If You Have a Spare $200 Million or So …

… you could buy the rights to what is probably Broadway’s greatest back catalog. The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, the private company which controls the rights to such shows as Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific and The Sound of Music, is up for auction.

The War of the Brass and the Woodwinds

It was probably Professor Peter Schickele (a.k.a. PDQ Bach) who first composed a musical work that actually set different musicians at each other’s throats (the Concerto for Two Pianos vs. Orchestra), although one wonders if it hadn’t been done before — the way some composers have orchestrated their works as if the instrumental sections were in a bear-baiting pit (yes, I’m looking at you, Richard Wagner).

At any rate, Jeff Curnow, the former principal trumpet of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, tears the lid off the simmering warfare going on between the brass section and the woodwinds in this helpful, animated commercial (”Penetrating sonic target barriers”) for a line of weapons-grade mouthpieces.

John McCain’s Arts Policy, At Last

His campaign finally released a statement about government and the arts. Here it is, in its entirety:

John McCain believes that arts education can play a vital role fostering creativity and expression. He is a strong believer in empowering local school districts to establish priorities based on the needs of local schools and school districts. Schools receiving federal funds for education must be held accountable for providing a quality education in basic subjects critical to ensuring students are prepared to compete and succeed in the global economy. Where these local priorities allow, he believes investing in arts education can play a role in nurturing the creativity of expression so vital to the health of our cultural life and providing a means of creative expression for young people.

The statement was released last week to the Salt Lake Tribune. Julie Checkoway’s article, “McCain’s anticipated arts policy comes in at four sentences long,” is here. Lee Rosenbaum’s CultureGrrl blog has more: “I’d call that an education policy, not an arts policy.”

The Big Center Hires the Big Voice for a Walk-On

And the answer to Stephen’s question (see below) about who the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts would get to make their opening-day announcement is really quite simple.

Just get the Greatest Voice for Announcing Anything in the World.

James Earl Jones

– who promptly gave the dignitaries and million-dollar arts patrons assembled at the Belo Mansion a little sampler (Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, some reminiscences of playing Of Mice and Men at SMU, Fences on Broadway and The Great White Hope on stage and film — funny, there was nothing about this guy, though). And then Jones didn’t even announce the one (the only) new fact. The official opening date of the DCPA. That was left for John Eagle, head of the opening ceremony committee.

October 12, 2009.

Memo to Mine Owner: Most of the Canaries Are Gasping

A quick roundup of news items about the economic meltdown and the arts:

• The Telegraph (London): Bad for British theater

• Hollywood Reporter: Bad for media companies

• Bloomberg: Bad for art auction houses

• Bloomberg: Bad for art galleries

• Bloomberg: Bad for the whole entire art market

• Washington Post: Bad for high fashion

• The New York Times: Bad for New York theaters

• Boston Globe: Bad for Masschusetts art groups

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Bad (maybe) for Seattle Art Museum

• Orlando Sentinel: Bad for Central Florida art groups

• The Independent (UK): Great for an online satiric series

• Bloomberg: Great for a French comic book

• Bloomberg: Great for movies — if you like Depression-Era Hollywood

Arts on Campus: There, but Not There

Marjorie Garber, author of the superb Vested Interests:Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety as well as Patronizing the Arts,  writes in the Boston Globe:

This is an era of what could be called the “visual intellectual.” Students on college campuses and members of the general public flock to hear - and see - addresses by filmmakers, artists, and performers. Cultural attention, and cultural primacy, have shifted to encompass art installations, the moving image, technology, and performance. Phrases like “visual literacy,” “aural literacy,” “digital literacy,” and “media literacy” are increasingly common.

But although artists and performers are highly prized as visitors to colleges and universities, the kind of work they do has not reached a comparable importance in the curriculum.

Art and higher education might seem a natural fit in many ways, but they have a long and uneasy relationship. The arts are often still consigned to a secondary role within universities, sometimes viewed as not intrinsically intellectual, or not intrinsically academic. Even when a university invests significantly in the creative arts, and offers an array of courses in painting, sculpture, creative writing, and performance, many scholars and academic administrators remain unconvinced: Arts do not seem to lend themselves easily to the “tenurable” standards of other university subjects.

Tut’s Here: So What Do We Think?

Following Wednesday’s press preview of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” the Art&Seek bloggers participated in an e-mail round-table discussion on all things Tut:

JEROME WEEKS: Setting aside, for the moment, the content of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” at the DMA, what struck me immediately about the exhibition was its highly theatrical nature. That’s not intended as a criticism (not entirely). On recent visits to European museums, I’ve been struck by how some of them use much more technology than art or history museums in America seem comfortable using (or can afford to use) — TV displays, lasers, computer screens, digital re-enactments.

To give those readers who haven’t seen Tut some idea: The exhibition is basically split in two, with the first half devoted to Tutankhamun’s general period and immediate predecessors. It’s a mini-history of the 18^th dynasty, so that visitors may understand better such things as Akhenaten’s revolutionary monotheism, his banishment of hundreds of the old gods for his new sun god (Aten), with whom he was identified. Akhenaten may have been Tut’s father or his older brother; the precise lineage is still a matter of dispute. In any event, Tut grew up under this revolution (it meant an overturning of the dominant priesthood), and then, for some mysterious reason, Tut turned around and restored the old gods, the old priestly caste.

That first half is presented more or less like a typical museum exhibition – brightly lit and open, although with the walls and information displays designed to evoke Egyptian temples, and there is an introductory film with voiceover by Omar Sharif. But then we turn a corner and seem to enter King Tut’s tomb. Everything that follows is deliberately sunk in blue-black darkness, the better to evoke the tomb itself and, I should add, the better to highlight the gold and jewels, which are given pinpoint illumination. Tut discoverer Howard Carter’s famous remark about seeing wonderful gold glinting in the darkness is prominently posted several times (actually, there’s some dispute about whether he ever uttered those words; his own diary entries do not contain them). The ceiling has giant wood beams across it, the mummy itself is not there but recreated with a large platform in the middle of one “chamber.”

And so on. It’s all very atmospheric. A little hokey, I thought, especially with the many projected paragraphs hyping the exciting moment of discovery. But still, it’s thrillingly effective.

BETSY LEWIS: I knew this would be a tech-heavy exhibition, but the objects are amazing, and oddly I was not prepared for that. Museum regulars may be put off by the spectacle and the parking issues, but once they finally enter that first gallery – wow. The colors, the detail and the remarkable preservation of these objects will dazzle the most aloof art history major.

I thought the multimedia touches added to it, but then I have an Apple logo on my windshield. Yes, it looks like Disney, but who doesn’t like Disney? High theatricality is only a bad thing when it is intertwined with one’s personality (but I know nothing about that).

[Read more →]

It’s Not the Current Economy That’s Hurting the Arts …

… it’s the one we’ve had since 9/11. So says Michael Boehm in the Los Angeles Times.

What many of them called “the perfect storm” hit in 2001. The tech-bubble burst, the World Trade Center was attacked, and economic recession ensued, discouraging donors and ticket buyers, curtailing government grants and leading to layoffs, cancellations, deferred expansion plans and downsized theatrical seasons and productions.

Charitable gifts to the arts rebounded with the stock market, but in many cases attendance did not, as the public’s fascination with the Internet and home electronics accelerated.

The bottom line is that worries never left, experts say, so arts decision-makers didn’t need the current financial crisis to snap them to attention. There has been an ongoing urgency to face the new music and dance — not the old-fashioned waltz but steps unimagined before Necessity called.

And in a passage relevant to the current troubles of the Texas Ballet Theatre, Boehm adds:

Dance, in fact, is the canary in the coal mine. During the 1990s, says John Munger, research director for the national service organization Dance/USA, it was typical for no more than six to 10 of the 80 or so companies with budgets over $1 million to cut spending in any given year. Since 2001, at least 20 a year and as many as 44 have been compelled to downsize.

Future of Cultural Criticism?

Doug McLennan is the mind behind Artsjournal.com, one of the best arts-news websites and art blog collectives around. Confession: I blog there as book/daddy, but seeing as Doug has been doing this for nine years and Artsjournal.com gets 45,000 users per day, my estimation of his achievement has some basis. Amanda Neer of Life’s a Pitch interviewed him about cultural blogs and art criticism.

Here are some of his thoughts about the near-future of criticism and how newspapers have only hurt themselves:

When do you think newspapers will croak for good? At some point Jonny Greenwood or whomever is going to declare that Radiohead no longer wants to be reviewed in print because it’s bad for the environment, and that will be the end, right?

I think there are already artists and arts organizations that have given up on newspapers. Hard to argue with their logic. I don’t think newspapers will ever really go away. I do think that 2-3 years from now it will be the exception for local newspapers to have staff critics. They’ll still run some form of writing about culture. But it won’t mean much. Really a shame. I think newspapers have hurt themselves greatly by the ways they’ve come to think about arts coverage. There’s a huge audience out there, but newspapers have pursued a dumb strategy when it comes to A&E coverage.

I feel like I came to the blog party circa five years late. Ah well. Are blogs over? Close to over? What will be the next big thing?

Blogs aren’t over. But blogs don’t have some magical property. Blogs are merely a quick publishing platform that allows the world to see what you write. They’re like a pen is to paper - a tool that enables you to write. What you choose to do with it is entirely up to you. There are as many kinds of blogs as there are people. Some of the bigger blogs are starting to look more and more like traditional publications. Some traditional publications are looking more and more like blogs. Some are very journalistic. Many are like personal diaries.

What’s next? I think there won’t be a huge revolution. Changes will be incremental. Video, audio, collaborative. Etc. The next immediate thing is the explosion of mobile use and interactive multi-media. I think this will very much change the way we use the web today. It will make how we use the web/create for the web today seem like the Dark Ages. Any artist, arts organization or journalist who isn’t thinking about the way mobile use is going to change things, is going to be left in the dust.

Critic too Critical?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has stopped its longtime classical music critic, Donald Rosenberg, from reviewing the Cleveland Orchestra. No reason has been given by the editors.

Rosenberg, who has been covering the orchestra for some 30 years, 16 of them at the Plain Dealer, is the author of “The Cleveland Orchestra Story: ‘Second to None’” (Gray & Co., 2000), widely acknowledged as the definitive source on the orchestra’s history.

Rosenberg is a past president of the Music Critics Association of North America and currently serves on that organization’s board of directors…. He will continue to write for the newspaper on various subjects, but staff writer Zachary Lewis has been assigned to cover the orchestra in his stead.

Rosenberg is 56. Lewis is 31. Perhaps the thinking is that the less experienced critic will be the kinder, gentler critic. Rosenberg has made no secret of his opinion that Music Director Franz Welser-Möst pales by comparison to his predecessors in the post. He is not alone in his opinion. When the orchestra announced in June that it had contracted the Austrian conductor through the year 2018 – giving him 16 years on the Cleveland podium – The New York Times commented that the news might “surprise” some observers who feel that the conductor “has not lived up to his potential.”

The New York Times story.

The Wall Street Journal commentary.