Oscar-nominated films are often small, dark and unintended for mass audiences; they’re about art, after all, not commerce. But that’s especially true of this year’s crop, which has little mainstream buzz and among the lowest box-office totals in recent years.
Tag: 01.29.08
Top Canadian Dance Companies Create School
Canada’s top five ballet companies are collaborating on a new summer training program for young dancers at the Banff Centre in Alberta.
Sweeney Tops UK Box Office
Murder-musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has cut into the UK and Ireland film box office, taking the top spot on its opening weekend.
Cincinnati Loses Grande Dame Of The Arts
Cincinnati philanthropist Patricia A. Corbett “was one of the last of Cincinnati’s grande dames in the arts. Her name graces many prominent arts venues, including the Corbett Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, Corbett Tower in Music Hall and Northern Kentucky University’s Patricia A. Corbett Theater.”
The Future Of Music – But It’s Not Real (Yet)
“QTrax, a start-up website, spent an estimated £500,000 carpet-bombing Cannes over the weekend to promote its revolutionary service. Briefly, it convinced the world that it had signed up major record companies to create an online catalogue of 25 million songs.” But it wasn’t real…
Street Art – A Sign Of How Stupid Art Is Right Now
The rise of street art “as something to take seriously says something about the weird state of art now. The core of art today is satire and gags and attention-getting stunts. As a society we all kind of know this but somehow we also accept that it’s a social faux pasever to mention it.”
Israel Apologizes For Banning Beatles 40 Years Ago
Israel has at last apologised to the surviving Beatles for banning them from the country in the 1960s as a supposed threat to the morals of the nation’s youth.
The Essential Fringe
“We should be careful not to simplistically romanticise the fringe – as with most theatre, the gems that are to be found often nestle among a great deal of rubbish. But if we see these spaces as simply stepping stones to other things, don’t we risk missing the potential that they have to not only teach the craft of creating theatre, but to fundamentally change and expand our understanding of what the theatre can do?”
The Cure For Fiction – The Novella?
Might the way to stop our atrophied attention spans becoming terminally distracted be to simply publish more short books?
Finalists Chosen To Create Monumental Sculpture
Five artists have been shortlisted in a competition to “create a sculpture measuring 50 metres (165 ft) that will be visible from road, rail and air. The commission is for the new Ebbsfleet International station and Ebbsfleet Valley, a development on 1,000 acres of open land between Dartford and Gravesend in north Kent.”