“In more than two dozen interviews on the floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center, gallery executives reported mostly brisk sales and said the contemporary art fair seems insulated — so far — from U.S. economic jitters.”
Tag: 12.09.07
Time To Buy A Warhol
“Driven by an unprecedented global buying spree of everything from hot-ticket contemporary works to time-proven choices from Picasso to pop, works of art have become a de facto international currency in their own right.”
NY Philharmonic Agrees To Play In North Korea
The trip, at the invitation of North Korea, will be the first significant cultural visit by Americans to that country, and it comes as the United States is offering the possibility of warmer ties with a country that President Bush once consigned to the “axis of evil.”
Hollywood Writers’ Strike – A Disaster In The Making
“If the strike lasts another four to six weeks, it could spell the end for 2008 pilot production. The most-circulated scenario in that case involves the networks renewing all their existing series for next fall, producing their pilots in the summer and launching their new crop of shows in midseason 2009.”
Pay-What-You-Want – Music’s Next Business Model?
“Radiohead’s pay-what-you-choose gambit didn’t just set off economic debates. It should also establish 2007 as two kinds of tipping point for recorded music. One is as the year of the superstar free agent. The second tipping point is the decisive migration of music to the Internet.”
Florida Mega-Church Stages $1.3 Million Christmas Spectacle
“We’re having to compete against many theatrical things around the country, whether it’s MTV or the Rockettes or any show you might see on Broadway. We have made a conscious decision to pull out all the stops.”
Doris Lessing: Of Privilege And Possibility
“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers. What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV.”
The New Museum – Supernatural At Play
“The New Museum in New York works, and it works in part because its basic form suggests not just playfulness, but something supernatural as well. A mix of those two elements, an amalgam of brattiness and transcendence, silliness and the spiritual, would pretty much describe where the contemporary art world spends much of its time these days.”
DAM Could Stand To Toot Its Own Horn
Why doesn’t the Denver Art Museum make more of a fuss over its new acquisitions? “The museum is regularly acquiring significant works of art, and the public is simply unaware of them… It would be great to see the museum make a point of systematically announcing those acquisitions of a certain minimum level of importance.”
Albom: Michigan Should Get Serious About Films
Should economically depressed Michigan jump on the trend of providing tax breaks and incentives to lure Hollywood filmmakers? Author, columnist, and Detroit native Mitch Albom says there’s no question about it.