$750,000: Asking price for Charles Burchfield's "Backyard in Golden Sunlight"$796,790: Bruce Springteen's payoff from concert at Darien Lake.
7: Number of times Patti Smith spat at the Sphere.
20,300: Number of pennies in Herd About Buffalo sculpture
$139,572: Marvin Hamlish's BPO salary
30: Number of CDs Buffalo Philharmonic Music Director JoAnn Falletta has recorded.
Want to know how much Bruce Springsteen earned at Darien Lake? How often Lawrence Brose shaves his head? The weight of the heaviest art work in the Albright-Knox? Here's a list you can count on
Forget, for a minute, all that lofty talk about the nature of art. Let's admit, instead, that sometimes art is a numbers game.
Who hasn't fallen into a trance contemplating the number of Jennifer Lopez's liaisons, the number of times Barry White uttered the word "baby" during the average concert, or what you'd have to pay for the autographs of the cast of "Gilligan's Island"?
Everything has a number, even the lofty, abstract realms of art. Just ask the Count on "Sesame Street" - or his colleague, the King Of 8. (Remember him? "I'm the King of Eight, and I'm here to state that everything must number 8.")
Buffalo, where we're obsessed with everything from the inches of snowfall to the calories in chicken wings, is the perfect place to celebrate statistics.
Let's take a few minutes - 15, say, or maybe 20 - and crunch a few artsy numbers.
- Mary Kunz
$1,998,000: Number of dollars Elton John and Billy Joel took home between them following their March 9, 2003, appearance at HSBC Arena.
$450: Amount earned by local rock group The Tails, split five ways, at its sold out 1995 CD release party at Nietzsche's.
$100: Amount earned, on average, a local original music band makes at a weekend gig.
$3,863,410: Number of dollars earned on average each evening of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's 2003 World Tour, which stopped by Darien Lake's Performing Arts Center in September.
$796,790: Amount earned at Springsteen's Sept. 20, 2003 Darien Lake show, with 11,951 paid attendance.
$139,572: Salary Marvin Hamlisch earns as BPO Principal Pops Conductor.
73: Number of musicians in Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.
106: Number of musicians in the New York Philharmonic.
2: Number of times a day CEPA Gallery Director Lawrence Brose shaves his bald head.
$250,000: Highest amount a BPO instrument is insured for in the BPO's instrument insurance program. It's a violin.
$835: Gross proceeds from first public art exhibition in Buffalo, held on the day before Christmas 1861 in American Hall.
$15,976: Weeklong Box Office take for the Highest Grossing Film in any of the locally owned Dipson Theaters, for "Shakespeare in Love" at the North Park Theater.
26 weeks - Longest Run of any recent film at a Dipson Theater, "The Full Monty."
165,591: Most people to attend an Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition, "Monet at Giverny."
7: Number of times punk-poet Patti Smith spat on the stage during her April 2003 appearance at the Sphere.
28: Number of times News Pop Music Critic Jeff Miers slapped his companion on the back and said, "Isn't this amazing?" during Smith's Sphere set (according to said companion).
5: Pounds a soprano can lose during a single performance of a Wagner opera.
0: Number of Christmas seasons in the past 15 years without a local production of "The Nutcracker" and "A Christmas Carol."
5 tons: Weight of the heaviest indoor art work at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Richard Serra's "Kitty Hawk."
3,000 B.C.: Date of creation of the oldest work in the Albright-Knox collection, Mesopotamian "Mountain Deity."
50 percent: Percentage of works of art in the Albright-Knox collection dated after 1945.
20,300: Number of pennies used in Herd About Buffalo's "Penny For Your Thoughts" by aNouYmoUS.
8: Number of hours of the longest movie ever shown in Shea's Buffalo Performing Arts Center, Hans Jurgen Syberberg's "Our Hitler," including a dinner break.
2: Number in audience at the end of five-hour performance of John Webster's "The White Devil" given at the first manifestation of the Pfeiffer Theatre in a Westside church. One of the two was asleep.
12 hours: Time it took to perform Yvar Mikhasoff's "The Great Piano Marathon" in Slee Hall.
10 hours: Time it took to play the many, many notes of Petr Kotik's musical score for Gertrude Stein's "Many, Many Women."
2: The number of days it took to perform Erik Satie's piano piece "Vexations" at Baird Hall.
30,000: Number of costumes in the costume department at Studio Arena Theatre.
21/2: Hours of listening to Verdi's "La Traviata" a Florida judge imposed as punishment on a man who was playing 50 Cent too loudly on his car stereo.
120: Pounds of honey used by Karen Finley in her honey-rolling performance "Shut up and Love Me" at Hallwalls.
13,500: Number of 23.75 karat gold tiles in M&T Bank's dome.
13: Number feared by pianist/wit/raconteur Oscar Levant.
1301, 1302, 1303: Rooms assigned to Levant by Buffalo hotel, leading him to wail, "I'll never be able to come to Buffalo again!"
2,000: Estimated number of angel faces on Our Lady of Victory Basilica.
5: Number of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses in Western New York.
3: Number of never-built Frank Lloyd Wright Buffalo designs in the works for the future.
10,964: Number of people who paid between $42.50 and $65 to see Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera at HSBC Arena in August 2003, for a total gross of $620,630:.
16,390: Number of people who paid between $48.50 and $128.50 to see Aerosmith and Kiss at Darien Lake in August 2003, for a total gross of $1,118,489.
20,510: Number of paid attendees it took to declare last summer's Bob Dylan/The Dead double bill at Darien Lake a sell-out, for a total gross of $947,178.
15: Number of minutes it took for David Bowie's upcoming show inside Shea's Performing Arts Center to sell out.
277: The number of roles generated in 13 years of "Buffalo Quickies," Alleyway Theatre's annual one-act festival (which opens March 11).
$511,750: Most ever paid at auction for a Charles Burchfield painting, "Wild Sweet Peas in a Summer Rain.
$750,000: Current asking price for Charles Burchfield's "Backyard in Golden Sunlight."
$1,800: Price paid on e-bay for Charles Burchfield forgery, "A Country Scene."
35 feet high and 28 feet wide: dimensions of the tallest, narrowest gallery in town, the University at Buffalo's Lightwell Gallery
4: Months it took Guiseppe Verdi to write his opera "Aida."
4: Years it took Elton John and Tim Rice to write Disney version of "Aida."
240,000: Wattage of the brightest lighting cue in production at the Shea performance of Disney's "Aida."
17: Number of spring 2004 concerts by JoAnn Falletta listed by music Web site Beethoven.com in its promotion "Going on Tour With JoAnn Falletta."
30: Number of CDs Falletta has recorded.
$2.5 million: Amount over budget from the original $1 million estimate for the restoration of Theatre of Youth's Allendale Theatre.
- Contributions by Jeff Miers, Elizabeth Barr, Richard Huntington and Jeff Simon
