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1. Napster Kayoed?
The
US Appeals Court ruling
[Wired] Feb. 12 against Napster
turned out to be as ambiguous as the dispute itself has become.
Yes, the file-trading service faces a shutdown
[Salon] but it wasn't an immediately
lethal sword to the gut.
Sure
the recording industry seems to have proved its case that
file-traders are breaking copyright laws. And musicians need
to be paid for their work. But the recording companies have
a difficult
time [NYTimes] proving that
they have been damaged out on the digital free range. Indeed,
there is mounting evidence that digital music downloading
may be in part responsible for a strong
increase [The Age] in recording
sales.
The
recording industry itself has not
exactly been on the cutting edge [ZDNet]
of finding ways to sell music legally online. Currently it's
much more difficult to download music legally - paying for
it - than do it with any of the "illegal" services.
And young people are now hooked on downloading, with one-in-three
teens ages 12-17 [Washington Post]
copying away. And who trusts the recording companies anyway?
They were hit with a
price-fixing suit [Variety] last
year for colluding to keep CD prices high. In any case, it
may be time
to stop romanticizing [The Telegraph]
the "revolution" represented by Napster - after
all, it's about the content, right?
Complete
Digital/Napster stories archive.
2.
Giuliani VS Brooklyn, Pt II
The
Brooklyn Museum couldn't buy publicity like this. New York
mayor Rudy Giuliani knows how to give the Brooklyn Museum
of Art a big attendance boost (and make an artist's career
in the process).
By
early
accounts, [NYTimes] Renée
Cox is an artist with "a minor reputation as an artist
of expensive-looking, technically proficient photographs."
But that didn't stop the art-loving mayor from considerably
elevating her position in the artworld when he
denounced Cox's photo [NYTimes]
"Yo Mama's Last Supper," being shown as part of BMA's "Committed
to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers" show, for
being "disgusting," "outrageous" and "anti-Catholic."
Guaranteeing
that Cox will be in the news for weeks to come (and that crowds
will be flocking to the BMA), he also promised to appoint
a commission to set "decency standards" to ensure such work
stays out of museums that receive public money. He's likely
to be thwarted in that threat, just
as he was last year [CBC]
when he tried to withhold city funding to the BMA because
he objected to it showing a Chris Ofili painting as part of
the "Sensation"
show [ArtsJournal].
Of
course, the mayor hasn't yet seen the photo itself, but particularly
after last year's "Sensation" storm, he had to know
that his public condemnations would ignite another media flurry.
And now the issue will play out with all the predictable
players [NY Post] taking their
predictable sides, including
Cox, [Salon] who will make
a career of portraying the aggrieved artist. Can you say Holly
Hughes? Here we go again.
Complete
Brooklyn/Giuliani "Sensation" story archive
3.
The Art of Destruction
After
you've done Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, how do you shock
critics to action? How about the politics of destruction?
British
critics are abuzz about Michael Landy's project to destroy
everything
he owns [The Guardian]. It's
called "Break Down" and Landy is systematically
feeding everything he owns into a crusher at the end of a
long conveyor belt set up in an old department store. Some
find it reminiscent of the "piles of spectacles and
shoes in Nazi death camps, of Holocaust victims, stripped
of their belongings and their humanity."
[The Guardian]
Or
is it "the
death of British art"? [The
Guardian] Still others
see it [The Telegraph] as
"quintessentially modern because it is so ruthlessly
efficient, so mechanised."
It
seems to be one of those artist acts that grabs the imagination
because a viewer can put their own
personal spin [Sunday Times]
on what it means and apply it to their own experiences.
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