It’s taken 26 years for Christo and Jeanne-Claude to get their Central Park Gates project approved and built. Now it’s being sintalled in the park. “The Christos make no secret that their traveling show—from the political jockeying to the public debates to events like the signing of an original drawing, such as the one they’ve given to New York—is all part of what they consider their grand work of art. Whether this process is a critique of art and bureaucracy or simply great public theater, it’s an undeniably canny way to conduct business.”
Tag: 01.17.05
Software That Can Pick Pop Hits
“The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can ‘predict’ the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS). It has been developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music.”
Elvis Racks Up Another No. 1 Hit
Elvis Presley hits the UK singles charts at No. 1 – again. “The king’s latest triumph – if that is the word for a CD that managed to top the chart with just 30,000 sales – is also the 1,000th No 1 since the UK chart began in 1952. Low sales or not, the music industry is rolling out a series of promotions to tie in with the milestone.”
Okay, We Like Art. Anyone Know Why?
“In all the airtime and column inches devoted to discussing art – its merits, its value, its place in our lives – the big questions that lie at the heart of the debate are often too difficult or too obscure to tackle. They are, roughly speaking, these: why do we care about art? And, given that we obviously do (and that this is worldwide phenomenon that has stretched throughout history), what is it in art that we care about?”
Whatever Happened To The Public Domain?
As U.S. copyright rules have tilted ever more strictly towards the original holders, artists and filmmakers who created work under far different regulations are increasingly finding themselves out in the cold. As the limited permissions documentary filmmakers negotiated with copyright holders of news footage expire, older documentaries such as the award-winning Eyes on the Prize are having to be pulled from circulation completely.
PBS Cleaning Up Documentaries For FCC Approval
HBO has offered the free use of three recent documentaries it aired to PBS, in an effort to get the films in front of viewers who do not subscribe to premium cable/satellite channels. But PBS is an over-the-air network, making it subject to FCC regulation, and the network is planning to err on the side of caution, removing a few scattered curse words and non-sexual nude scenes in films about terrorist attacks and Nazi death camps.
Aviators, Wine, & Oversexed Suburbanites
Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator, and the surprise art house hit, Sideways, were the big winners at Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards. Clint Eastwood took home the best director award for Million Dollar Baby, and Clive Owen and Natalie Portman took home supporting actor awards for Mike Nichols’ Closer. On the TV side of the ledger, ABC’s Desperate Housewives won for best comedy series, and a bizarre and edge F/X show about plastic surgeons won for best dramatic series.
London Art Fair Tries Old School Approach
The London Art Fair has undergone a bit of an identity crisis in recent years as it struggled to compete in a newly crowded marketplace where art fairs seemed to pop up like mushrooms in every available urban space. So this year, the fair is going back to basics, abandoning the flashy colors and irritating buzzwords of past years, and focusing hard on modern British art, with an eye towards attracting “collectors, not shoppers.”
Arkansas Legislators Want School Texts To Define Marriage
Some Arkansas legislators want the state’s public school textbooks to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman — just like the recently approved amendment to the state Constitution.
Music Sales Dip One Percent In 2004
Music sales were down again slightly in 2004, but there’s hope for the industry. “Hit by piracy, Internet song swappers and saturated markets, music sales fell in 2004 by one percent to $32.1 billion. But 2005 will make up for the damage with a one percent increase, said research group Informa. Over the next six years, the music publishing industry will return to the $39 billion sales levels last seen between the years 1997 and 2000, before the invention of cheap CD burners and file swapping services such as Napster.”