“Does anybody actually want to watch classical concerts on their computer screens? Evidently, yes. Last year, Medici.tv reached 150,000 unique viewers with its broadcasts from Verbier, according to Medici.tv’s founder and director, Herve Boissiere. This year, he says, the numbers are even better. The real question is whether anybody wants to pay for it.”
Tag: 08.07.08
The Essential Music
“The idea that music exists as a product — that you can download or purchase — is a recent phenomenon. A seismic shift occurred in musical culture when music could be listened to on the gramophone, a radio, stereo system or MP3 player without the need to have musicians present.
This constant presence of recorded music has heightened the brain’s shut-off valve: we have learned to ignore it. Although aural stimulus is still coming in, we may no longer be paying attention. Having the stimulus of music when we don’t want it has dulled people to the magic of what music can be.”
British Playwright Simon Gray, 71
Gray wrote more than 30 plays, including “Quartermaine’s Terms,” “Otherwise Engaged” and “The Old Masters,” as well as five novels and the screenplay for the 1987 film “A Month in the Country.” A rakish figure who claimed to have consumed three bottles of champagne a day for years, Gray also was steeped in the academic world.
Obama Is My Art Project
The fall of iconography in Obama art will coincide with his election or defeat. Come November, he’ll become a real, sturdy subject for art.
An Art Project That Explores Sanitized Violence
“Using the same basic technology that controls unmanned drones – an EZIO board crucial in robotics – Bilal and his colleagues built a paintball gun that could be aimed and fired remotely from any computer in the world. “The same technology you use to send a missile to destroy a village,” he says, “was used here to create art. That’s dual-use!”
September Vanity Fair Cover Story – Tacky. But Also Anti-Democratic?
The latest issue of the U.S. glossy, featuring French First Lady Carla Bruni on the cover and in a detailed companion piece, continues to elicit howls of indignation in Europe. The Guardian sees President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to allow a commercial photo shoot of his “rock-chick wife” inside the Elysée Palace “for the first time in the history of the Republic” as “frivolous,” tacky, and indicative of his “contempt for democracy.”
The Little Foreign Film That Humbled Hollywood Blockbusters
In the U.S., even the most critically lauded subtitled films rarely make a dent at the box office. But this summer, the elegant French-language thriller “Tell No One” has been inexplicably marshalling audiences to art-house theaters and yielding higher per-screen average returns than Hollywood mega-musical “Mamma Mia!” The secret? Positive word-of-mouth and the fact that “ticket buyers seem to forget they are watching a foreign-language film.”
Olympic Opening – A Really Big Show
It features “20,000 performers, 30,000 fireworks, 4 billion people watching. The 3 1/2-hour opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, which starts at 8 p.m. tomorrow at the new 3.5 billion yuan ($511 million) ‘Bird’s Nest” national stadium, will team British soprano Sarah Brightman with Chinese singer Liu Huan to head a program that the government has tried to keep secret.”
What Ails Broadcast TV – A Little Sex?
“While the major networks struggle to create compelling content that meets the FCC’s rigid decency standards, HBO, Showtime and AMC have pumped out profitable hits that could not exist on broadcast television. And not only is the public accepting of the adult content, many people pay to watch it.”
How Architecture Affects Us
“For better or worse, it really does matter where you are and the quality of the building is going to have an impact on you. The problem with really unsuccessful architects is that what they do hangs around for a very long time – this will probably be with us for another 300 years. In other words, architecture is a serious business, and I do think that it impacts on our state of mind.”