18
culture
The Copenhagen Post cphpost.dk
25 - 31 January 2013
No longer just a US state thanks to its new TV channel rikke k mathiassen
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Louisiana
Museums are spreading their wings online, demonstrating that art appreciation needn’t be a preserve of just the elite and exhibitions
here is no documented proof that watching a video of an artist swinging a brush at his canvas makes more people want to visit an exhibition. Still, the region’s museums, competing to extend our art experience beyond the exhibition walls, are producing web-TV like never before.
Video’s cool and all that, but there’s no substitute for experiencing the beauty of Louisiania’s surroundings first-hand
Louisiana is just the latest in a line of museums that are allowing you to keep updated on the work of artists without ever passing their doorsteps. Following in the digital footsteps of major international museums such as MoMA in New York and the Tate Modern in London, free online video and TV channels are increasingly becoming a ‘must’ on museum websites, even though no evidence suggests it affects how many people actually pay the entrance fee to see an exhibition. “We didn’t launch the channel to make more people visit the museum,” explained Christian Lund, the head of Louisiana Channel, which was launched by Louisiana at the beginning of December. “The channel is not supposed to offer the same content as the exhibitions. It is supposed to offer something different − an extra bonus.” The viewers of Louisiana Channel can access a wide range of content from the museum, which is located half an hour’s
drive north of Copenhagen: from a 15-minute interview with the British artist David Hockney to a live performance by American poet and songwriter Patti Smith – all just a click of your mouse away. In Denmark, Louisiana is playing catch-up. Arken Museum in Ishøj has been distributing free video via its channel, Arken Channel, since 2011. “The videos are made for people who want to keep up-to-date with what is happening at the museum and who want to get more in-depth with some of the artists or themes that are represented here,” explained Karin Skipper-Ulstrup, the marketing and online manager at Arken Museum. And Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen already has four years of experience in the web-TV field. The head of its web-TV department, Mathilde Schytz Juul, agrees with the other museums that the video production has a different purpose from making more people pay to visit the museum.
“Our goal is to stimulate people’s appetite for art,” she said. “A click has as much worth to us as a visitor.” Louisiana accordingly measures the success of its new webTV channel in clicks instead of ticket sales. The goal is to reach a much bigger audience than the museum’s usual activities. By tracking the clicks on the channel’s website and social media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube, they have found out that people in the USA and Canada are actually the most frequent users of their videos. “What we want to do is to communicate the values that Louisiana stands for,” said Lund. “Maybe sometime while watching one of our videos on YouTube, people in the US will become curious about what this place ‘Louisiana’ is besides being a state in their own country.” Louisiana’s new channel currently attracts between 600 and 800 views a day, compared to 4,000 visitors on a very busy day through its doors.
Mad for the movies Amy Strada Cinemas salute their best year since 1982
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Columbia pictures
ast year saw the highest number of cinema tickets sold for 30 years. In total, 14.2 million were purchased – nearly three per every person in the country and a 12 percent rise on last year. Cinema-goers rushed to see blockbusters like ‘Skyfall’ – the year’s most popular film, with 914,000 tickets sold – ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (566,000 tickets) and Peter Jackson’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s geek-pleasing ‘The Hobbit’. Meanwhile, Danish films also prospered, selling 4.1 million tickets – their second highest tally since 1981, just 100,000 adrift of the 2008 figures. Leading the way were two films by female directors. Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis’s Second World War resistance film ‘Hvidsten gruppen’ (‘The village: One family’s sacrifice will let a country live’)
was the most watched, selling 765,000 tickets, followed by Susanne Bier’s ‘All You Need is Love’ (645,000 tickets). In third place, Nikolaj Arcel’s ‘En Kongelig Affære’ (‘A Royal Affair’) sold 528,000 tickets – the first time three Danish films have sold over 500,000 tickets since 1986. “The films also showed their strength internationally, winning awards at major festivals such as in Sundance, Berlin and Cannes,” Henrik Bo Nielsen, the CEO of the Danish Film Institute, told media. From 272 festival nominations, Danish films won close to 30 percent of them. No fewer than four Danish films were featured in Sundance’s World Cinema categories; ‘En Kongelig’ won the awards for best actor and best script at the Berlin International Film Festival and is nominated for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at next month’s Oscars; and Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘Jagten’ (‘The Hunt’), which will be eligible for the Oscars next year, won the best actor award at Cannes.
‘Skyfall’ is the most popular ever Bond film in Denmark
Changes on the way for some TV owners Soon-to-be obsolete digital signal and decades-old antenna fee on the way out
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lans by cable TV provider YouSee to change its broadcasting format could force as many as 50,000 of its customers to buy a new television. The company is planning to switch from the MPEG-2 format to MPEG-4 by April 30 in order to be able to carry more highdefinition content. The change means that those who purchased early-model digital televisions or receivers equipped with only MPEG-2 receivers will be unable to receive YouSee’s signal. Since 2010, virtually all devices can decode the MPEG-4 signal. “We have been reluctant to make this decision because it may force a small number of customers to buy a new TV,” Lars Techen Nielsen, a YouSee spokesperson, told Jyllands-Posten newspaper. Nielsen said YouSee, which has 1.2 million customers and is the nation’s largest cable company, wanted to upgrade all of its digital broadcasts to highdefinition by 2015, and to do so it needed the bandwidth now consumed by broadcasting some programmes in both formats. The change will affect only those channels that are broadcast
Hector Martin He is a former Church of Denmark vicar popularly known as the priest who didn’t believe in God. Bad career choice, huh? Well, saying he didn’t believe in God is something of an oversimplification. In his 2003 book ‘En sten i skoen’ (‘A stone in the shoe’), he wrote that he didn’t believe God created or played an active role in the world. Doesn’t that still go against some kind of church teaching? It does, but it wasn’t enough to get him kicked out of the church – at least not right away. He was given the chance to explain himself to his bishop, who then made sure his sermons stuck to church dogma.
Now you see it, now you don’t
Ray Weaver
Who is … Thorkild Grosbøll
digitally. Analogue signals will still be able to be seen, even on older model televisions. An easy way to test whether a set can receive MPEG-4 broadcasts is to tune into DRHD (which becomes DR3 on January 28). Since the channel is broadcast in the MPEG-4 format only, any set that can receive it will be able to receive YouSee broadcasts when they switch over to MPEG-4. In another sign of the changing television times, the decadesold forced marriage with local antenna associations, which many people are required to enter into, may now be coming to an end. The environment minister, Ida Auken, announced she will introduce a bill next month that will put an end to the law requiring people living in certain areas to pay for a connection to a common antenna – something that has been a part of municipal planning since the 1970s. “Of course people should be able to decide which TV provider they want to use without having to pay for a communal antenna,” Auken told JyllandsPosten newspaper. There are no official figures on exactly how many households are currently paying to be members of an antenna association. According to official estimates, it is between 50,000 and 100,000
households, but a study conducted by members of the consumer electronics industry indicated that 650,000 households were currently locked into what they called “television handcuffs”. Dansk Energi, the lobby group for the energy industry, has fought against the common antenna requirement for years on behalf of a number of major utilities companies that have invested billions in broadband and TV services. Although the group was happy the change was finally taking place, they were angry the bill calls for a two-year transition period. Both the European Commission and Konkurrence og Forbrugerstyrelsen, the national consumer watchdog, have pushed for years for the abolishment of the common antenna rules, saying they hurt competition and consumers. Broadcasters like Viasat, Canal Digital and Boxer TV all supported that position. Carsten Karlsen, who heads antenna association group Forenede Danske Antenneanlæg (FDA), said he welcomes the new rules, even if they mean war for some of his association’s members. “We have no interest in being perceived as a prison by our members,” Karlsen told JyllandsPosten.
Did they? Not really. He wound up being suspended in 2004 and relieved entirely of his priesthood the next year, despite having the full support of his parish. He really didn’t do much to help his own case though – especially not when he repeatedly fed the press with quotes like: “God belongs in the past. In fact, he’s so old-fashioned that it astounds me that modern people can even believe in his existence.” At the same time, he blamed the press and his superiors for taking his quotes out of context. He was eventually allowed back, but only after he reaffirmed his faith, including the parts about God being the “all-powerful creator of Heaven and Earth”. He retired for good in 2008. Is he trying to make a comeback? No, but his moment of public doubt has apparently made such an impact that a church in Viborg, Jutland recently advertised an opening for a vicar, including as one of the requirements was that the successful candidate needed to be ‘a believer’. Are there more like the Rev Grosbøll? According to the church looking to hire, yes. Given the stink put up by the vicars’ union and the church minister over the requirement, they would appear to be right. Tolerance is apparently divine.