work from artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.”
A Remaster On The Future
The hot new trend for recording buyers this Holiday season? “Music marketers are using new technology to remaster albums to their original form after selling us sonically sweetened versions for ages. With the success of historical and theme compilations, they’ve figured out these carefully made reproductions – with a few add-ons – will entice us anew.”
Visual Art – In Need Of Reinvention?
A visit to this year’s exhibition of Turner Prize finalists shows that visitors aren’t much interested in the art there. “Is it just that this year’s shortlist is lacklustre? Or is this year just part of a larger problem? The answer is the latter. If there is a big message in the Turner prize exhibition, it is that there is a huge public demand for the arts, but it is not being met by the artists. Admittedly, this is a charge which has often been made in all the arts in the past, and has been made in many different societies, and by some very unsavoury figures. But it continues to be made, and it seems to be a particular problem for the visual arts.”
Lesson For The Day – Stealing’s Okay If It’s Educational
JK Rowling and Warner Bros. have lost an expensive lawsuit in Germany. A publisher of textbooks had used the Harry Potter character in printed homework assignments, so Rowling sued. “The judge in the case agreed with the publishing house’s argument that they did not need to obtain copyright for school books because they were for educational purposes. The practice of using images on German schoolbooks is apparently commonplace. According to the publishing house, authors are happy to be targeted because it gives them free publicity and even boosts sales of the original book as it means children have to buy them so they can complete the homework.”
I Just Called To Write I Luv U
A love poem has been declared the winner of this year’s Guardian “Text Message” Poetry Contest. The poetry is composed for mobile phones and “the text message format puts a limit of 160 characters on each poem, which tests the ingenuity and creativity of the poets. Combining poetry, one of the oldest literary forms, with texting demonstrates just how creative text messaging can be.”