Tag: 02.12.03

Hamilton Gets Tanenbaum Collection

“Real-estate and steel magnate Joey Tanenbaum and his wife Toby have announced an immense donation of 211 European 19th-century works to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, a gift that will make the Southern Ontario city a destination for scholars of the period.” The collection is valued at as much as CAN$90 million, and includes works by Gustave Doré, Jean Léon Gérôme, and Eugene Carrière.

Digital Music Gets A Bar Code

It’s so basic, you wonder why no one thought of it earlier. The recording industry has unveiled a system it says will make it easier for artists and record companies to be compensated for digital music purchased online. The system is called GRid (Global Release Identifier,) and it works much like a UPC code attached to each song, allowing the seller to track songs sold. All sides seem to be guardedly optimistic about the system, although privacy advocates worry that the GRid could be used to pursue consumers who buy a tagged song and then allow it to be traded on a song-swapping site.

Big Score – Stadium Music Clones

Why does music at sports stadiums all sound the same wherever you go? “Turns out that the folks who make decisions about stadium music are less interested in crafting a unique, venue-specific soundscape than in giving the people what they want—and they are not too proud to steal. If fans in Sports Market A love a given song, you can bet that it’ll soon be pumping out of speakers in Sports Markets B, C, D, etc. Forget about regional music. These days, stadium music functions pretty much like mainstream radio—a combination of lowest common denominator hits and reliable standards, all played to death until they seem inescapable.”

Miami Cops Sting Art Thieves

A Renoir and a Monet stolen from a Florida mansion in December have been recovered by Miami police. The police used their acting talents as much as their investigative skills to recover the art. “A Miami-Dade officer posed as a seedy high-roller with a penchant for gold jewelry. A private investigator, hired by an insurance company, adopted the role of an Eastern European businessman with a professorial air and an appetite for boosted art treasures. Another Miami-Dade officer posed as a chauffeur-body guard to the artistic impersonator, driving him to the decidedly unswanky Hialeah hotel in a pricey Lincoln…” And the sting was on…

Cabin Fever – An Actor’s Inflight Torture

Think the inflight entertainment is bad? For actors it’s worse. “The overcrowded cabin, tasteless food and germ-infested air-conditioning usually found on aeroplanes held no terrors for me – after all, I’ve worked at the Barbican – but I also knew that, with a journey time of just over 11 hours, the in-flight entertainment was likely to include several hours of recent television favourites. Actors go on holiday to forget all the jobs they have missed, not to be reminded of them, and I braced myself for the worst.”

Recreating A Difficult Time

The lives of people in North Yorkshire were ruined a few years ago when foot-and-mouth virus was detected, and livestock by the thousands were destroyed. Now a local theatre has produced a play about that time, using local people. “The non-professional cast have had only minimal rehearsal time, which gives the production a rough-and-ready quality. That doesn’t diminish its effect, however. In fact, the lack of ‘acting’ only adds to the piece’s power and the sense that what you are witnessing, rather than a mere performance, is a genuine dialogue between stage and audience.”

Phillips Collection To Expand

Washington’s Phillips Collection is expanding. “The Phillips has bought an adjoining four-story, 15-unit apartment house on 21st Street NW fashioned in the early 20th century out of two town houses. The museum will keep that building’s cream-colored facade while gutting the interior. The museum bought the apartment house for $1.4 million two years ago, and it has budgeted $20 million for the expansion, a figure that museum officials expect to rise.”

Fixing The 70s…What To Do With Those Ugly Buildings?

What to do with all those ugly (usually) concrete buildings of the 1960s and 70s? “Demolition is cathartic and the idea of a blank piece of paper seductive. But though developers can make a profit tearing down 1960s office buildings, elsewhere comprehensive redevelopment has proved hellishly expensive. That sort of money is never going to be available for the arts, though,” so how to make arts buildings of that period work?