“Museum and city of Fresno officials acknowledge The Met is near collapse. Its problems are numerous and immense, but nearly all revolve around a lack of money. The museum is in the former Bee building on Van Ness Avenue in downtown. City Hall took ownership of The Met’s home this year after the museum defaulted on a $15 million bank loan guaranteed by the city.”
Tag: 12.27.09
Greg Mosher Returns To Broadway After 17 Years
Scarlett “Johansson’s debut in Monday’s preview is getting more attention than a notable reappearance, the return of Gregory Mosher, who last directed a Broadway show 17 years ago — “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange.”
ECM – A Record Label That Still Works
“Manfred Eicher’s emphasis on state-of-the-art sound and a cool, spacious aesthetic, with evocative cover art and intelligent liner notes. This approach, which helped ECM to build a following among aficionados and audiophiles alike, has inspired several books and countless imitators. Even now, with music consumption increasingly shifting from physical objects to digital downloads, Mr. Eicher’s releases still retain a sense of being coherent objects of art.”
Defining 00’s Architecture
“If you wanted to describe what the buildings of the past decade looked like, you’d be hard-pressed to settle on any particular description. A cool, sleek, almost chilly modernism prevailed among some designers, while others pursued exuberant and dazzling forms. Museums went through a great age of expansion, though as the decade ends, it’s not clear if they may also be in for a new age of overextension hangover.”
Is Britain’s Museum Renaissance Over?
“Britain’s museums have done more than gentrify the urban core. Over the past 10 years they have provided cosmopolitan spaces in our multicultural society, offering a vehicle for a shared socialunderstanding. In the face of mass-migration and stark, post-9/11 and 7/7 religious tensions, Britain’s great conurbations have mostly remained free of communal violence. Our civic institutions have played an important role in that by offering settings for transcultural dialogues.”
Why Indie Filmmakers Are Putting Their Movies Online For Free
“In the age of YouTube and viral marketing campaigns, it was only a matter of time before independent filmmakers came to realize that cutting the middleman out of the process is sometimes the best way to guarantee large audiences see their works. This is especially true at a time when funding from studios has been seriously hit by the recession — just as it was on the way up.”
NYC Imposes Big New Fee On Shooting Movies
“One critic calls the $3,200 price tag for a permit to film at one of the city’s buildings the highest fee in the nation by a municipality. But the city, which attracts about $5 billion in business each year through the film trade, defends it as a small increase affecting a slim percentage of productions in a place that has long been among the friendliest filming venues in the country.”
Is Technology Wrecking Our Lives?
“Are we being served by these technological wonders or have we become enslaved by them? I study the psychology of technology, and it seems to me that we are sleepwalking into a world where technology is severely affecting our well-being. Technology can be hugely useful in the fast lane of modern living, but we need to stop it from taking over.”
Vegas’ City Center Defies Context
“The most striking thing about CityCenter is how, in a city that defies any notion of context, it feels somehow out of context. Locals, living in a vast, jangling assemblage of different architectural gestures, somehow feel that CityCenter is out of place, wrong for their city, like the guy who wears a dark blue suit to a Halloween party.”
How Classical Music Looks Different In 2010
“Downloads brought the classical recording industry to its knees and rendered the standard format of the $25 CD an endangered species by decade’s end. But downloads also led to a wider consumption of classical music.”