Technology has made the “duet” album a big deal. Singers “perform” together, even though they may never have met and the list of live singers recording with dead ones and singers of one genre recording with those of a different one without really collaborating is getting longer…
Tag: 11.17.06
Berlin’s Opera Mess Deepens
The general director of the foundation that funds Berlin’s opera companies quit, then recanted. Michael Schindhelm, “in office for only 18 months of his five-year contract, quit in disgust over a mandate by the federal government to cut the foundation’s budget by 16 percent by 2009, from $143.5 million to $127 million.”
Museums – Plying Both Ends
Museums are complaining about changes in the tax code about gifts. They’re also selling pieces of their collections. “Museums are trying to have it both ways: benefiting from tax subventions because they supposedly can’t survive in the marketplace yet stepping into the marketplace when they deem it appropriate. Some are actually renting out parts of their collections. What’s so disturbing about collection rentals and sales is that they violate the reason that museums are treated differently from businesses.”
On Museums And Antiquities, Two Opposing Agendas
“In two different parts of town last night, two very different voices in the debate over museums and antiquities made their arguments heard. Uptown at the Metropolitan Museum, the Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, delivered to a rapt audience an impassioned defense of museums continuing to collect antiquities –– while, downtown, Peter Watson, the author of ‘The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities — From Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums,’ spoke to a group at the Chelsea Art Museum about the responsibility of museums not to contribute to the illegal trade in antiquities.”
Put Book To Nose. Inhale Deeply.
“There I was, reading On Opera by the late philosopher Bernard Williams, and I was suddenly transported back to my childhood. How so? Because of the way it smelled. … How to describe why one book smells nicer than another? I could burble on about the Williams book’s hints of musk, fresh grass, and topnotes of vanilla, but you can see that I’d never make it as a wine writer. But maybe there is a secret community of book-sniffers out there who know what I mean.”
Cuban Heirs Trump US Publisher In Rights Fight
“A copyright struggle over some of the finest music to emerge from Cuba ended yesterday after a six-year legal process in which a British judge presided over court hearings in London and Havana. Mr Justice Lindsay, ruling on a wrangle over rights to ‘lively and expressive music’ made famous on the Buena Vista Social Club album, declined to give a declaration sought in the high court by Peer International Corporation, a US publisher, that it owned the rights to 13 songs dating back to the 1930s.”
Taking Woolf From Page To Stage, Ill-Advisedly
“‘Writing one’s mind’ was Virginia Woolf’s own description of her experimental 1931 novel, The Waves. But how do you put on stage an extended prose-poem made up of a group of interior monologues? … Like Woolf’s book, this version traces the inner lives of six characters from childhood in 1893 to early middle age in the 1930s. In the process, the production uses a variety of devices: speech, sound-effects, video-images, even rhythmic dance-movements. But although fragments of the solitude and discontent of the sextet emerges, there seems to me something extravagantly pointless about trying to give Woolf’s words a physical reality.”
Steal A Name And Your Book May Be Pulped
With his novel, “Johnny Come Home,” Jake Arnott inadvertently libelled a man who shares a name and other traits with a fictional character. “Where real names are involved, an author cannot hide behind that all-purpose shield: ‘any resemblance is purely coincidental’. Nor do the courts accept ignorance as a defence. If you can be shown, by using a real-life name, to have injured a real-life reputation, then you will pay. The law is right alongside the Bard: ‘He who steals my purse, steals trash. But he who steals my good name, steals all that I have.’ You’re safe, of course, if your named victim has no good name to lose.”
Dance As Ratings Titan: Who’d Have Thought?
“Nearly 28 million watched Wednesday’s hour-and-change finale of ‘Dancing With the Stars’ at the end of which the three-time Super Bowl champ was crowned best amateur ballroom dancer. That’s the show’s biggest audience ever. … ‘Dancing’ topped the combined audiences of CBS, NBC and Fox in the Wednesday hour by about 4 million viewers and delivered ABC’s biggest non-sports audience in the time period in nearly seven years.”
Bill Would Block Barnes Move
“Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.), who narrowly won re-election last week, on Wednesday followed through on a pledge to introduce legislation that would prevent the Barnes Foundation from being relocated to Philadelphia from suburban Merion, Pa. The bill would penalize any charitable institution that solicits donations contrary to the original benefactor’s wishes.”