Posted by Douglas McLennan on January 07, 1999 at 15:06:20:
Web Offers a Wealth of Info on Arts
- By Douglas McLennan
(posted by NWA - from Seattle PI, 1/4/99)
The easiest way to make money in the stock market in 1998 was to invest in any company with a .com in its name. That $1000 invested in Amazon.com in mid-1997 when it first went public would be worth about $36,000 on the last day of 1998.
If that kind of return held up for arts organizations that have taken to the internet, there'd be no such thing as starving artists. Pretty much every
arts organization with two cents and a hand-me-down computer has set up its own cyberspace outpost.
But aside from visiting your favorite dance company online to check schedules or order tickets, the web has turned into an excellent resource for learning about the arts. Here are some arts sites that have earned bookmark status on my browser:
For Arts News:
For keeping up to date on arts news from around the country, the best site consistently is Artswire (www.artswire.org). A project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, Artswire monitors arts happenings all over the country and posts news electronically. The site includes arts job listings, a database of arts resources and you can also subscribe to Current, Artswire's dependable weekly electronic e mail service with all the latest news.
For the even more seriously inclined arts news junkies, there's the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (www.nasaa-arts.org/). The site posts arts news from around the country, features work by various artists and provides access to an impressive trove of arts studies that seek to help explain how the arts function in American life.
Along the same lines is the American for the Arts site (www.artsusa.org/) with several interesting studies on it. There is arts news and arts advocacy here too, but it is updated much less frequently than the other sites in this category.
At www.artstozoo.org/artslynx/issues.htm, you'll find links to a broad spectrum of political opinions on the arts - everything from People for the American Way to the Christian Coalition. There are Congressional voting records on arts issues, as well as links to an array of political arts sites.
If you want a more conservative perspective, try www.townhall.com and type in NEA (National Endowment for the Arts). Yee-haw, but don't they have a good
hate going on - 867 documents on why the NEA is a threat to the future of The Greatest Country On God's Green... Seriously, though, if you want a sense of what about the NEA makes it an issue conservatives have latched onto, here's Ground Zero.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has long been one of the leading arts broadcasters. It has an excellent site at www.infoculture.cbc.ca infoculture.html that includes plenty of arts news from
around Canada, but also some interesting arts features. It's a large and lively site, well archived and up to date.
Local:
Microsoft's Sidewalk (www.seattle.sidewalk.com) was launched with big expectations a few years ago as a place where you could go to find out what was happening that night. It was a shaky start - incomplete listings, indifferent reviewers and fairly unsophisticated writing.
The site has been revamped a couple of times and has turned into a useful guide. It's more complete than it used to be (classical listings, for instance, now include complete programs), and though its writing still doesn't have much of a critical edge, it's at least developing a little attitude and reads less like a press release.
Looking for a favorite arts organization, or want to get a sense of some of the city's arts flavor without leaving your chair? The Speakeasy Café has a site (www.speakeasy.org) that hosts dozens of artists and arts organizations. You can find links to the Seattle Symphony, the 5th Avenue Theatre, Seattle Opera, and Pacific Northwest Ballet here. But you can also find Kendra Shank's jazz biography, the Business Volunteers for the Arts on-line arts directory listing every arts organization in the region, Blackchair Productions' listings of independent video, film and computer artists, the Critters Buggin band site, and the Raven Chronicles literary site. This is a treasure trove of local arts links.
Theatre Puget Sound has made huge strides in bringing the local theater community together to share information. Its new website has lots of information for local theater professionals, but it also includes this page www.tpsonline.org/playback.htm where anyone is invited to post reviews of plays they have seen or participate in theater-related discussions.
The Seattle Art Museum and Seattle Public Library have teamed up with the Benton Foundation on a program called Open Studio. The program teaches local artists how to get onto the web and, once there what to do with it. The national Open Studio program can be found at www.openstudio.org/home.html. The local edition www.openstudio.org/Mentor/sam.html hosts a number of sites created by artists who have participated in the program.
General:
There are hundreds and hundreds of good sites specific to a particular artform. The American Museum Network (www.amn.org) has links to most of the major and minor museums in this country, a comprehensive calendar listing of exhibitions, plus a link to the Art Museum Image Consortium. The consortium is a project to digitize museum artworks and make them available online. You type in the name of an artist and up pop thumbnails of paintings by that artist.
A site called Classical Insites (www.classicalinsites.com/) is a comprehensive resource for classical music lovers. There's plenty of biographical information, classical music news, compact disc reviews and information about artists.
In a similar vein is the ``music department'' of www. Virtual Library (www.gprep.pvt.k12.md.us/classical/). Imagine your local college music reference library, and you get the idea - there's a bio index, basic reference material and information about music software. Interestingly, the site is sponsored by the Georgetown Preparatory School.
Another excellent music site is the University of London's ``Golden Pages,'' links for musicians and music lovers (www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/Music/Links/) which, though it is primarily UK-based, has an enormous number of leads to serious sites about music. A terrific place
to start if you're looking for the answer to a music question.
For opera, a good starting place is the Opera America site (www.operaam.org/). Opera America is the opera world's service organization, and the site offers a comprehensive schedule of performances and a number of publications devoted to opera.
Architecture Magazine (www.architecturemag.com/) has a good site that includes reviews found in the paper version of the magazine, as well as news and listings.
For some interesting think pieces on arts issues, try the High Performance site at www.artswire.org Artswire/Community/highperf/HPhome.html.
And finally, to get a sense of what the new Experience Music Project might evolve into, visit www.experience.org.
Douglas McLennan can be reached by e-mail at DmcLennan@aol.com