“There was a time when important historical and cultural sites were visited only by aristocratic travelers making the Grand Tour or exploring Italy. Then came ‘bourgeois’ tourism, which was still an elite affair but involved hundreds of thousands of cultivated and sensitive travelers. With the advent of mass tourism, some important sites increased their income, but at the cost of ugliness and vandalism.” What to do? How about replicas?
Tag: 04.02.07
The Music, The Ads, The Business Model
“Sony BMG is poised to unveil a partnership with one of the world’s leading online music databases making thousands of back catalogue tracks available to advertisers. Falling CD sales in recent years have prompted the big music labels to look for new ways to make money out of their vast catalogues.”
All That 80s Culture Back Again? There’s A Reason
“You’ve got what used to be called a 20-year nostalgia cycle that’s built into pop culture in the 20th century, in which cultural products get recycled 20 years down the line for secondary consumption. That’s driven in part by the relationship between people consuming something that means a lot to them typically in teenage years, where impressions are really vivid. Then 20 years later, you find that people consume it again as part of the life cycle of contemporary western pop culture.”
Postwar Artists To Top Modernist Masters?
“Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon and other postwar painters are fetching top prices at auctions as works by modern artists such as Pablo Picasso vanish into museums and private collections.”
Wanted: A Digital Strategy For Movies
“Many entertainment companies are growing impatient watching companies like YouTube distribute clips of movies and television shows free.” Yet, “missteps made today could have grave consequences for the future, particularly when it comes to consumers’ willingness to pay for movies and television shows online.”
The Pre-Book Tour
More authors are doing pre-publication book tours, “a ritual an increasing number of authors are enduring so that their books can have a fighting chance in an industry that issues, by some estimates, more than 175,000 titles a year. Unlike the postpublication book tour, which focuses on publicity and public appearances, the pre-publication tour is meant to win the hearts of the front-line soldiers in the bookselling trenches, and more and more publishers are finding it an indispensable part of their marketing plan.”
It’s Summer, And A Critic’s Thoughts Turn To…
Summer’s coming, and along with it a succession of critic-proof blockbusters and movies that any critic would find hard to like. So maybe critics should take the summer off and reappear when the quality movies come back in the fall.
EMI Sets Its Music Free (Well, You Still Pay, But…)
EMI said it will make its music tracks available for sale over the internet without digital rights management. “It was clear what we had to do because we hold the consumer at the center of our focus. We take the view that we have to trust our customers.”
When Arts Organizations Drive Their Own Designs
“Two projects — the Elbe Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg, Germany and firstsite:newsite in Essex, England — share a cultural thread: The arts organizations that will occupy them drove the design and development. By contrast, the arts organizations at the World Trade Center site have had to sit by and wait — or drop out — as plans evolved around them. The difference in this approach to a city’s cultural life will be made manifest in short order.”
Technology Works New Stage Magic
“Video is often used as a sophisticated set element or backdrop. But it’s flat, and no other element onstage is flat. Here we’re trying to make all elements fully dimensional — to manipulate time, light and image the same way I would manipulate clay as a sculptor.”