“In books, the recession is putting the marketplace under huge pressure at the very moment when e-publishing is beginning to make a serious impact on the mainstream. I freely admit that I don’t fully understand what is happening, but I sense that, for anyone who does, there’s a killing to be made.”
Tag: 04.23.09
Artists Take Over Vacant Storefronts. Will It Transform London?
“Where commercial enterprise has stalled and shops shut out, artists and galleries are now taking the initiative and moving in – a development the government last week announced its support for, unveiling a £3m grant scheme to allow people to breathe new life into vacant shops. If this works, Britain’s high streets are likely to be transformed over the weeks and months ahead: shops that had closed their doors will morph into studio spaces, galleries and workshop venues.”
The Mind-Reading Computers – They’re Here
“In the coming months, cheap headsets that let you control technology with the electrical signals generated by your firing neurons will go on sale to the general public. Our relationship with technology – and our brains – will never be the same again.”
Needed: A Geneva Convention For The Arts?
“For us, today, how art behaves in evil times requires a code of practice, an ethical consensus of what to do when a ruler with blood-stained hands calls for cultural distraction. The lesson of the Hitler era is that artists must take responsibility for their actions, and inaction. But how? We need a kind of Geneva Convention, which protects prisoners of war, to define the rights and duties of an artist under duress. Seventy years after the outbreak of the Second World War, that debate has barely begun.”
How Facebook Found A Substitute Pianist
“The online social networking site helped a Switzerland-based artist manager who was vacationing in Israel track down a New York pianist performing in Colorado and book him for a concert in Colombia.”
American Idol, Picasso Edition
“The scion of one of Michigan’s wealthiest families is launching an Internet-age competition for artists with $450,000 in prize money — including $250,000 for the winner — and an everyone-can-play vibe tailored to the age of online social networking.”
America’s Universities And The Endowment CrisisMiller
“Take a place like Grinnell or Swarthmore or Amherst, which had more than $1 million-per-student endowments — what were they doing? They’ve hit a tough time because their budgets are completely dependent — 30 percent, 33 percent or 40 percent — on the income from this endowment. Now the endowment has collapsed 30 or 40 percent and they’re in a jam.”
Composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich At 70
“Zwilich’s witty, unpretentious personality belie her determination and toughness, qualities necessary for a female composer to make her way in a male-dominated profession, particularly three decades ago when a woman composer was still viewed as something of an eccentric novelty. Zwilich has been remarkably prolific. She has written in all genres except opera, and created a significant, extensive body of work, averaging more than one new composition a year since she “started counting” in 1971.”
Roofs At Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center Go Green
“The Woodruff Arts Center’s rooftop conversion completed Phase 2 on Wednesday, as a crew laid down 5,250 square feet of vegetation.” Who’s paying for this? The law firm whose offices overlook the roofs.
Looking Back At The Berlin Wall (And What It Left Behind)
“It was as if some immense laboratory experiment had gone on for half a century according to rigorous principles: Take a single defeated society, weary with guilt, wounds and hatred, and divide it in two … [and] see what kinds of worlds develop under very different visions of social and political order. […] Twenty years ago [the Wall] seemed immutable, a force that bent the natural world to its demands. Now it seems like something from a storybook.”