Arts writers declare 'strike' against Huffington Post

Arianna Huffington, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, has long espoused progressive political views, which has made her website's reliance on unpaid writers a rather awkward sticking point for the left-leaning pundit. Now Huffington's values are being put to the test by a group of arts writers, largely from Southern California, who are asking to be paid for their contributions to the site.

Writers for the websites ArtScene and Visual Art Source said Monday that they are declaring a "strike" against HuffPo, to which they have contributed content since the summer of 2010. In their announcement, the writers listed two primary demands: that a pay schedule be proposed and initiated for all contributing writers and bloggers, and that paid promotional material no longer be posted alongside editorial content.

They also objected to the HuffPo's publishing of catalogue essays — non-journalistic pieces that usually serve a commercial function for art galleries — without separating them from other editorial content.

"It is unethical to expect trained and qualified professionals to contribute quality content for nothing," said the writers in their announcement.

"It is extremely unethical to not merely blur but eradicate the distinction between the independent and informed voice of news and opinion and the voice of a shill."

Bill Lasarow, the publisher and editor of the two websites, said in an interview that the move is "not a hostile act in any sense whatsoever," but added that the writers felt "like they were being taken advantage of by the company to make an enormous profit."

He said that the action was prompted at least in part by the HuffPo's recent sale to AOL for a reported $315 million.

As Obamas host Broadway stars, Culture Monster commenters invoke Nero and Marie Antoinette

President Obama and wife Michelle are set to host an evening of Broadway performers in the East Room, to be taped for an October broadcast in the PBS "In Performance at the White House" series, and streamed live at whitehouse.gov starting at 4 p.m. PDT Monday. (When we first posted on this last week, White House officials weren't sure they could get the contractual clearances needed to stream the show live, but apparently they have).

Matt Drudge linked Monday morning to our previous report, using his own headline: "Another Party at the White House? What's on the Playbill Tonight?" The result, here at Culture Monster, was an outpouring of sentiment in our comments section that, in a time of high unemployment, war and a massive oil spill, playing host to the likes of Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald and Marvin Hamlisch is akin to Nero fiddling while Rome burned, or Marie Antoinette advising the French populace that if they couldn't afford bread, they should just eat cake.

Fewer than a handful of Drudge-directed comments on our post said it's OK for the Obama White House to be a cultural showcase.

"Encouraging the arts and promoting American industries, including the theater industry, is part of an American president's duties," noted one dissenter to the Obama-as-Nero notion, while another wrote that "while I did not vote for Obama, nor do I support almost anything he has done as president, the idea of using the White House to showcase art and artists is a great idea and worthy of support from all sectors."

One theater director's take on art and commerce in tough times

For a clear-eyed and forthright assessment of the problems that major nonprofit theaters face nowadays, check out this Q&A from the L.A. Stage Blog, with Andrew Barnicle, artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse, providing the A's while Rick Bernstein, marketing manager of the Colony Theatre in Burbank, serves up the Qs.

Barnicle, who's in his 20th year as the Laguna artistic director, recently moonlighted at the Colony, staging its current production, "Celadine," by Charles Evered.

Some of his observations on the juggling act of serving both art and the bottom line in a straitened economy:

"Nothing cuts to the quick deeper than when one my former university students calls and says, “You’re doing that?”

"It’s a little like living inside of a pin cushion -- the moment you move away from a sharp object you get poked from the other direction. If I put up a slender, lightweight entertainment and it makes a million dollars, a lot of the snobbier critics will call us irrelevant. If there’s an artistically highly regarded production that sells 14 tickets, my board will raise a collective eyebrow. You can hear it. They are, after all, the fiduciaries of the organization."

"One of the biggest changes...is the decline of the enlightened subscribers who recognized the season would be eclectic and there might be some challenging material or plays they might not have attended on their own. They were adventurous, though, and willing to try something a little unusual. Those people have slowly peeled away....

"As a result a lot of theaters are left with a fewer number of like-minded subscribers who get irritated if they get something a little too challenging. Naturally the programming tends to lean in their direction....With a tanked economy, the situation becomes even more pronounced....The upside is you’re still paying people a living wage to work in the theater - no small accomplishment, and to a degree you can fall back on that as a source of pride, even if you’re not completely fulfilling your personal aesthetic ambitions."

Here's the interview:

-- Mike Boehm

Related

Laguna Playhouse gives up its expansion dream

Photo: Laguna Playhouse artistic director Andrew Barnicle (with skull) showed his musical comedy acting chops on stage, taking the lead in the Playhouse's 2000 production of "Enter the Guardsman." Credit: Alexander Gallardo / Los Angeles Times.

Irish playwright Enda Walsh on playwriting and screenwriting

Enda Walsh, the acclaimed Irish playwright, didn’t study literature or drama in college—he went to film school.  (Studying cinema in Dublin, a city with a very small film industry, Walsh has said was “like studying dentistry in a country where people have no teeth.”)

He worked as an editor for a few years in his 20s, then devoted the next decade of his life to the theater (which he speaks about at length in this Sunday Arts and Books profile).  But recently, Walsh has returned to the world of cinema.  After the success of the film “Hunger,” which he co-wrote with director Steve McQueen, Walsh is under contract to write an adaptation of the children’s book “Island of the Aunts” and a Dusty Springfield biopic.

Walsh says writing for the screen is an entirely different process: “A play you write from the stomach, but the craft of screenwriting is all head.”  When Walsh writes for the stage, he says he writes for the characters (“I just let them have at it”) but when writing a movie, “I’m writing for someone else’s vision, I mean, of course, there are always strains of me in there; but ultimately, the balance of it should be for the director. It’s a director’s medium.”

 When asked if he would ever write a screenplay for himself to direct, Walsh (who is directing the upcoming production of his play, “New Electric Ballroom” for UCLA Live) says: “I might do that.  There’s a director, Pawel Pawlikowski, who made ‘The Last Resort’ and ‘My Summer of Love’, two brilliant films, and he works very organically — and that’s a very exciting way to work.  But you rarely get the opportunity to do that.  So meanwhile, I’ll just do what I do.”

--James C. Taylor

10 more GOP senators demand answers from the NEA about teleconference

Ten Republican senators have written to National Endowment for the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman, expressing concern that the Obama administration may have violated federal law by trying to use the agency for political purposes -- something the White House and NEA have denied.

The charges stem from an Aug. 10 teleconference in which the NEA's communications director urged members of the arts community to help Obama's efforts to spur volunteer community service.

Yosi Sergant was subsequently demoted by Landesman, and resigned Thursday. It was accepted effective immediately, an NEA spokeswoman said, adding that Sergant left voluntarily because he thought "he felt he was becoming a distraction for the agency."

Sergant, a former Los Angeles publicist, supported Obama's presidential bid and worked closely with artist Shepard Fairey on his independent "Obama Hope" poster campaign.

At the White House, the special counsel's offfice issued a memo to "White House staff and...agency and department heads," urging all hands to avoid "even the appearance of politicization" during "public outreach efforts" like the teleconference. The White House previously had issued a statement of regret about the incident.

Patrick Courrielche, a former employee of Sergant's with his own Los Angeles marketing company, was part of the group phone call and later posted a recording and transcript.  Writing on the Big Hollywood blog, Courrielche said the teleconference was improper political organizing on behalf of the president's legislative agenda. Courrielche also shared his concerns, and parts of the recording, on Glenn Beck's Fox News program.

Monster Mash: 'Persepolis 2.0' stirs controversy; Royal Opera House wants bloggers; Zeta-Jones could be Broadway bound

-- Political protest: Two expatriate Iranian comic book artists have updated Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" to reflect the recent election controversies in their home country.

-- Star power: Catherine Zeta-Jones could be headed for Broadway in a new production of Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," according to one report.

-- Commemoration: Berliners are being invited to paint on remaining parts of the Wall ahead of the Nov. 9 anniversary of its collapse.

-- New voices: London's Royal Opera House is looking for bloggers to contribute to its website.

-- Thinning the ranks: New York's Whitney Museum of American Art has laid off 4% of its staff in an attempt to reduce costs.

-- Quality entertainment: Times theater critic Charles McNulty appreciates Showtime's "Nurse Jackie."

-- Honored: Pierre Audi, artistic director of the Netherlands Opera, will receive the first Johannes Vermeer Award, a prize presented by the Dutch minister of culture to recognize achievements in the arts.

-- Lawsuit: An art dealer is suing actress Claire Forlani for claiming that he sold her a fake photographic print.

-- Revisions: A new code proposes to change the way Australian aboriginal art is traded.

-- Accident: A man drowned while swimming in a lake that the Indianapolis Museum of Art is developing as part of an art and nature park.

-- David Ng

Photo: A scene from the feature-film adaptation of "Persepolis." Credit: Marjane Satrapi / Sony Pictures Classics

Monster Mash: Josh Groban, Kiri Te Kanawa honored; T.R. Knight does theater in L.A.; job cuts at Art Institute of Chicago*

-- Hall of famers: Josh Groban, Kiri Te Kanawa receive honors at the Hollywood Bowl. Photo gallery of others appearing at the Bowl.

-- L.A. first, Broadway later: Despite rumors of a Broadway appearance as his next move, T.R. Knight of "Grey's Anatomy" will star in "Parade" at Mark Taper Forum.

--Move over, Shepard Fairey: A guerrilla artist in North Carolina faces charges over his hitchhiking monster made out of stolen orange traffic barrels.

-- Cost cutting: The Art Institute of Chicago lays off 22 people, or 3% of its staff.

-- Cost cutting, Part 2: Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., is laying off 4 to 5 people, or 10% of its staff. UPDATE: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said Long Wharf would be cutting 40 to 50 people.

-- Help for the president: 21 artists, dealers and curators offer their choices of artwork for the Obama White House.

-- Changing jobs: AmericanTheatreWeb is shutting down; Andy Propst moves to TheaterMania next month.

--  Post-Jeff Koons: Versailles plans its next contemporary art exhibition  -- Xavier Veilhan --on the palace grounds

-- Is she or isn't she -- and do we care? Mariah Carey reportedly plans to make her West End theater debut in a mystery show in London in the spring.

-- No sale: Eli Broad takes his New York apartment off the market.

-- Cursed or coincidence?: A problematic production of the "Scottish play" in Thousand Oaks.

-- Sarod player: India's "National Living Treasure," performer-composer Ali Akbar Khan, dies at 87.

-- Attention must be paid: Benedict Nightingale of the Times of London offers up 15 golden rules of theater etiquette.

-- Lisa Fung

Photo: Josh Groban at the Hollywood Bowl. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Theaters are taking social networking to a new level

Now that practically every new stage production has its own Facebook page and Twitter feed, what's the next step for theater companies in the realm of social networking?

First, an obvious but crucial point: In the theater world, just as in any realm of showbiz, social networking is really just a glorified marketing tool, a cheap way of building word-of-mouth buzz. But for a marketing campaign to be really useful, it has to bring in information (in that creepy Orwellian way) in addition to putting out the word.

To that end, theater companies are starting to up the technical sophistication of their social networking sites, tricking them out with complex metrics tools that are designed to collect fan data, which in turn can be used to sell, sell, sell.

And it's happening everywhere, from stage productions on the West Coast to Broadway, from nonprofit companies to blockbuster productions.

The La Jolla Playhouse recently launched a new campaign titled "Your Life, Our Stage," in which the company is inviting everyone to submit ideas for a play based on their own lives by uploading videos, photos, artwork and written descriptions via the social networking vendor Brickfish.

The winning entry will have a scene from his or her life story written by Doug Wright, the playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for "I Am My Own Wife."

So what's in it for La Jolla Playhouse?

Come chat with us on Tonys night

Broadway's prom night is almost here. You've heard about it, that big dress-up event in New York this Sunday night known as the Tony Awards.

While we'd love to have all of you over to our place to nosh, drink and dish about Doogie while we watch the telecast, we don't have a big enough couch. So we're offering the next best thing: a live chat. Right here on Culture Monster.

Join us during the show, which starts at at 5 p.m. Sunday California time. Times theater critic Charles McNulty will be here along with Tom O'Neill of Gold Derby and a few more Culture Monsters.  If you'll be watching on the West Coast and don't want any spoilers, catch a recap of the chat by hitting play when the Tonys air here at 8 p.m.

Sign up for a reminder below.

Hope you'll join us. You don't need to a rent a tux or buy a gown to be a part of our party.

— Lisa Fung

Skinned-cat artist has the fur flying once again

This is a controversy that apparently has nine lives: Check out this Fox News piece about a Dutch artist whose claim to fame is turning her cat into a purse. She is back in the spotlight, this time with a book revealing personal details about the people who wrote her hate mail to protest her so-called art.

Katinka Simonse, who also goes by the name Tinkebell, compiled all the e-mails into a book, "Dearest Tinkebell." But she also took it one step further: She used the Web to find out additional information about her pen pals -- such as their MySpace profiles and "any other embarrassing information available," and published it along with the senders' names, ages and addresses. Fox cited the English version of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

According to the report: