It's All Been Done "In a post-postmodernist culture swamped in sequels, self-reference, adaptation, irony, parody, reality TV, digital sampling and the thud-beat of rap, newness has become a novelty item, a dated curio from another age." But does the reliance on old ideas necessarily mean artists aren't creating original work? According to Steven Winn, that's exactly what it means, and the art world is the worse for the lack of creative originality. San Francisco Chronicle 01/09/03
Posted: 01/09/2003 6:23 am
- A Great Threat To Modern Culture "The current artistic culture, which is replete with references, borrowings and parody, has collided with a corporate and legal culture that is bent on protecting intellectual property. If Andy Warhol were working today, he would be facing litigation from Campbell's soup, Church & Dwight (the makers of Brillo pads) and every corporation whose logo he appropriated. 'Virtually all art builds on previous work, either overtly or covertly'." Los Angeles Times (Newsday) 01/08/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 2:50 pm
Great Architecture Requires Great Clients (Where Are They?) Why does it seem so difficult to muster forces to create great architecture in America? "Citizens are the consumers of architecture. How are they educated to appreciate and judge what they must necessarily inhabit and, as taxpayers and clients, often buy? Primary and secondary schools rarely mention architecture or urbanism at all, except in the most elite or innovative schools. The general public's lack of even the most basic education in architecture and urbanism makes for ill-informed, ill-prepared clients. With admittedly a few exceptions, asking members of those groups to judge inspired architecture is akin to asking people with a third-grade education to select the next winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature." Chronicle of Higher Education 01/10/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 12:28 pm
Never Saw It Coming "People who make, teach and exhibit film in Pittsburgh were stunned yesterday by the Carnegie Museum of Art's announcement that it was eliminating its venerated film and video department as a way to save money." Even an organization which some viewed as a competitor to the Carnegie series was shocked by the move, insisting that the two series had the same mission - to bring top-quality international film to the Steel City. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/09/03
Posted: 01/09/2003 6:12 am
- Previously: Museum Cuts in Pittsburgh "In an effort to trim its 2003 budget, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh is eliminating its film and video section and permanently laying off 17 full-time and four part-time employees. In addition, six employees have resigned voluntarily and 22 vacant positions will not be filled. The loss of 49 total full-time and four part-time positions is expected to save the parent corporation $4 million this year." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/08/03
Liking What's Being Proposed For The WTC Architects proposing ideas for the World Trade Center site meet in a public forum to talk about their plans. How do you reconcile the ideas? Maybe collage the best of each and come up with something collaborative? "I came expecting a fight. Instead, everyone is so warm and fuzzy and self-congratulatory it distresses me."
The New York Times 01/09/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 11:22 pm
In Munich - A Museum That Puts Art Above Building In an era when museum buildings are asked to be works of art themselves (and the art inside can seem like an afterthought), Munich's new Pinakothek der Moderne is a white rextangle in which art is the star... The New Yorker 01/06/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 5:59 pm
England's Historic Structures in Danger English Heritage has released a report that concludes that the country's "historic environment is 'a massively underexploited asset, which is under attack from all sides.' Threats include 'a skills crisis, incongruous development, half a century of unsympathetic agricultural policy, inappropriate tax regimes, climate change and natural erosion, and of course, a lack of funds'.”
The Art Newspaper 01/06/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 12:21 pm
Is The Art Museum-Building Boom Done? "During the 1990s stock market bubble, every major arts institution planned to build or renovate. Some projects were completed (Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art), some started long ago remain on track (Museum of Modern Art in NY, Nelson Atkins in Kansas City), while others have scaled back (the Metropolitan), and still others appear to have stalled (Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Museum of Fine Art, Whitney Museum, Jewish Museum in San Francisco)." The Art Newspaper 01/06/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 12:18 pm
Miami Art Show - City Of The Future? The first Art Basel Miami was a big success. Though "visitor sophistication may not have been high" and expenses were more than expected, there were plenty of sales. So much as to prompt the following speculation: "If Art Chicago is clearly doomed in the next decade, the real fight is now between the Armory Show of New York and Art Basel Miami Beach. Which of these cities, both packed with very different pleasures, will prove more lastingly tempting?" The Art Newspaper 01/06/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 11:52 am
Jazz Police, I Hear You Calling Jazz aficionados bow to no one in their ability to turn rapidly snobbish when confronted with a corner of the jazz world which does not square with their own vision of the genre. The infighting has reared its head in Toronto this month, with the International Association for Jazz Education holding its annual conference there. Upset at being shut out of the conference, a consortium of some of the city's more innovative (read: non-mainstream) jazz musicians have organized their own gathering. That's all well and good, says Carl Wilson, but the rhetoric coming out of the alternative gathering is a bit over the line. "We're against music teachers now?" The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/09/03
Posted: 01/09/2003 5:39 am
More Rhetoric, No Progress in Colorado Springs The tension is continuing to build at the Colorado Springs Symphony, where the musicians have labeled their management's talk of a bankruptcy filing as "blackmail," and the music director has threatened to resign if Chapter 11 becomes reality. None of the involved parties denies that the CSS is in real fiscal trouble, but it's a matter of perception: orchestra execs contend they are doing their best in a bad economy, while the musicians claim that management created the problem and is now trying to avoid culpability. Denver Post 01/09/03
Posted: 01/09/2003 5:29 am
- Previously: The Orchestra Ax Falls Again Yet another small North American orchestra is on the verge of bankruptcy. The Colorado Springs Symphony says it needs $217,000 to survive more than another week, and is demanding steep pay cuts from its musicians, who already earn less than $13,000 per year. The musicians, for their part, claim that orchestra management has been grossly incompetent in running the organization, and accuse the board president, whose resignation they demanded in September, of trying to turn the CSS into a "pro-am community group." Colorado Springs Gazette 01/07/02
HipHop And The Academy "A quarter century after its founding in New York's South Bronx, the culture of beats, rhymes, and life is finding new devotees in classrooms, conferences, and faculty meetings coast-to-coast. Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, Yale, Harvard, New York University, and M.I.T. have each boasted courses examining some aspect of the culture, while the prestigious annual American Studies and Modern Language Association conferences have featured similar panels. Some snicker that as long as Princeton theologian Cornel West doesn't record a follow-up to his 2001 album, Sketches of My Culture, the academy will continue unfettered in its engagement of the global, billion-dollar culture." Village Voice 01/08/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 6:56 pm
A Tax For Musicians That Musicians Don't Get In Canada blank CDs carry a 21 cent tax "collected from technology companies to reimburse the music industry for losses incurred by music copying and swapping." Now the industry wants to increase the fee to 59 cents. There are also proposals to slap a fee on devices which record media. But there is growing opposition - "Since 1999, the CPCC has collected more than CN$28 million in copyright compensation fees. It expects to collect more than CN$100 million in levies next year." And yet, critics point out that the music industry hasn't paid a penny to musicians... Wired 01/08/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 5:30 pm
Demolish Or Restore? Philly Looks To L.A. In Los Angeles, a number of decaying old movie palaces are being restored, thanks in large part to a private investor with a passion for old films. And the redevelopment has another big city 3,000 miles away paying attention. In Philadelphia, where downtown is bustling and decrepit old buildings are being torn down at a record rate to make way for new structures, time is running out on the one remaining classic movie palace in town. But will the city consider a one-screen throwback worth saving? Philadelphia Inquirer 01/09/03
Posted: 01/09/2003 6:05 am
Who's Next? Arts Groups Have No Idea. A startling new report from an Illinois group reveals a near-total lack of planning on the part of arts organizations nationwide for replacing their top executives. "Three out of four non-profit arts organizations report having no succession plans, even though nearly three-quarters of their aging top managers say they plan to quit within five years." And while it may be true that arts groups don't have the budgets to carefully groom successors from within, as is the norm in the corporate world, the recent rash of hasty executive departures from orchestras and museums points up the lack of foresight. Chicago Tribune 01/09/03
Posted: 01/09/2003 5:19 am
Heppner Ready For A Comeback It has been a year since Canadian tenor Ben Heppner shocked a Toronto audience by cracking several notes and then calling a halt to his recital mid-aria. Heppner, long considered the most talented operatic tenor in a generation, has spent the last 12 months struggling to find out what it was that caused his voice to suddenly abandon him. He's cagey about specifics, but the answer appears to have been found in the side effects from a medication he was taking. He is scheduled to return to New York's Metropolitan Opera next month. Boston Globe 01/09/02
Posted: 01/09/2003 4:48 am
Sachs Steps Down From Running The Frick Samuel Sachs II has announced he's stepping down as director of the Frick Museum after six years there. "A quirky institution known for its stuffy, family-run board, it now attracts nearly 350,000 visitors a year, up 20 percent a year since Mr. Sachs became director. When he arrived, after having run the financially ailing Detroit Institute of Arts for 12 years, Mr. Sachs said his mission was more one of "fine turning" than of making major changes." The New York Times 01/09/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 11:06 pm
Did The Chinese Really Discover America? Gavin Menzies' new book claiming that Chinese discovered America 70 years before Columbus landed is getting lots of press. But does the research hold up? "Sadly, many observers concur that accuracy matters little to publishing houses, especially when fudged facts are almost guaranteed to generate controversy, and therefore sales. 'The publishing industry's gullibility is boundless and its devotion to the bottom line endless, so if they can maintain their fealty to P.T. Barnum and put one over on the public, they'll do so without losing a wink's worth of sleep'." Salon 01/07/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 6:34 pm
New NYT Editor Cracks The Whip Steven Erlanger is the New York Times' new culture editor. And he's jumped into the job with a memo to his troops exhorting them to do better: "I’ve been impressed and gratified by some of what we’ve published in the last weeks of the year. But I’ve also been dismayed by some of the flat, careless and inelegant writing I’ve seen, some of which has gotten into the paper. What we do in the section matters. I’m concentrating now on understanding how it works before deciding how to make it better." The New York Times 01/08/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 11:18 am
Frank Rich Rejoins NYT Culture Pages Frank Rich, considered the most-feared theatre critic in New York during the 1980s when he was theatre critic at the New York Times, is moving back to the NYT culture pages. For the past eight years Rich has been writing an op-ed on the NYT editorial pages. "We plan for his column to be an anchor of the Arts & Leisure section. In addition, he will work closely with Steve Erlanger, our newly appointed cultural news editor, in planning coverage and the overall design of the culture pages." The New York Times 01/08/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 11:07 am
Why Tolkien Would Have Hated This Movie The smashing success of the first two installments of the filmed version of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy points up a fundamental irony in the story: the movies could not pack the emotional and visceral punch they do without the use of state-of-the-art digital technology, but Tolkien, a vehement Luddite, would undoubtedly have despised the computer-generated effects. "Tolkien's hatred of technology was central to his conception of Middle Earth. The good hobbits are classic old English villagers, content to cultivate small plots of land and smoke their pipes... The evil wizard Saruman, by contrast, is a kind of demented Henry Ford, with a 'mind of metal and wheels'."Slate 01/08/03
Posted: 01/09/2003 6:40 am
Clear Channel Pulls Out Of Netcasting The nation's largest corporate radio conglomerate, Clear Channel Communications, has told its stations that they must individually bear the cost of broadcasting their signals over the internet, causing 150 of them to yank their webcasts entirely. The cost of streaming a traditional radio signal has become increasingly prohibitive with courts issuing rulings mandating payments to musicians and actors whose work appears on the streams.Wired 01/09/02
Posted: 01/09/2003 4:36 am
More Arts Programming? With These Ratings? Okay - so all the critics are complaining about the BBC's lack of arts programming. But over on BBC4, the so-called culture channel, there appears to be nobody home... "While the main terrestrial channels calculate their audiences in the millions, BBC4 has to talk in thousands, tens of thousands and - if they are lucky - occasionally hundreds of thousands." With ratings like these, how do you justify more of this programming?The Telegraph (UK) 01/09/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 6:49 pm
Learning About The Holocaust From Films "Unfortunately we live in an age where people learn their history from feature films. This has not served our memories well. It may be too much to ask film makers to tell the most complete, unwholesome aspects of a story. But it's worse when they focus instead on a more palatable, yet unrepresentative slice. The risk is in misleading the audience, trivializing the horror, and reducing the madness into something mundane."OpinionJournal 01/09/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 5:09 pm
Dance Summit Of International Artistic Directors Artistic directors of dance companies around the world are gathering this week to talk about the state of the art. "Figures from the Bolshoi, the Royal Ballet and companies from Chile to Portugal are taking part in the think-tank to address how to develop new "classics" alongside the tried and tested favourites audiences always want to see. The three-day symposium will ask whether the companies are losing their individuality as they all perform the same Swan Lakes, Nutcrackers and Coppelias." The Independent (UK) 01/08/03
Posted: 01/08/2003 8:10 pm
