“The biennial Monaco Dance Forum, held in the exclusive European principality, focuses on a low-profit performing art and is conducted largely in French. But the young festival is broader in scope than prominent performance-oriented gatherings such as the American Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow, and focuses squarely on what it perceives as the brave frontiers of dance creation and presentation.”
Tag: 12.16.06
D.C.’s WETA May Go Back To Bach
In the wake of last week’s announcement that Washington, D.C.’s last classical radio station will shortly convert to sports talk, one of the district’s public radio stations is saying that it will strongly consider adding classical music back to its program schedule. WETA dropped classical in favor of an all-news/talk format in March 2005, but the change hasn’t been popular with the public.
Crazy For Those Painted Faces
Portraiture is hot all across the art world right now,and London seems to be its unofficial center. “Every day, it seems, you can go to a different [London] museum and see another portrait show as enthralling as the one you saw the day before. The upshot: This has turned into what many seasoned cultural consumers describe as the greatest year in memory for art exhibits.”
Can The Cell Phone Save Performance Art?
“We don’t need the cellphone-addicted script from the latest James Bond film Casino Royale to remind us that the cell is society’s prevailing fetish object. In the past few years, it has also become the multipurpose art gadget of choice that, more than ever, has helped artists bust out of gallery walls to reach a vast and eclectic audience.”
Synergy + Flexibility = Profitability? (CBS Hopes So.)
At a time when many major record labels have been cutting back, CBS announced this week that it is reviving long-defunct CBS Records, “through which the company plans to release music and promote artists on its networks’ stable of television shows… Outside of television, CBS Records will release music online through its own Web site and retailers such as Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes Music Store. The label has completed a deal with Apple to sell music, videos and other content, and expects to seal similar agreements with other online music services.”
Actors, Studios Battle Over The Smallest Screen
” How much should actors get paid for appearing on iPod screens instead of television? The [Screen Actors Guild] maintains that studios should pay actors for digital content. Studio bosses, saying that Webisodes are promotional material, want actors to appear for less than their usual fee… Actors still regret agreeing to a low pay scale during the advent of VHS; they have been stuck with the same rate since the 1980s.”
Regan Fired From HarperCollins
Judith Regan, the powerful editor at the center of the recent firestorm over O.J. Simpson’s pseudo-confessional book, has been fired from HarperCollins. “Ms. Regan’s publishing unit and its staff [will] continue as part of the HarperCollins General Books Group, but it is unknown whether that group would remain in Los Angeles, where Ms. Regan moved it from New York earlier this year.”
Where Others Saw Divisions, He Saw Opportunity
Ahmet Ertegun, the immigrant founder of influential Atlantic Records who died this past week, was a fascinating study in both business acumen and a pure, all-consuming love of the music of others. He was “an outsider, from Turkey no less, who loved African-American music so much that he became a major force in pop history. Points of friction in American culture — class, ethnicity, race, religion — mostly provided him with sparks.”
GAO Signs Off On Smithsonian/Showtime Deal
The federal government’s General Accountability Office has announced that it could find no evidence that the Smithsonian Institution’s controversial deal with the Showtime cable networks was hampering the abilities of other researchers to access those same materials. “The GAO review, begun last June, said its inquiry had prompted the Smithsonian and Showtime to make clear that researchers’ ideas do not have to be presented first to Showtime to gain Smithsonian access.”
Smithsonian To Make Film Deal Details Public
“The Smithsonian Institution has agreed to develop a system to document and explain its decisions about why television and film producers are granted or denied access to its collections outside of a widely criticized contract the institution entered into with Showtime Networks.”