“I mean, daily newspapers all need to put ‘f***’ in a headline above the fold one day – it’ll solve all their problems. That’s my prescription. And then in one fell swoop they’ll get rid of all those 80-year-old subscribers who won’t let them drop ‘Blondie.’ Catering to the 80-year-olds? Where’s that getting newspapers? Making sure there’s nothing in your paper that’s inappropriate for an eighty-year-old to read?”
Tag: 11.12.08
Newspaper Music Coverage: Dismal, But Not New
“Music critics write basically for three important audiences: First, the people who attend concerts. Second, a larger group of intensely interested people who read reviews of concerts they aren’t going to hear. And third, the critic’s bosses. Ignore the third audience at your peril.”
Settling Old Scores In AGO Revamp
“Emerging from the debris of decades of squabbles and hundreds of pages of legal documents, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario unveils its revamped and redesigned home this week in a state of happy detente with neighbourhood residents who once voiced fierce opposition to its transformational plans.”
Tony Boss Ousted
“Producer Elizabeth I. McCann, who guided the Tony Awards through some choppy times, had a lot to do with the success of this year’s telecast, a program that won an Emmy and good reviews from the press.” But McCann was relieved of her duties this week, reportedly at the hands of “Charlotte St. Martin, who heads the Broadway League, and Howard Sherman, who looks after the nonprofit American Theater Wing.”
Should Pittsburgh Fest Drop Visual Art?
“One of the decisions that the principals deciding the future of the Three Rivers Arts Festival will have to make is what role the visual arts will play, and perhaps it’s time to consider whether they should be included at all… The event is as popular as ever,” but with no admission charge, it’s become harder and harder to pay for, and tough decisions may have to be made.
Gehry On Gehry: The AGO Redesign
The starchitect speaks: “Putting things on a pedestal hurts the art and I didn’t want to do that. It’s a miracle, but the galleries for [Ken Thomson’s] Canadian collection are the best I’ve ever done. Even with white cubic spaces we managed to give them soul… We did the best thing we could do on our budget; a very complicated way of interweaving things within a structure that had been remade many times.”
NPR Taps NY Times Exec As New CEO
“Vivian Schiller, 47, will take over as president and CEO of Washington-based NPR at a time when many media companies are under severe economic stress due to declining advertising support and rapidly shifting consumer tastes.” So far, NPR has avoided fiscal trouble, but “Schiller takes over an organization… that has been roiled by internal disagreement.”
Philly Children’s Museum Quadruples Its Space
“To the adult eye, [the Please Touch Museum’s] $88 million new home in [Philadelphia’s Memorial Hall,] a Beaux-Arts-style granite palace built for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park, is super-size in every way… The reborn children’s museum, which reopened last month, offers 38,000 square feet of exhibit space, almost four times that of its previous location.”
Hip-Hop Artists Celebrate Obama
“Since last week, hip-hop artists have issued a host of new songs in tribute to Obama’s victory… There’s obvious joy and celebration, but also a sense of historic moment, and almost a tragicomic awareness of what it took to get to this point.”
Manhattan Artists’ Club Selling Off Its Studio Space
The Pen & Brush, “a century-old former club in Greenwich Village devoted to female artists and writers,” is selling its longtime home after concluding that it can no longer afford to maintain the space. “Those who rent the artist studios on the upper floors, are distressed by the prospect of losing work and exhibition spaces to which they have grown attached.”