“In the world of art and antiquities, millions of dollars are at stake for museums and private buyers, depending on the date or ownership of an object. Disputes are increasingly common, and sometimes escalate.”
Tag: 05.18.06
Look Back, Then Turn Away
It’s been 50 years since John Osborne’s much-lauded play, Look Back In Anger was published, and many in the theatre world are falling all over themselves to celebrate the classic. But is Osborne’s work really worth celebrating? “Even taking into account Osborne’s physical and emotional suffering at the hands of women, his misogyny was extreme… A defective, even disgusting, personality doesn’t rule out the creation of great art; many artists can leave theirs in the unsatisfying world of real life while they get on with creating a better one. This is not the case, however, with Look Back in Anger, which is weakened not so much by misogyny as by immaturity.”
Nashville Ballet Gets New Chief
Nashville Ballet has hired its own former marketing director to be its new executive director. Andrea Dillenburg worked for the company in the late 1990s, has most recently been working for the Atlanta Symphony, will succeed Paul Kaine at the helm of Nashville Ballet.
Charleston Musicians To Get Back Their Full Salary (Of $20,000)
The musicians of the Charleston Symphony have a new one-year contract, and will see their salaries return to 2003 levels, when the orchestra accepted a 17% cut to prevent the orchestra from going bankrupt. “Under the proposed contract, an average section player would earn $20,903 and average principal player would earn $26,128 in the 2006-07 season, Girault said. The 46 core CSO musicians perform more than 100 concerts from mid-September to mid-June.”
Venture Capital + Literature = …Um, We’ll See
“The Literary Ventures Fund is a tiny nonprofit, founded last year with offices in Boston and New York, that ‘seeks to challenge the status quo of literary publishing,’ as its Web site boldly proclaims. LVF hopes to help exceptional works of fiction, literary nonfiction and poetry find the readership they deserve — by using an economic model more frequently associated with Silicon Valley.”
The Show That Made Gay Okay (Even If We Don’t Remember It)
When NBC’s long-running sitcom, Will & Grace, says its final goodbyes tonight, it will probably seem to most viewers a minor event. And that, says Gail Shister, is a testament to just how far American audiences have come in their perception of gay culture since the show debuted in 1998. “If Ellen opened the door, Will & Grace burst into the room with a marching band, tastefully accessorized… Without a single sermon, [the show] advanced the national conversation about homosexuality.”
M-SPIFF Goes From Almost Postponed To More Than Solvent
This year’s edition of the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival (M-SPIFF) almost didn’t happen, due to financial problems, staff changes, and other difficulties. But the festival went off as scheduled in the end, and this week, organizers announced that the event finished in the black, with even a small surplus left over after all the bills were paid.
Telefilm Canada Not Getting Its Hollywood Hotshot, After All
“The English-Canadian film industry reacted with more wry amusement than outrage yesterday after learning Michael Jenkinson, the man hired by Telefilm Canada to whip the moribund feature-film sector into shape, would not be showing up for work. Less than three weeks after Los Angeles-based Jenkinson was exuberantly introduced at a Toronto press conference as Telefilm’s newly minted go-to-guy with a mandate to revitalize English-language cinema, a red-faced Telefilm issued late Tuesday a vague press release that suggested business complications in California had forced Jenkinson to back out at the final hour.”
Bleeding Howard
As the number of listeners purchasing and using satellite radio increases, an unexpected problem is becoming a major irritant to some of those still relying on terrestrial radio. Many satellite users employ a small mini-transmitter to allow their satellite signal to be heard on their existing FM radios, and despite the limited range of the transmitter signal, complaints have begun rolling in to FM stations whose frequency is the same as the mini-transmitters that listeners are being forced to listen to Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony “bleeding” into the FM signal from some unknown location.
Raising The Bar(re) On Academics
The career trajectory of a dancer is so short that, from a very early age, talented specimens are encouraged to devote themselves heart and soul to their art, and not to waste a minute on frivolities like, say, higher education. The result is that many dancers, who can expect to retire their toe shoes before they turn 40, are simply not qualified to do anything else once they do retire. Two prominent New York ballet companies have been looking to change that unfortunate equation, offering its young dancers the chance to take classes at conveniently located colleges, even as they continue their rigorous dance studies.