The Tate Gallery spent £700,000 on buying Chris Ofili’s “The Upper Room” after the artist’s agent told the museum that Ofili was getting married and needed the money. Ofili is one of the Tate’s trustees.
Tag: 10.23.05
TV Broadcasters Hit Big With Viewer Phone Participation
Traditional TV ad revenue is down in Europe. But broadcasters are finding a great new stream of revenue from cell phones. “The tide of calls, televotes and text messages billed at premium rates of more than 1 euro a message are building a market that could top 750 million, or more than $900 million, in Europe by the end of the year. To hook viewers on their handsets, producers are focusing on universal topics like love and money, and eclectic ones like cosmetic surgery.”
Pole Wins Chopin Competition
Rafal Blechacz, 20, is the first Pole in 30 years to win the Chopin International Piano Competition. “The last time a Pole won the 78-year-old competition was 1975, when Krystian Zimerman captured first place and went on to a brilliant musical career.” Eighty pianists from 18 countries entered this year’s competition.
Canada Plays The Film Tax-Credit Game (And Plays It Well, We Might Add)
“In the borderless world of movie making, the scramble over Hollywood’s production dollars is a financial arms race of government subsidies. Eager to get the best deals, Hollywood skillfully pushes the ante up by playing off one another the myriad countries and states hungry for the dollars and glitz a film production generates. It used to be Canada and America. Now, everybody is competing for the film business.”
Goodbye Mass Marketing, Hello Buzzzzz
Greg Stielstra, senior marketing director for the Book Group at Zondervan, one of the world’s leading publishers of Christian books, “argues passionately that traditional mass marketing, which seeks to sell products and services to everyone, is no longer effective at selling anything to anyone. The societal influences that allowed mass marketing to prosper have disappeared, rendering mass marketing ineffective. New circumstances have created an opportunity for a different marketing approach.”
DVD Battle May Be Irrelevant?
Hollywood is battling over the next format of DVDs to be adopted. But does it really matter? More and more, consumers are moving away from physical disks as a way to get their media. Online seems to be the future…
Putting The Frieze On Art
London’s Frieze Art Fair is only three years old, but it’s leaving traditional museum shows behind. “The Frieze Art Fair feels as if the flying circus of dealers from Basel, curators from Barcelona, museum owners from Istanbul, collectors from Los Angeles, and even the occasional artist from Hoxton or Berlin who constitute the perpetual shifting landscape of art, have given up perpetually circumnavigating the globe, and decided to turn themselves collectively into an airport.”
Measuring This Year’s Frieze
“The speed with which Frieze has become an essential date in the international arts calendar is testament to the buzz which surrounds British art. It was launched only three years ago, but the number of galleries represented has risen from 150 last year to 160, due to the increased quality of the 400 applications. Frieze is determinedly international, but this year there are 35 British galleries represented – second only to the Americans, who have 38.”
A First Look At 9/11 Museum Plans
“The plans, presented in public workshops over the past month, offer the first glimpse of an institution that is likely to become one of the country’s most visited museums. The ideas are also likely to prompt sensitive questions of how to tell the story of Sept. 11.”
Chicago Symphony: Going It Slow
The Chicago Symphony has a $12.5 million accumulated deficit. “In the administrative offices of Symphony Center these days, the pressure to find a new music director to replace Daniel Barenboim, who leaves in June after 15 years, is certainly being felt. So is the need to erase the CSO’s string of annual deficits and to keep the orchestra moving forward artistically as well as financially. But with so much at stake, CSO Association President Deborah R. Card and Board Chairman William H. Strong are charting a course that values slow and steady over fast and furious.”