The Houston Symphony has a new contract with its musicians. The base pay rises to $81,900 a year. “The three-year orchestra agreement, which takes effect in October, is a small, measured step toward sustaining the organization’s fragile financial stability, newly found after decades of problems.”
Tag: 06.13.07
A Closer Look At A County’s Plan To Save The Barnes
The Barnes Collection is set to move to Philadelphia. Now the county where the Barnes is located wants to buy the buildings and lease them to the collection. “The bonds are backed by the lease payments. The debt service would be $2.5 million per year but the interest on $50 million would be $3.5 million a year. Leaving the Barnes a profit for its endowment fund. After 40 years the debt would be paid off and the Barnes could probably get a 99-year lease at $1 a year. There could be an option to buy back the land and buildings whenever they wanted to. This is a way the Barnes could be economically viable without using millions in taxpayer money.”
Judge Blocks Fisk University From Selling Paintings
A judge has told Fisk University it cannot sell two paintings from its collection – a Georgia O’Keffe and a Marsden Hartley. “The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum argued in a motion last month that Fisk should not be allowed to sell the paintings based on what it saw as a clearly defined “no-sale” condition imposed on all of the artworks in the Stieglitz Collection.”
Taking Stock Of London’s Remade Festival Hall
“On balance, this is beyond measure a better hall than it used to be, better than my fondest expectations for the refurbishment and better than London has heard since Queens Hall was bombed in May 1941. It is good enough to show up the limitations of resident orchestras and challenge their London swagger. It is also good enough to command admiration and renewed public affection. What it is not, and never will be, is the equal of classic shoebox-shaped halls in Vienna, Amsterdam and Boston, or of modern marvels in Birmingham, Lucerne and Los Angeles.”
Art In The YouTube World (All About The Branding)
“Welcome to marketing in the age of YouTube, where brands seek to appeal to the consumer’s so-called creativity, in part by associating themselves with genuine artists and creative dialogue, in part by exploiting interactive technologies such as social networks.”
The Politics Of Serious Memorials
Getting a new monument approved and built in Washington DC isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s also about the politics of getting it done, and the accomplishment often doesn’t match the thing to be honored. “Monuments in Washington are almost always built to the greater glory of their makers, not the victims or heroes acknowledged, as if in a footnote, in the words carved on them.”
Conductor Misses Opera Dates Because Of Lost Passport
Conductor Richard “Bradshaw’s British passport went missing on June 8, one week before he was to have led two concert performances of Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco in Budapest. A statement from the COC said that ‘despite exhausting every possible resource,’ the English-born conductor has received ‘little or no assistance from the British Identity and Passport Service,’ which has refused his request for an emergency 24-hour passport.”
Luminato Festival Tops Attendance In Its First Year
In its first outing, “Toronto’s newborn Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity, which ended on Sunday, became the biggest multi-site, multidisciplinary festival in North America, well beyond South Carolina’s Spoleto, or the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City. Over Luminato’s 10-day run, attendance topped 1.03 million people, more than double the festival organizers’ modest first-year projections.”
AT&T Teams Up With Hollywood Against Piracy
“The nation’s largest telephone and Internet service provider also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers. As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood.”
Disney – Portrait Of An Empire
“Of Disney’s $34bn annual revue, about $1.5bn is classed as digital – but $800m of that is online sales of holiday packages. That leaves a relatively measly $700m of true digital media revenue. That doesn’t put off Disney. Not only is the digital sector growing fast, it is also hitting the advertisers’ sweet spot.”