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TOP
ARTS NEWS
- CULTURAL
CRUSADER: On Tuesday US VP-candidate Joe Lieberman, "a
culture warrior considered one of the moral voices of the
Senate, promised supporters that the Democratic Gore/Lieberman
ticket would help parents 'raise PG kids in an X-rated society.'
He praised Vice President Gore's wife, Tipper, for having
had the courage to speak out against certain music lyrics,
a move for which she was widely blasted in the 1980s."
Washington Post 08/09/00
- A
TV CRITIC: "Lieberman, like a lot of us who actually
watch the TV we rip, wants content changes. But when the
government threatens to get involved in that sort of thing,
it smacks of demagoguery. No matter. TV critic Lieberman
is always good for an opinion." Chicago
Sun-Times 08/09/00
- THE
LIEBERMAN FACTOR: US VP-candidate Joe Lieberman has
been tough on the entertainment industry. How tough?
"He told Daily Variety last year that shows
like 'Friends' should be relegated to late night because
of their raciness. Variety
08/08/00
- CONSCIENCE
OF THE NATION? Hollywood is pondering the possibility
of Joe Lieberman becoming vice-president of the US. "Lieberman
is widely regarded as 'the moral conscience' of the Senate
and has continually blasted TV, movies and the recording
industry for featuring too much sex and violence."
New
York Post 08/08/00
- EASY
TARGETS: "There are three people truly disliked
by Hollywood. John McCain, conservative moralist William
Bennett and Joe Lieberman. That's because each has sought
the spotlight to further his own career by picking on
an easy target — the pop culture spewed out by television,
movies, music and video games...That Lieberman is now
in the running to become vice president is not good for
those who oppose censorship."
San Francisco Examiner 08/10/00
- CITY
TAX FOR ART: A proposed "cultural tax" in Detroit
would pump $36 million annually to arts and culture. "It
is being pushed by Detroit Renaissance, a group of business
executives trying to enhance the area, and a coalition of
cultural institutions. They contend that the money is needed
to keep Metro Detroit's cultural landmarks vibrant by stabilizing
funding and providing support for the arts if the economy
slows." A poll shows 58 percent of those surveyed said
they would approve it. Detroit
News 08/07/00
- FAILURE
TO PROTECT: British police are "failing to take the
theft of fine arts and antiques seriously, undermining a Government
initiative to make it harder for criminals to sell stolen
property, according to a leading figure in the arts market."
The Telegraph
(London) 08/04/00
- 18,000
MANUSCRIPTS, BOOKS, AND MUSIC COMPOSITIONS stolen by Russia’s
Red Army after World War II and since kept in Armenia’s Academy
of Sciences were returned to Germany this week. Armenia first
returned war booty to Germany in 1998 with a huge shipment
of antiques. Germany’s culture minister is confident the remaining
artifacts will be returned shortly.
Russia
Today (Reuters) 08/10/00
- ART
FAKERY: A senior Vatican official is being investigated
for "allegedly selling works of art with fake Vatican-stamped
certificates representing them as masterpieces by artists
such as Michelangelo."
The Times (London) 08/12/00
- SHOWDOWN
IN BERLIN: Since he took it over eight years ago, Daniel
Barenboim has turned the former East Berlin Staatsoper company
into Berlin's leading opera house. But Berlin is broke, and
Barenboim is demanding another 10 million marks for his budget
as a condition of his staying. Last week drastic plans by
the Berlin Senate were revealed to amalgamate the city's three
major opera houses with Barenboim to be offered the job of
general manager, or "intendant," of the new super-company.
Chicago Tribune 08/08/00
PLUS:
Workers' strike at Museum
of Modern Art seems to have had little impact on museum
operations ~ Teams of archeologists begin cleaning and restoration
of the Parthenon
in preparation for the 2004 Olympics ~ New York artists battle
for control of the Clemente
Soto Velez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side ~ Actors
Theatre of Louisville names new artistic director ~ A tribute
to Sir
Alec Guinness who died last week at age 86 ~ The Writers
Guild of America corrects the credits of eight blacklisted
writers from McCarthy era ~ The Television
Bureau of Advertising forecast television stations will
post a record of $550 million during the 2000 presidential election,
up from $367 million in 1996 ~ Sydney
ensures a brighter financial future of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary
Art.
TOP
ARTS FEATURES
-
FESTIVAL
POWER: "Think of Edinburgh today: boomtown,
glittering northern capital, as beautiful a city centre
as any in Europe; full of history, packed year round with
visitors, draped with pavement cafés, bright with flags.
Then glance back at Edinburgh as it was 53 years ago, when
the Festival was founded: a lost capital almost crushed
by the pressure of two world wars - the austerity, the rationing,
the sheer exhaustion - into a kind of dour British provincialism
from which it seemed unlikely ever to recover." The
Scotsman 08/08/00
-
WHERE'S
THE AMERICAN? "Most orchestras in this country
do not know and do not care about American music, and they
are convinced that you and I don't care or want to know
about it either. They see their mandate as one of protecting
culture, in this case, a culture produced in Europe 100
or 200 years ago. They therefore make it their business
to protect us from ourselves."
Los Angeles Times 08/13/00
-
SUBJECT
TO PREY: The relationship between biographer and subject
can be adversarial. Sometimes subjects retaliate. "It's
war, and a number of contemporary writers have tried to
gain the upper hand by putting biographers in their novels
and short stories." National
Post (Canada) 08/12/00
-
GHOST
OF A CHANCE: In the 1960s, hippy artists from Britain
were invited to revive a ghost hill town in Italy. They
restored its houses and rebuilt the water and sewage system
and made the town a going concern. "But a promise that
they could make their homes was never put in writing."
Now the Italian government wants the town back...
BBC 08/09/00
-
LEARNING
TO LOVE: "There is a basic myth of modernism, essential
to its ideology, that all great works of art are initially
repellent. It is only natural that this should give rise
to the suspicion that any art which seems repellent at first
is perhaps, after all, daring and provocative. In the past,
however, the assimilation of a new style which was originally
detested was most often the work not of critics but of the
artists themselves."
New
York Review of Books 08/10/00
-
SAVING
HISTORY: "That David Packard discovered and came
to love classic American cinema is one of the luckiest things
that ever could have happened to classic cinema. In the
past 20 years, Packard, 59, has done more for film preservation
than any private citizen in history, funneling millions
upon millions of dollars into archives such as the Library
of Congress, the University of California at Los Angeles
and the George Eastman House."
San Francisco Chronicle 08/13/00
-
TERM
OF THE MOMENT: What exactly does "contemporary"
art mean? "Look at what happened to Modern art, which
today is considered to have begun as far back as the mid-19th
Century. At first the term described the art of its day,
but since then the term has been assigned to a certain historical
period. Could the category of contemporary art be used one
day to classify art of the second half of the 20th Century?
What then - the ghastly 'post-contemporary'?"
Chicago Tribune 08/13/00
-
THE
TRUTH ABOUT STORIES: Why do literary critics seem to
be tripping over distinctions between fiction and non-fiction?
"The trendy new genre 'creative nonfiction' is just
a clever marketing tool — a way to sell the old tall tale,
part fact, part fiction, by assuring us that what we are
reading is 'real.' And that sense of clarity is not just
reassuring, it also demands less of the reader — who does
not have to suspend disbelief — and of the writer, who does
not have to work as hard at rendering a story believable."
San Francisco Examiner 08/07/00
-
POET
ADVOCATE GENERAL: "Is there something churlish
about Canadians that we balk at the idea of an official
poet laureate? Are we too modest, too embarrassed? We certainly
need an advocate for poetry. Poetry is the least honoured
and the most respected of our art forms. A poet laureate
would bring poetry to the people, giving us, as John Newlove
said, 'the pride, the grand poem / of our land, of the earth
itself'."
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 08/08/00
-
WHAT
A DREADFUL IDEA: "Poets are already considered
to be on the very bottom of the arts ladder, frantically
vying with the likes of documentary filmmakers, performance
artists and other degenerates. And Canadian poetry,
in the main, is horrible, consisting primarily of nuanced
references to woodchippers, and surprisingly vulgar
accounts of childbirth. To crown a laureate then would
be something like appointing a pantomime artist to remember
the dead for us each November - a poignantly awful idea."
The
Globe and Mail (Toronto) 08/08/00
-
AMERICAN
DREAMING: "While American theatergoers lament that
nonmusical drama on Broadway belongs to the British (and
in the '80s so did a large share of the musicals), the English
busily stage works that writers such as Arthur Miller or
Tony Kushner can't get premiered in the United States. This
probably says something about the relatively greater sophistication
of British audiences. Still, the fascination with secondary
plays by our first-rank playwrights can be mystifying to
an American - rather like that French thing for Jerry Lewis
films. What's the attraction?"
Washington Post 08/13/00
-
FILM
AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESSION: "The decade of
the 1980s in Argentina was characterized by profound political,
economic and social upheavals. Yet the Argentine film industry
in this period had retained a remarkable ability to stay
afloat and adapt to the radical shifts of the forces in
power. This skill was seen not only in production but in
the areas of distribution and exhibition as well. The connection
between the different governments and the national cinema
was more complex than what emerged from the accounts of
Argentine and foreign scholars about filmmaking during the
1980s."
The
Idler 08/07/00
-
KNOWING
YOUR PLACE: "When you add up the radio stations,
the dingy used-record stores, the $1.3 billion market for
rap and the $1.9 billion spent on revivified country and
western, music ranks among the largest industries ever to
exist. In the midst of this fantastic investment in an all-enveloping
cloud of sound, hardly anyone seems to remember that music
stands fairly low on the scale of devices by which we try
to understand human experience. A people that takes music
as its highest expression has cut itself off from narrative,
epic, allegory - the explanatory arts that could put to
use the emotions that their music represents." New
Statesman 08/07/00
PLUS:
Exploring ancient cities through
virtual
archeology ~ Why the director of the Tate
Modern is a happy man ~ Soul-less
in Salzburg: How could Mozart's birthplace have come to
this? ~ A Blind
artist's secret to painting ~ Salon.com's guide to the best
and the worst contemporary
fiction of the last 40 years ~ How the Big
Five orchestras of the U.S. have scrupulously managed to
avoid hiring American music directors
SPECIAL INTEREST
-
LANGUAGE
OF THOUGHT: European thinkers are curious about American
intellectual thought, and seem to seek it out to engage
with it. The reverse is not so often true. "In failing
to read our European contemporaries in their own languages
(especially when they write about their own philosophical
classics), don't we deprive ourselves of important cognitive
sources?" Chronicle
of Higher Education 08/07/00
-
SURVIVING
CULTURE: Do cultures have an inherent right to survive?
"There is no great moral distinction, such rhetoric
seems to suggest, between allowing a culture to assimilate
into the wider surrounding society and actually going out
and killing its members en masse. If we take these arguments
at face value, cultural survival is something very close
to a moral absolute; to refuse to endorse it is to sign
up on the side of cultural atrocity and numbing global conformity."
Civilization 08/00
-
WHO,
THEN, WILL LEAD US? "No longer do our poets, both
musical and otherwise, define society; instead, they reflect
it. Some of the most significant philosophers of our time
have provided nothing more than political fuel, and fashion
designers have been left with the sole responsibility of
directing the masses. We can hardly claim to perpetuate
the age-old search for nobility. Knowledge is no longer
a reward in itself, and a good number of us believe Socrates
to simply be a character in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure."
*spark-online 08/00
-
HOW
DO THEY DO THAT? At its top, the Tower of Pisa is 15
feet out of alignment with the bottom, in danger of tipping
over. But the lean is being painstakingly corrected. It's
"a delicate operation in which dirt is being extracted
through thin drill pipes— the geotechnical equivalent of
laboratory pipettes— from under the north, upstream side
of the tower foundations, allowing it to settle toward the
upright direction. The rate of soil extraction amounts to
just a few dozen shovelfuls a day; anything faster might
jolt the tower over the brink." Discover
Magazine 08/00
JUST
FOR FUN
-
BIRD'S
EYE ART: A Japanese artist has given new meaning to
the word "detail"; he rents a helicopter, photographs
a particular city, and then recreates it on paper with
a magnifying glass, drafting pens and calligraphy brushes. Recently
he spent 12 hours photographing Manhattan. "From the
Hudson River to the East River, every rooftop chicken coop
and streetside hot dog stand has surely been accounted for.
There are people, too: some 8,000 pinpricks among the 5,000
cars and 230,000 buildings." Daily
Yomiuri 08/10/00
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