Tag: 06.19.05

A Museum Director Who Makes Way Over Scale (But Why?)

How do museums set salaries for their directors? That’s what Tacoma News-Tribune reporter Jen Graves wants to know after noting that the small Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art has paid its director $282,000 in salary and $34,000 in benefits. The median museum director salary in the Western United States is $188,000. “At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an operation roughly 10 times the size of MoG and with $280 million in net assets, the director makes $267,245.” So what has the glass museum got for its money from its departing director?

Is HBO Losing Its Lustre?

“Through the end of May, HBO’s average prime-time viewership was down to 900,000 from 1.2 million for the same period in 2004. The weekly “Deadwood” audience has dropped by 2 million and “Carnivale” was canceled, while “Six Feet Under” and “Entourage” both started new seasons with smaller audiences than the year before…”

Killing A Memorial By Committee

Any chance of making something meaningful of the Ground Zero memorial in Lower Manhattan is all but faded. “As the wrangling over the nearby Freedom Tower has shown, nothing here goes smoothly. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is quietly pushing to wrap up plans for the memorial by mid-July. But after two and a half years of tinkering, the city is likely to end up with a memorial geared to tourists with short attention spans rather than to the serious contemplation of human loss. Worse, the constant revisions continue to gobble up space for the living, threatening to transform the site into a theme park haunted by death.”

A New Way Of Training Musicians In Minn.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the University of Minnesota have teamed up to take a different approach to training musicians. “We’re trying to address the fact that orchestra jobs are changing dramatically in the 21st century. The demands that are being placed on members of orchestras, the breadth of musical skills, the scope of interpersonal skills they have to bring, the score of entrepreneurial skills they need, are vastly different from the expectations of 25 to 30 years ago.”

Thomas Krens: Back On Track

Thomas Krens’s career, which “seemed to have hit the buffers at the start of the year, when the supremely generous chairman of his trustees, Peter B Lewis, resigned in disgust at his director’s manic, expansionist policies, is back on track. He has come up with the one thing that cannot but command the attention of his severest critics: an unmistakable blockbuster work of art. Krens has been instrumental in the installation of Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time: several hundred tons of raw steel in a sequence of rippling twisted curves.”

Do Book Review Sections Still Matter?

“Scott Pack, whose day job as buying manager at Waterstone’s gives him considerable powers over the relationship between writers and readers, has recently been hired as a columnist for Bookseller magazine and in his first outing took a swipe at the broadsheets’ books pages, asking, essentially, what is the point? ‘They should inspire reading. They should excite, stimulate, agitate and empower readers to discover new books.’ But they’re not…

Can Music Change The World?

That’s the hope of Bob Geldof and his amazing international music fest. But is this kind of concert activism of any use? “He is in danger of becoming one of the leaders of Compassion Lite, where people in the West, especially young people in the West, get to announce their compassion very cheaply, for the price of a wristband or a concert ticket or a plastic cup, without any meaningful demand on them to change their lives or look into their hearts.”

A Dancer’s Special Place

New York City principal Jock Soto retires this week after 20 years. “At 40, he can look back to a special place as one of ballet’s most creative personalities. While choreographers are essential to the art, dancers like Mr. Soto – and they are few – also define and redefine choreography with bold individuality and implicit collaboration. Peter Martins and Christopher Wheeldon have used him repeatedly in their new works. Just as significantly, as Mr. Soto has proved in familiar ballets, interpretation can become a creative act.”