The Whitney Museum in New York has chosen Italian architect Renzo Piano to design its upcoming expansion, replacing Rem Koolhaas, whose $200 million design was rejected by the Whitney board last year as too extravagant. Board members say they aren’t looking to create a “destination building,” merely a functional museum, and they applauded Piano’s willingness to work within their parameters.
Tag: 06.16.04
Well, You Get What You Pay For
“Blogging pioneer Dave Winer unexpectedly closed Weblogs.com, his free blog-hosting service, on Sunday, leaving thousands of bloggers without access to their blogs. Blogs affected by the shutdown now redirect to a generic message posted by Winer.” The Weblogs.com service was a free one, and Winer says that he simply could not afford the time and money necessary to keep it going. But many of his virtual tenants are furious at having been given no warning of the shutdown, especially since the content of their blogs is now inaccessible to them.
BBC Prepares For A Copyright-Free Future
“The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Creative Archive, one of the most ambitious free digital content projects to date, is set to launch this fall with thousands of three-minute clips of nature programming. The effort could goad other organizations to share their professionally produced content with Web users. The project, announced last year, will make thousands of audio and video clips available to the public for noncommercial viewing, sharing and editing.” And it may herald a new global era of more liberal licensing and less restrictive copyright enforcement.
Relâche Makes Big Changes
“In a significant change in artistic authority, Philadelphia’s cutting-edge Relâche Ensemble will now be guided by two of its longtime musicians, easing out artistic and executive director Thaddeus Squire. In an announcement yesterday, flutist Michele Kelly and oboist/English hornist Lloyd Shorter were named co-artistic directors.” Squire, who has been credited with rescuing the eminent contemporary ensemble from near-collapse four years ago, had recently proposed expanding his authority, a change with which the musicians weren’t comfortable. Still, the split appears to have been an amicable one.
250 Concerts Highlighting Violas and Bassoons? Must We?
An unprecedented series of 250 concerts will be held by orchestras across the UK this fall, with the aim of promoting the orchestra as a still-relevant cultural force, as well as to promote certain instruments within the orchestra which have fallen out of favor with young British musicians. Among the much-maligned-or-ignored instruments to be highlighted are the tuba, the bassoon, the double bass, and of course, the butt of all orchestra jokes, the viola.
Arts Council Plotted To Kill Off Scottish Opera
In a stunning development in the ongoing melodrama enveloping Scottish Opera, a secret document obtained by a newspaper shows that the Scottish Arts Council had a plan in place to eliminate the company completely “and replace it with a new organisation run by a skeleton staff.” Under the terms of the plan, which was concocted last summer, even as the company was preparing to stage its wildly successful Ring Cycle, the entire orchestra and chorus of Scottish Opera would have been dismissed, and a new group of administrators would have commissioned future productions on an ad hoc basis. The public release of the plan may well cost some Scottish government overseers their jobs, and the fallout is already beginning in Glasgow.
How Did It Come To This?
It is now clear that the Scottish Opera mess was created not by simple indifference, but by a deadly combination of bureaucratic bungling, shortsighted cost-cutting, and a stubborn unwillingness from individuals on all sides even to look for a compromise. “The impression now emerging is that powerful figures in the arts council were more than willing to let the Opera die – and that the Executive, confronted by sweeping redundancies, opted for a political fudge.”
Does Anyone Actually Support This Plan?
“Scotland’s arts world suffered another setback yesterday when Craig Armstrong, one of the country’s leading composers, resigned from the country’s flagship arts body just days after its membership was announced… In what will be regarded as a serious problem for James Boyle, the head of the commission, the composer resigned after discovering he was the only working artist on the board. He also condemned the Scottish Executive’s treatment of Scottish Opera, and called for artists to get together to save the company from the extensive job losses announced last week.”
McSweeney’s Goes Seriously Comic
The latest issue of Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s has been given over to comic art legend Chris Ware, who uses the occasion to take readers who ordinarily might not give comic art a second thought on a tour of the modern scene. “Ware’s curatorial tastes are generally quite broad… Even so, you can see his particular selectivity in the McSweeney’s picks. Ware prefers minimal, iconic, impressionistic drawing to the more deliberate rendering of the European school (“Blacksad” artist Juanjo Guarnido, say), and his introduction is quick to dismiss the comics aesthetic that’s grounded in old superhero comic books.”
Maybe It Would Be More Shocking If He Stole Art That People Like
“The thief who ‘kidnapped’ a fibreglass sculpture by the graffiti artist Banksy has struck again. AK47, as he calls himself, has removed a Tracy Emin pink neon sign called Just Love Me from outside the Hackney Empire theatre in east London… He also claimed that AK47 was a rapidly growing international ‘arto-political movement’, but was vague about the membership, saying only that it had ‘a lot’.” He plans to return the work by week’s end.