“After years of financial troubles and unfulfilled potential, the $158.2-million makeover hopes to recapture the imagination of metro Detroit. The DIA is on the brink of its most sweeping reinvention since moving into its Beaux Arts building on Woodward Avenue in 1927.”
Tag: 05.21.07
Study: Male Brains Decline More Than Female Brains
“Certain differences seem to be inherent in male and female brains: Men are better at maintaining and manipulating mental images (useful in mathematical reasoning and spatial skills), while women tend to excel at retrieving information from their brain’s files (helpful with language skills and remembering the locations of objects).”
Can Your Computer Pick The Hits?
The business of picking hit music is a strange alchemy. So could computers really bring some order to the process? Malcom Gladwell explores the idea…
Will This Book Succeed? Let’s Ask The Masses.
“When predicting which candidate is likely to win an election, what a movie will make at the box office or how much the price of oil will fluctuate, the guesses of a crowd can be remarkably accurate. But can crowds predict whether a book will succeed? That is the hope of the founders of Media Predict (www.MediaPredict.com), a virtual market beginning today, and Simon & Schuster, a publisher that plans to select a book proposal based on bets placed by traders in the new market.”
Is The Solution To Rude Audiences At Starbucks?
No one has yet found a way to keep the thoughtless, mindless and noisy peoples of the world out of its concert halls and theaters, and incidents of audience misbehavior have been mounting of late. Perhaps what’s needed is a strategy from completely outside the musical marketplace: Starbucks, say. “Starbucks, it seems, faces the challenge of encouraging its customers to linger a while, but not to fall asleep, and certainly not to change their socks. People should feel comfortable, but not too comfortable, because that… is when they can start to behave in unwelcome ways.”
Rare Raphael Portrait To Be Sold At Auction
“A painting by Renaissance artist Raphael is expected to fetch £15m when it is sold in London later this summer. The portrait, of Florentine ruler Lorenzo de’ Medici, has not been seen in public for 40 years – but will be displayed at Christie’s from 30 June. The auctioneer describes the work as the most important Renaissance portrait to be sold at auction for a generation.”
Private Equity Firm To Acquire EMI
UK-based recording industry giant EMI has agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm for £3.2bn ($6.3bn). The deal comes less than a year after EMI declined a merger offer from Warner Music, and Warner could still make a competing offer before EMI’s shareholders vote to approve the offer on the table.
Another Orchestra Assault (But This One’s Serious)
A concert by the local orchestra in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik was disrupted earlier this month when a nationalist member of the city council forced his way into the hall, threatened the guest conductor (apparently over his Serbian heritage,) then head-butted the orchestra’s executive director, who was attempting to keep the assailant from the stage.
Celebrated Austrian Director Succumbs To Cancer
“Award-winning theater and opera director Dietmar Pflegerl died on Thursday, May 17, at age 63 in his hometown of Klagenfurt, the capital of the southern Austrian state of Kärnten. He had been diagnosed with cancer five years ago, but adamantly refused to let it interfere with his work.”
Why Blogs Will Never Replace Serious Criticism
Blogs and online video may have changed the media landscape, but Richard Schickel says that it would be a mistake to confuse user-generated opinions with professional arts criticism. “Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object)… Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing.”