“The battle to force not-for-profits, including arts groups, to strengthen their fiscal accountability has moved from Congress, where it raged during 2003, to the states, where three attorneys general are pushing tough, charity-regulating legislation.”
Tag: 03.31.04
The Way Bad Book That Sold Millions
A newspaper editor had an idea. “In 1966, appalled by the best sellers of Jacqueline Susann and others, he challenged his colleagues at Newsday, where he was a distinguished editor and writer, to perpetrate a book so mindlessly crass it could not fail. ‘There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex. Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion’.” The book went on to sell millions of copies, crack the New York Times bestseller list and earn its authors $1.25 million.
The Internet Art Crash
The trouble with being an artist on the cutting edge is that when you discover that the trend you’re leading has just become a passe fad, it’s easy to become very irrelevant very quickly. “Internet art may have little direct connection to the dot-com financial bubble, but its reputation has suffered as the Internet itself has lost cachet. Many who work in the Internet art world report a sense of digital exhaustion.”
Big Plans In Baghdad
In the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, the looting and ransacking of the Iraq Museum was viewed as a very avoidable tragedy indicative of the inability of the occupying forces to protect the country’s national treasures. But “ten months after its looting, the Iraq Museum has recovered nearly half of the artifacts stolen. Many of those treasures, like the museum itself, are in need of extensive restoration. And a more ambitious goal has emerged, as well: of returning the museum to a role it has not played in a generation, as a center of scholarship and as a place to display Iraq’s priceless archaeological heritage.”
Envy Not The 9/11 Curator
As national tragedies go, the 9/11 terrorist attacks stand out for the visual images left in the minds of everyone who watched the horror unfold, either in person or on television, so the idea of creating a museum to memorialize some of the objects found in the wreckage of the World Trade Center was a natural. But what objects should make the cut? “At the beginning, with memories so fresh and personal and abundant, the most difficult curatorial choices will have to be made. If the museum were to draw on nothing more than the artifacts… that are now stored in Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport, it would have to winnow the collection by about 20 percent just to fit in the designated space.”
$630 Million Brooklyn Project Underway
Construction is beginning on the $630 million redevlopment of the area around the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Called the BAM Cultural District, the idea, on the drawing board since 1998, is only now beginning to take shape. The project is spearheaded by Harvey Lichtenstein, who served as BAM executive director from 1967 to 1999 and who now heads up the BAM Local Development Corporation, in charge of turning the idea of a cultural district into reality.”
After f/X – The Movies Held Hostage
What’s wrong with movies today? They’ve been kidnapped by special effects, writes Denis Dutton. “Producers are stuck in the upward spiral of an endless special-effects arms race, with demands for bigger explosions, uglier villains, more frenzied, realistic violence, louder noises and ever-expanding battle scenes. A computer-generated crowd, according to the Hollywood rule, must not be smaller than the crowds in last month’s releases.” So what about plot? Character? Acting, anyone?
Debunking The Myth Of Austin
Why all the kudos for Austin as a music capital? It peaked about seven years ago, writes Lindsey Eck. These days “cops with dB meters lurk like vultures outside of venues and force people unloading equipment to park blocks away, no matter how heavy the drum kit. Alcohol enforcement is particularly heavy, while the State Comptroller has singled out downtown clubs for closure over unpaid taxes (which must be paid in advance of the club taking in revenues). And let’s not even begin to enumerate the ways in which zoning, industrial policy, and development decisions generally have made Austin an impossible place.”
Alistair Cooke – A Creature Of Radio
Alistair Cooke much preferred radio to television “because the pictures were better,” he often said, quoting the remark of 7-year-old boy that he’d heard of. “You are in charge of the picture,” Cooke elaborated. “If you stand up against the Empire State Building on television and tell its history, which is ghoulish and funny, viewers are saying, ‘He looks a little tired,’ or, ‘He’s not as thin as he used to be.’ Whereas if you tell the story on radio, your words create the picture, and that’s what I love. The voice does the whole thing.”
Canadian Judge Rules Downloaders Can Allow Their Music To Be Copied
A Canadian judge has ruled that the recording industry can’t sue people who allow music they own to be copied by others. The judge ruled that “the Canadian Recording Industry Association hadn’t shown copyright infringement by 29 people who had allowed their music files to be uploaded. Making files available in online, shared directories is within the bounds of Canadian copyright law.”