“Many former and current hip-hop producers and performers… have turned their attention away from the Top 40 and toward Madison Avenue. While hip-hop performers have been running marketing divisions as part of their business, [hip-hop capitalists] are building successful full-service agencies with a roster of clients that they run apart from their other businesses.”
Tag: 08.09.04
The Mysterious Disappearing (Reappearing) Demographic
About a year ago, the people who track TV ratings and the people who pay attention to them sounded the alarm: 18-34-year-old men, the most desirable advertising demographic, had stopped watching television! Millions of ’em! “Commentary abounded that a significant cultural shift had taken place and that a generation of men was steadily quitting television-viewing, forsaking both network and cable programs in favor of video games, DVD’s and the Internet.” Now, the young men are inexplicably back watching the tube. Were the Nielsen ratings wrong? Not according to Nielsen. But several critics of the system say otherwise.
Missing The Point: The Architect As Superstar
Frank Gehry’s addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario is doomed to be a disappointment, says Christopher Hume, because Toronto has always refused to view Gehry as an architect when it can view him as a home-grown celebrity instead. “Not that Gehry’s famous for being famous anywhere outside of Toronto. In some cities, he’s famous for his buildings. Indeed, in some cities, his buildings are more famous than their creator. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for the man. Sure, he’s a celebrity, but he’s also an architect, a great architect even. Even if it turns out brilliantly, the AGO addition was always too limited to give Gehry, the architect, the scope to do something major, something spectacular.”
Adding To The Discussion
Gottfried Helnwein is an artist whose work – “giant color portraits of stillborn babies, paintings that merge Nazi-archive photographs with pictures Helnwein has taken, enigmatic portrayals of apparently wounded or menaced children” – tends to provoke strong reactions, and in recent years, several individuals have expressed their displeasure with some of his images by defacing them. Helnwein confesses to being initially startled by the vandalism, but these days, he has decided that the viewer has as much to contribute to the larger discussion as the artist, and if people are moved to destroy what he has created, he can at least salute their passion.
This Implies That There Are Good Bagpipers?
A national “piping expert” in Scotland is accusing the Edinburgh Festival of forcing attendees to endure substandard bagpiping buskers in the name of tradition. “[Roddy McLeod] said most of the performers who lined the capital’s streets during August were ‘shockingly bad’ players. Many could not tune their instruments properly and did scant justice to their musical potential, he added.” Festival organizers agree that their pipers are not exactly ready for a Saturday night at the Sydney Opera House, but insist that they are merely upholding centuries of Scottish tradition.
The Biggest Donor
W. Jerome Frautschi is a man of his word, and it’s a good thing for the city of Madison that he is. When Frautschi offered to pay the full cost of constructing Madison’s Overture Center for the Arts, that cost was projected to be $50 million. Instead, the final price tag was $205 million, and Frautschi’s gift is now believed to be the largest amount ever given to a single arts organization by a single donor.