The Smithsonian Institution is willing to lend smaller museums its objects, and its prestige, for a price. “In exchange for a $2,500 annual fee, museums may become Smithsonian ‘affiliates’ and borrow artifacts. Some are less important items. Some are icons. Some go out on a short-term basis. Some, long-term. Now 146 museums and cultural organizations are part of the program, called Smithsonian Affiliations. The latest is the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Ky., which has its eye on a famous stuffed steed from the Civil War.”
Tag: 08.22.06
Online Music Sales’ Latest Victim: Tower Records
“Tower Records has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, its second such filing in less than three years. … The company admits ‘intense’ competition has hurt its business. ‘The brick-and-mortar specialty music retail industry has suffered substantial deterioration recently,’ Tower said in court papers. Industry observers say the chain could have a tough time finding a buyer willing to keep its stores operating in an industry increasingly dominated by online music purveyors and big-box retailers.”
A Split Unsettles Spanish-Language TV Market
“The unhappy divorce of the top U.S. Spanish-language network, Univision Communications Inc., and Latin America’s biggest producer of hit shows, Grupo Televisa SA, was a plot lifted directly from the telenovelas that made both wildly successful. Now Telemundo, once relegated to a supporting-actor role, is trying to win over viewers and emerge ahead of bigger rival Univision. U.S. Spanish-language programming is a market that has grown to more than 35 million Hispanics who make up at least 14 percent of the U.S. population and are driving the nation’s population growth.”
YouTube Moves To “Ads Within Ads”
“After attracting millions of eyeballs with video clips of dancing cats and lip-syncing coeds, YouTube hopes to cash in on its popularity with online infomercials. Starting today, the video-sharing site plans to let advertisers create ‘channels’ filled with clips they produce themselves — and then in turn sell sponsorships to other advertisers. Among the first: a channel created by Warner Bros. Records devoted to Paris Hilton’s new album…. Fox Broadcasting Co. will advertise on the Paris Hilton Channel to promote the fall season of the television show ‘Prison Break.'”
Too Many Shows Frozen Too Soon
“When is a theatre show finished? I don’t mean what time does the curtain come down (or rather not come down in the case of Edinburgh where curtains and traditional stages are thankfully in very short supply) but at what point do the cast and director stop working on the show in order to improve it?” The question “is particularly pertinent here in Edinburgh where there is a lot of fragile and fledgling work on view. This is a wonderful chance for companies to really develop a show in front of an audience, but often it simply doesn’t happen.”
Art Restorer Umberto Baldini, 84
“Umberto Baldini, the director of the conservation studios at the Uffizi Gallery who helped save and restore hundreds of artworks damaged by the famous Arno River flood of 1966, died at his home near Florence on Wednesday.”
What Motivates Fame Seekers?
“For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.”
Pushkin Museum, Expanding, Puts Stars Center Stage
“The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Russian capital’s premier repository of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works, has opened the Gallery of Art of the Countries of Europe and America of the 19th-20th Centuries, devoted to the best of its collections from those periods. The expansion nearly doubles the display space for 19th- and 20th-century art, said Irina Antonova, the museum’s director. Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso all have separate halls…. It is all part of a goal to create a ‘museum town’ in the heart of Moscow….”
Tomb Robbing No More, An Artist Imitates What He Once Stole
In Italy, a former tomb robber, jailed briefly long ago for selling his own authentic-seeming copies of Etruscan art as originals, “has transformed a mushroom farm that was once an ancient quarry into Etruscopolis, a quirky museum celebrating the art of a civilization that flourished in roughly the eighth to second centuries B.C.”
Can A Biennial Transform Liverpool?
Liverpool’s Biennial is about to begin. But will the event have a culturizing effect on the city? “Culture is not a cure-all medicine for a city that has been in decline for 50 years. Of course there are economic benefits. But if you say it’s only about that then expectations start heading off in the wrong direction. And the actual difference made by culture is hard to gauge. Sometimes Liverpool looks less like a capital of culture than a culture of capital.”