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Liza Figuroa Kravinsky asks: Why can't older composers get career-starting grants?... - Sandow

Jay-Z and the Future of MusicPublished: June 19, 2013I was in a bar in Brooklyn watching the NBA Finals on Sunday night, when Jay-Z’s now infamous three-minute-long Samsung commercial first aired. Barely able to hear the spot over the din of gathered basketball fans, a friend pulled out his phone and headed to the URL displayed at the end of the ad: MagnaCartaHolyGrail.com. And it was there that we learned that the world’s most famous rapper would be dropping his 12th studio album, “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” on July 4. If you have a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, that is. The news brought up a number of questions: 1) How was Jay-Z able to keep this so quiet? The album’s release was just over two weeks away, making the turnaround between the announcement of Kanye West’s “Yeezus” and its official release today look downright sluggish in comparison. 2) Was Jay pulling a total big brother move on Kanye, stealing his thunder by announcing “Magna Carta Holy Grail” days before Kanye’s album was set to hit stores? 3) Wait, you have to have a Samsung Galaxy phone if you want to get the album on July 4? To answer the first question, I have absolutely no idea. I guess if Jay asks you to keep a secret you do it, right? In regards to the second, umm, yeah, most definitely. “Yeezus” was cloaked in mystery before leaking, but one of the few concrete things everyone knew was that it was due out yesterday. There’s no way Jay didn’t give thought to the fact that he was announcing his new album, with its similarly grandiose title, less than 36 hours before the release of “Yeezus.” And as for the third question, apparently! Which is interesting if you are curious about the direction the music business is going in. Here’s how it works: If you want to get “Magna Carta Holy Grail” on July 4, you’ll have to own a Samsung Galaxy S III, Galaxy S 4, or Galaxy Note II, with which you will have access to the album for free, three days before everyone else, via an app that can be downloaded on June 24. That’s because Samsung graciously purchased the first one million copies for $5 million. The arrangement is great for Jay, because it guarantees that his album goes platinum before it’s officially on sale, and for Samsung, because their phone, the only real iPhone competitor, becomes even more of a “must have” — for people who absolutely can’t wait three whole extra days for the record, that is. But as mutually beneficial as the deal may be from a money standpoint, it also stigmatizes the album — this is the album Samsung paid for — regardless of when the partnership was reached. Yes, all major label releases involve monetary transactions, but here another layer has been added to the mix, and it feels a little gross. This is the direction music and marketing are headed in, though. As Daily Intel’s Kevin Roose points out, Zooey Deschanel, Alicia Keys, and Gwen Steffani have all promoted smartphones before (Keys was actually named Blackberry’s Global Creative Director). Jay-Z’s taking it all a step further by giving his most die hard fans that much more of an incentive to buy the product he is endorsing — it’s not just about having the same phone as the rapper, it’s about having it and also getting a little extra reward. We’ve already seen the sponsored tour, music video, and single, but those all felt like one-offs. But even in the iTunes era, the album is still supposed to be a cohesive artistic statement, something we rarely associate with corporate underwriting. Regardless, we’re sure this marketing ploy will work out for both parties, and those million free copies will be downloaded (whether or not Billboard recognizes them). The partnership really should come as no surprise either, as Jay has proven himself uniquely talented at personal brand expansion (the Budweiser Select deal, buying into the Brooklyn Nets, then selling his stake to start his own sports agency, just to name a few). After all, this is the same guy who once rapped, “I’m not a busines

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Nick Pinkerton on “Auto-Cinema” at Anthology Film Archives

Elvis on the Southern Railroad between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tenn.July 4, 1956. © Alfred Wertheimer. Amy Henderson, curator at the National Portrait Gallery, writes about all things pop culture. Her last post was on a ballet that started a riot. One of the great joys of curating a traveling exhibition is the travel, of course. Recently, I was asked to give the introductory lecture at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History for “Elvis at 21,” an exhibition I co-curated for the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) in 2010. “Elvis” has been on road for more than three years. It opened at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, and has traveled to 12 museums, including the Smtihsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Fort Worth is its final continental U.S. stop before it travels to the Australia’s National Portrait Gallery in Canberra for its international debut, December 6, 2013 through March 10, 2014. Featuring a cache of photographs taken in 1956 by freelancer Alfred Wertheimer, the exhibit documents the meteoric rise of young Elvis in the year he swiveled from virtual unknown to media megastar. Television was the new celebrity-generating medium in mid-fifties America, and a series of electrifying TV performances between January 1956 and January 1957 accelerated the young performer’s launch to fame. The exhibition’s large format photographs reveal the excitement Elvis conveyed onstage and off:  Wertheimer’s unlimited access chronicled a remarkably intimate record of a superstar “just before,” and Elvis’s innocence is entrancing—especially because viewers know the rest of the story. Museum exterior, courtesy of the museum Colleen Blair, senior vice president at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, was the key player in both securing the Elvis show and enticing me to speak. She persuasively argued that this exhibition would contribute to the museum’s transformation from an earlier identity as a children’s museum, to a broader-based, dynamic 21st century museum of history and culture. My talk about Elvis was geared to a Big Picture cultural approach, framing him as a messenger of enormous change in the years that ignited both the modern civil rights and feminist movements. By energizing the emerging youth culture and helping create a new consumer market fueled by radio, recordings and movies, Elvis represented an intrusion as shocking as Sputnik would be a year later. It was his popularity that helped catalyze a revolution in the entertainment industry, paving the way for rhythm and blues, gospel and rock into mainstream culture. Alone, outside the Warwick Hotel in New York City on March 17, 1956. © Alfred Wertheimer. The photographer said when he saw the burst of light in this photo, “It represented for me this entire experience and was better than anything I had done previously or would do later.” © Alfred Wertheimer. The museum itself is a knock-out. Designed by the acclaimed architectural firm Legorretta + Legorretta, it nurtures a “playful” spirit of discover and inspiration by using rich, bright interior colors and light that dazzles. Walking through the museum, visitors find such engaging features as a video wall, a waterfall, a planetarium, an Energy Gallery, and an IMAX theater. Van A. Romans became the museum’s president in 2004. Within five years, he raised $80 million and opened the doors on this stunning new museum facility.  It is a spectacular building that sits comfortably in a neighborhood with the Philip Johnson-designed Amon Carter Museum of American Art and the Louis Kahn-designed Kimbell Art Museum. Romans was the perfect fit for this museum. For more than 25 years, he had worked for the Walt Disney Company, including Disney Imagineering and pioneered the integration of the entertainment industry with the museum world. His mission in Fort Worth has been to inject energy and vitality into the museum experience by enhancing the “historical aspect of t

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“Demystify the Market”: Design Miami Founder Launches Online SalesPhoto Gallery: Slideshow: Highlights from L’ArcoBaleno's online design storePublished: June 19, 2013NEW YORK — Nearly a decade after she co-founded Design Miami/ at the age of 23, wunderkind curator Ambra Medda opens her new hybrid design fair/magazine L’ArcoBaleno today in her most daunting marketplace yet: the Internet. “I’m relatively spastic online,” Medda admits to ARTINFO. “I’m not tech savvy at all.” Despite her fluency in five languages, terms like social media, SEO, and SEM were until recently part of a completely foreign lexicon. In turn, launching her online venture also required translating the concept for the older, more traditional gallerists of the design establishment: “They ask me, ‘Oh, so you’re selling furniture via email?’” Medda relays, affecting a heavy Italian accent, “and I say ‘Well, not really.’” The act of translation summarizes the project as a whole, as literally as it does figuratively. “L’ArcoBaleno” is Italian for “The Rainbow,” an apt name for a site that plans to sell a broader spectrum of inventory than real-life sales conventions would allow. Buyers can scroll through the site and read an interview with Johanna Grawunder or a historical look at Atelier Fornasetti, as well as browse works that span Verner Panton to Nacho Carbonell, listed by dealers throughout the world. With a click the site computes shipping costs, and once the purchase is complete, that dealer sends the object — be it Swedish portable synthesizers or Hopi Native American doll — straight to the collector’s door. A similarly wide spectrum informed Medda’s choice of collaborators: starting with L’ArcoBaleno CEO Oliver Weyergraf, a former executive officer at e-commerce sites eBay and erento; and extending to an advisory board that includes hip hop mogul Pharrell Williams, London-based and African-born architect David Adjaye, Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos, London designer Tom Dixon, and a slew of gallerists from various continents. “They represent different constituencies,” says Medda. “Because [the site] is supposed to speak to a global audience, it’s essential that we have different points of view.” Medda’s other mission, on a broader reach of inclusivity, is to “demystify the market.” The reluctant older dealers who “rarely even have a landing page” initially found Medda’s insistence on displaying prices for each item quite perplexing (the spectrum there ranges from a $50 Max Lamb bowl to a $155,000 pair of 18th-century vases), but she was adamant: “The market is very tricky; there’s a lot of overlap in people selling secondary market pieces. I understand the game, but if someone who hasn’t been a longtime collector doesn’t know how it all works, and they want to buy, let these people buy. Let them know who made it, why this is so amazing, and yes, sell it. It’s commerce, people.” Her own novice on the Web, a sharp contrast to her design expertise, resulted in a site of minimal design — sans serif black fonts and the most basic of layouts — that allows the objects and editorial to speak for themselves. “It needed to be really simple and intuitive,” Medda explains, adding, “It’s the stuff we’re interested in. It’s not much more complicated than that.” To see images, click on the slideshow.

Russell Crowe in Talks to Direct "The Water Diviner"Published: June 19, 2013Russell Crowe is in talks to make his directorial debut on a film that should speak loudly to Australia’s national identity. “The Water Diviner,” reports Deadline, is the story of an Australian man seeking his two sons in Turkey in 1919 — three or four years after they went missing during the First World War battle of Gallipoli. The screenplay was written by the prolific Australian film and television writer-producer Andrew Knight and his frequent collaborator, Andrew Anastasios. Backed by Hopscotch Films and Crowe’s Fear of God Films, the production is expected to go before the cameras in Australia and Turkey later this year. It is not known if Crowe will act in the film, though there is speculation he will play the father. The project is presumably timed to coincide with the centenary of the start of the Allies’ disastrous campaign against the Ottoman Army in the strategically vital Dardanelles Strait on April 25, 1915. That was the day when more than 20,000 Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs) landed on the Gallipoli peninsula with the objective of capturing Constantinople and opening a sea route to Russia via the Bosphorus. The Gallipoli campaign, during which 42,000 French fought alongside 489,000 Anzacs, British, British Indian, and Newfoundland soldiers, led to a war of attrition lasting eight months and two weeks. It culminated in an Ottoman victory.   Sources vary on the number of losses. The Turks suffered between 56,000 and 87,000 deaths; the Allies 53,000. It is believed that 8,709 Australians and 2,721 New Zealanders were killed or went missing. Enteric fever, dysentery, and diarrhea accounted for many casualties. “The Water Diviner” could shape up as a sequel to “Gallipoli” (1981). Peter Weir’s memorable anti-war film follows a couple of Western Australian sprinters, an unemployed railway laborer (Mel Gibson) and a stockman (Mark Lee), who enlist as Anzacs in Perth, train in Egypt, and fight as dismounted infantrymen with the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Battle of the Nek. Successfully defended by Turk machine-gunners, the Nek was a ridge between the Anzac trenches at Russell’s Top to the Ottoman position at Baby 700. Of the 600 Australian participants, 234 were killed; it is believed eight Turks were killed. Weir’s movie contrasts the Anzacs’ mateship and “larrikinism” — the Aussie anti-authoritarian mocking humor that bonds soldiers in the ranks — with the pity of war. There are elements of this, too, in the 1985 “Anzacs” miniseries, which depicts combat at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and 1987’s “The Lighthorsemen.” The latter, directed by Simon Wincer, portrays the monumental Australian cavalry charge that overran the Ottoman trenches in the Battle of Beersheeba in Palestine on October 31, 1917.