The Seattle Art Museum expansion is the product of an innovative deal with a bank. “Aside from the architecture, will there be any substantive consequences to SAM’s close financial affiliation with an international banking concern, or does the alignment just have an uncomfortable veneer? After all, many corporations with strong R&D departments do what artists do: They experiment, they push. And the boards of museums are packed with businesspeople.”
Tag: 05.02.07
Why Must Writers Write In A Consistent Style?
“It would be easy to be cynical, and assume that a major reason for any author to stick to the same well-traversed territory is purely to do with maintaining a readership. If you’ve built up a fan base with a distinctive formula, you mightn’t want to alienate your fans with a drastic change to it.”
The Bigger-Than-Life Rostropovich
“For a man so driven by idealism and emotion, he was shrewd as an actuary when it came to money and sometimes downright greedy. He was the highest paid soloist of his day, at $45,000 a night, and among the top conductors. He loved property and bought homes in Paris, Lausanne and London (later also in Moscow and St Petersburg), starting with a flat in Holloway and trading up to half a house in Maida Vale. Since he was never in the same town two weeks running, he made new friends in the street to do his house-sitting.”
A Record Summer For Hollywood?
“Hollywood could have its first $4 billion summer, topping the record $3.95 billion haul from the first weekend in May through Labor Day in 2004. Factoring in higher admission prices, modern Hollywood’s best summer for attendance came in 2002 with 653 million tickets sold, another record that could fall.”
The “Mugging” Of Ken Burns
“Ken Burns and PBS have just been mugged by censors and pressure groups demanding major changes to his critically acclaimed documentary.” So where are the protests from the usual sources?
Na Na Na…Now You Can Sing Along
Yahoo! recently posted the lyrics to thousands of songs. “In the past, lyric seekers have had to endure innumerable junky sites offering dubious transcriptions based on someone gluing their ear to a speaker. Now, there will finally be a legitimate one created in co-operation with the big music publishers and providing accurate words to all your favourite tunes for free. Or so the claim goes.”
Crystal Tapped For Twain Prize
Billy Crystal has been announced as the winner of this year’s Mark Twain Prize, presented by the Kennedy Center, “not just for his comedy but also for his charity work. In 1986, with Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams, Crystal started Comic Relief. The annual show raises money for the homeless ,and most recently, the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.”
What’s Going On Behind The CanStage Curtain?
“CanStage, Toronto’s largest not-for-profit theatre, announced a series of changes to its administrative structure yesterday,” and some observers are sniffing a behind-the-scenes power struggle. “Was there even a process involved? …This is one of the largest theatres in the country and it appointed a new artistic director without a search or a consultation. That can’t be right.”
A Museum Where Art And Architect Cooperate
Christopher Hawthorne loves the Seattle Art Museum’s new home, mainly because it manages to properly showcase the art inside it without subsuming the architect’s skill and vision. “Increasingly, the most satisfying new museums are the ones that manage to bypass that art-versus-architecture debate and give visitors a real variety of visual and spatial experience.”
We’re Holding Out For A Gehry Armoire
“A steel chair designed by Daniel Libeskind for the ground floor of his new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum will go into production by Nienkamper this year, making it the first piece of furniture the globetrotting architect has designed for commercial sale… The museum will take orders for the chair, priced at $10,000 to $12,000, at its gift shops, but will not share in the revenue.”