- Serious Art Won't Hurt You? Time was, people aspired to consuming high art. Now they apologise for it. Or at least feel like they need to defend it. Peter Plagens says the turnaround is no mystery. "As for high art’s problem, it’s simple, but with complex fallout. High art is elitist. Only a relatively few people have the educated taste for it, the patience to enjoy it and, frankly, the ability to get it. We live, however, in a passionately egalitarian society, most of whose members absolutely resent the idea that Mr. Fairfax Van Richbuckets has, when he goes to the opera, a better esthetic experience than Mr. Harry Twelvepack does when he springs for a couple of Bon Jovi tickets. (Of course, Harry doesn’t have much regard for his kid sister’s taste for Justin Timberlake, and she can’t understand her younger cousin’s jones for that new Hilary Duff movie. Hierarchies are everywhere.) Connoisseurship on any but a micro level ('Man, that’s a great Clint Black T-shirt—must be six colors in the silkscreen for it) is practically a dirty word these days, and I’d be surprised if the word 'vulgar' is uttered pejoratively more than twice a year in the United States outside of a Tipper Gore tea party." Newsweek 05/01/03
- How Artists Earn Money For Their Work Not everyone pays for an artist's work. That's a good thing - it allows entry to the work and opens possibilities for the artist. "An ecosystem with many ways for unintended free-release is a requirement. Therefore, an ecosystem which looks to a mixture of the traditional amateur, performance, patronage, and commission forms of payment is a requirement. Depending upon rigid enforcement of performance payments will disrupt the balance. Listening to representatives from the recording and movie industries, you would think that selling fixed artifacts is the only way that artists can get paid. That has never been the case, and should not be in the future or else society and art itself will suffer." Bricklin.com 04/21/03
- Is The Chicago Symphony's Plight Dire? Jeremy Grant reports that the Chicago Symphony's financial fortunes are precarious and worrisome. "Due to factors mostly out of [music director Daniel] Barenboim's control, the CSO faces possibly the most serious financial crisis in its 112-year history. With the US economy in recession, ticket sales are flat and subscriptions are falling. Plunging stock market values have eroded the value of the orchestra's endowment fund and new corporate and individual sponsorships have all but dried up. This year's budget is likely to balance, but only because of a one-off draw-down from the endowment. Management predicts the orchestra is likely to swing into a deficit of about $4m-$5m (£2.5m-£3.1m) next year, having slumped to $6.1m in 2002." Financial Times 05/02/03
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Leonardo Online "Using digital technology, the Louvre Museum is making [Leonardo] da Vinci accessible as never before, photographing 12 of his notebooks - which have not been exhibited together for 50 years - so visitors can flip through them with the click of a mouse. The effect is breathtaking - like touring the great genius's mind. Normally kept in a Bank of France vault, each yellowing sheet testifies to the insatiable curiosity of the artist, architect, engineer, inventor, theorist, scientist and musician some describe as the ultimate embodiment of a universal man." Toronto Star 05/04/03
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Opera For Prudes An Opera Colorado production of Mozart's Don Giovanni has been ordered 'toned down' after a group of home-schooled students viewed a dress rehearsal, and complained about the overtly sexual nature of a scene in which "a woman - dressed in a one-piece bustier, fishnet stockings, garter belt and high heels - [cavorted] with a sometimes shirtless Don Giovanni." Since the entire plot of this particular opera is based on the sexual exploits of its title character, one might have expected the company to tell the complainants to get bent. But the president of the company was apparently similarly shocked to discover that there is sex in opera, and ordered that the show be sanitized for audience protection. Denver Post 05/07/03
