Big celebrations are planned for the centenary celebrations of Michael Tippett. But “is he really worthy of a place alongside those great masters? Or is his high stature just another symptom of that insecurity we Brits have about our composers, which makes us elevate them beyond their worth? He certainly wasn’t a great innovator who left his mark on succeeding generations, the way Messiaen and Stravinsky have done. And his place in musical life is not quite first-rank.”
Tag: 12.29.04
The Year of Sex & Stupidity
There are worse combinations, we suppose, but looking back at what should have been a year of serious debate and international soul-searching, 2004 was instead a year in which television went from covering news in an insipid manner to actually creating its very own insipid storylines which were then imposed on the world with an unforgivable seriousness. “Both in Canada and the United States, television not only reported the news and created hit shows, it also became the news. The sex was more implied than dramatized. The stupidity was to be found in the fuss about it.”
Is Progress Killing The Boutique Museum?
Can museums based on one person’s vision really survive effectively once that one person is no longer around? The Barnes Museum’s pending move is only the latest in a long line of single-collector museums struggles to stay relevant (and solvent), and one could question whether total reinvention is really an effective tool. “Every museum doesn’t have to be a major tourist attraction, and people who really want to see the Barnes usually can, with some planning. Some museums — the Miho outside Kyoto for one — are valued in part because of the sheer challenge of reaching them, which becomes a sort of pilgrimage.”
Sontag: Life Of The Mind
“Susan Sontag passed an extraordinary amount of her life in the pursuit of private happiness through reading and through the attempt to share this delight with others. For her, the act of literary consumption was the generous parent of the act of literary production. She was so much impressed by the marvelous people she had read—beginning with Jack London and Thomas Mann in her girlhood, and eventually comprising the almost Borgesian library that was her one prized possession—that she was almost shy about offering her own prose to the reader. Look at her output and you will see that she was not at all prolific.”
It’s Groundbreaking, Innovative, And It Must Be Stopped
Peer-to-peer file trading software, the bane of movie producers and recording company executives everywhere, is nothing new. But the overwhelming epidemic of illegal movie-trading predicted by some has never quite come to pass, mainly because peer-to-peer swapping is incredibly slow and cumbersome for large files like movies. But a new piece of software is changing that – BitTorrent allows a user to download, say, an hour-long episode of The West Wing in minutes, rather than the hours it would take with traditional peer-to-peer software. And if you think this development has Hollywood running scared and ready to fight, you’d be right.
Broadway Bucks Boosted
Critics may not be finding much to love on Broadway this year, but the Great White Way has regained its financial footing after a couple of dismal box office seasons. “A rise in foreign visitors plus a host of successful new openings” have led to a $23.5 million uptick in ticket sales for the year, and the number of foreign tourists attending shows has returned to pre-9/11 numbers.
Oldest Flute Discovered
Archaeologists have discovered one of the world’s oldest known musical instruments — a 30,000-year-old flute finely carved from a woolly mammoth’s ivory tusk in southern Germany. “The findings would point to the region as one of the key areas of cultural innovation at the start of the Upper Paleolithic and demonstrate that the origins of music can be traced back to the European Ice Age over 30,000 years ago. The flute would have been capable of playing relatively complex melodies.”
Here’s Your New Concert Hall, No Charge
After years of futile efforts, it looks as if the Montreal Symphony Orchestra may finally get the new home it’s always wanted. A plan being floated by the new Quebec government would abandon the idea of building a $280 million performance complex, and instead renovate an existing (and terribly underused) theater for the orchestra’s use. The plan is likely to succeed where others have failed partly because it is simple, but mostly because it won’t cost the province’s taxpayers a dime.
LA Man Arrested In Art Scam
An LA man has been arrested for selling fake art attributed to artists such as Mary Cassatt, Marc Chagall and Roy Lichtenstein.” A 66-year-old Mission Viejo doctor managed to generate interest among potential buyers in his collection, primarily of modern masters — a collection that turned out to be bogus.”
UK Museums – Free But They Still Cost
Museum visits in the UK have soared since ticket charges were dropped. “The figures show that three years after the turnstiles were removed, visitors to galleries that used to charge have soared. There were nearly six million more visits this year than in the year before entry charges were scrapped. In London, visits to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) are up by 113 per cent over the past three years, the Natural History Museum is up by nearly 96 per cent and the Science Museum by nearly 71 per cent.” But who’s to pay for keeping the doors open?