Mark Feeney has a contrary take on the legendary portrait photographer:
“Karsh’s very real if amorphous achievement belongs not to the world of art but celebrity. He wasn’t so much a photographer as a brand name. Karsh of Ottawa was a label on a conspicuously worn luxury good.”
Tag: 09.23.08
Industry Settles Two Little Arguments (But Not the Big One) Over Internet Royalties
“Groups representing songwriters, music publishers, record labels and digital music websites have ended a seven-year dispute over two types of music royalties. Unfortunately, neither of those is the controversial performance royalty for Internet radio.”
Life Magazine to Rise Again, This Time Online
Life.com, a joint venture between Time, Inc. and Getty Images, “is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2009 with 6 million images from the LIFE archive… It will add about 3,000 new images a day from Getty Images, which will feed most of its editorial images onto the new site.”
What Says Broadway Like American Psycho?
Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 best seller is headed to the Great White Way — maybe. “Graphically bloody novel, which juxtaposes Reagan-era decadence and gruesome killings, includes prominent references to bands of the era, a fact that contributed to the idea of musicalizing the story. … Current economic woes have prodded producers to put the tuner on the fast track.”
Greenwich Village Theatre To Get New Life In Reality TV
“Filmmaker Lawrence Page has bought and renovated downtown venue The Actors’ Playhouse with the intention of producing a reality TV skein about thesps putting on dueling legit shows. … The TV skein would eventually culminate in full stage shows to play at the Playhouse, with a cash prize going to the offering that draws the biggest crowds.”
Up Next At The UK’s Arts Council: TBA
“The closing date for applications to be the Arts Council’s new chair, to succeed Sir Christopher Frayling, is tomorrow. So sharpen those pencils, potentials! Names being bandied about include Richard Eyre, apparently favoured by his successor at the helm of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner; and Genista McIntosh, also formerly of the National Theatre, who so thoroughly whipped ACE into shape in her report into the debacle over the last funding round.”
How Bootlegs Affect The Way We Think About Art
“Bootlegging is, of course, a long artistic tradition. It’s one Shakespeare himself alludes to in The Winter’s Tale….” With the release of the eighth volume in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Ron Rosenbaum argues that “Dylan culture, especially Dylan bootleg culture, figures into the way we assess ‘authorized’ and ‘unauthorized’ work by other great artists such as Shakespeare and Nabokov.”
Munch’s Vampire, Long in Private Hands, Goes Up for Auction
The 1894 painting, formally titled Love and Pain and part of Munch’s 20-work series “The Frieze of Life” (along with The Scream), is expected to fetch more than $35 million at Sotheby’s this November.
14th-Century Cookbook, Canterbury Tales Manuscripts to Go Online
“Manchester University’s John Rylands Library will be digitising much of its renowned collection of medieval manuscripts… Staff will begin to scan the pages using a high definition camera in October and the results will be available by late 2009.”
Ancient Assyrian Ale? (No, It’s Older Still)
A Caltech scientist, using eons-old yeast recovered from a weevil trapped in ancient amber, “now brews barrels (not bottles) of pale ale and German wheat beer through the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company.”