The citywide piano project “Play Me, I’m Yours” “is intended as an exploration of mass creativity and shared public space,” but “[m]usicians are piggybacking on the project to promote themselves and their music. They’ve planned marathon performance routes, … worked their way into TV news footage and mustered their own video teams.” Oh: And they’re busking.
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
A Point-By-Point Takedown Of Lee Siegel’s Fiction Claim
“1. Siegel: ‘Fiction has become culturally irrelevant.’ People buy books, read books, are right now camping on sidewalks to see ‘Twilight: Eclipse,’ a movie based on a book, and they camp out in bookstores too, when a novel they’re eager for is sold at midnight. Maybe these people are not part of our culture?”
Berkeley Art Museum Taps Diller Scofidio + Renfro
“The choice signals that UC Berkeley remains serious about a cultural expansion that would bolster city efforts to position its downtown as a cultural destination. The selection also is an implicit act of one-upmanship to a friendly rival across the bay: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has DS+R on a list of four finalists to design an expansion to its home….”
Name Change For Oregon’s (Liberal) Tea Party Bookshop
“Owner JoAnne Kohler, 47, opened the independent bookstore in August 2008. She named her store Tea Party because she liked the association with ‘independence, revolution, anti-corporation.’ A short time later a conservative movement that was also fond of the historical event became a force in national politics. And that’s when the misunderstandings began.”
Nat’l Recording Registry Picks 1959 Gypsy Cast Recording
“Fon der Choope” (“From the Wedding”) by Abe Elenkrig’s Yidishe Orchestra (1913); “Canal Street Blues” by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (1923); and the Metropolitan Opera’s 1935 “Tristan und Isolde” are also among the 25 recordings to be preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry.
Digital Animators Are Our Leonardos
“[I]t is time to acknowledge the Renaissance masters of our time. Pixar and other studios at the forefront of digital animation and effects are dealing with something very comparable to the problems solved by artists in 15th-century Italy.”
In Thrall To Blockbusters, Museums Neglect Collections
“Over the last decade our galleries have become almost entirely devoted to mounting exhibitions, their general collections forgotten, their reserve holdings left untouched and the energy of their directors and keepers devoted to arranging and cataloguing temporary shows.” Meanwhile, success is judged by “the size of the crowds and the length of the queues.”
In Self-Publishing Trend, Readers At Risk Of Slush Fatigue
“What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?”
Dumping Int’l Fest A Serious Blow To LA’s Cultural Status
“[T]he decision … reflects a lack of understanding of the theater festival’s unique place in the city’s cultural ecology. There is simply nowhere else to experience the kinds of offerings [its artistic director] was importing to Los Angeles. Beyond the Brooklyn Academy of Music and one or two lonesome xenophilic venues in the U.S., the only option is a pricey European flight.”
As B’way Caves To Market, How Should Artists Respond?
“Even many Broadwayites, it seems, find themselves unhappy with the way things are,” as response to this year’s Tony Awards indicates. “If Broadway is purely a business, as commercial theater’s defenders love to maintain, then clearly business as usual has some problems.”