Ideas Everything's Changed. Oh, Wait. No, It Hasn't. As 2002 began, art was supposed to be forevermore infused with the post-9/11 sensibility. Materialism and schlocky marketing were out, serious contemplation of the human condition was in. Riiiiight. So why does Frida Kahlo now have her own posthumous perfume, and why is the star of the year a shoplifting actress who hasn't made a good film since (arguably) Girl, Interrupted? "In a year where the world was too much with us, art could at least be bewildering." Toronto Star 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 6:17 am Is Coherence So Much To Ask? The recent flap that ensued in Canada when a former First Nations activist went on a rambling, semi-coherent, anti-Semitic rant points up a larger problem among the nation's public figures, says John Gray. Why can't anyone in government speak with any degree of profundity or even a basic grasp of what makes for stirring oratory? "What I find not only boring but dangerous is not the lack of imagination, nor art, nor insight, nor even intelligence -- but the absence of specifics. When Canadian public figures speak, I literally do not know what the hell they are talking about." The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 5:33 am Visual Arts Guggenheim Drops Lower Manhattan Plan In a three-paragraph e-mail message, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced that it had withdrawn its proposal to build a polymorphous, 400-foot-tall building designed by Frank Gehry on Piers 9, 13 and 14, south of the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan." The plan would have cost $950 million, and the museum admits that was an unrealistic goal. The New York Times 12/31/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 9:46 pm British Museum Puzzled Over Missing Goblet "Archivists at the British Museum are scratching their heads after learning that the biggest hoard of Roman treasure ever found in Britain comprised 35 pieces - not 34, as has been believed for the past 60 years - and that the goblet that is missing could be worth more than £1 million." The discovery was made when a 94-year-old man who had worked on cleaning one of the goblets came to visit the museum and discovered it was missing. The Guardian (UK) 12/31/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 9:28 pm Music Songs Of Protest "The venerable tradition of American protest music still generates heat on the rally circuit, as Dylan's constant reinvocation proves. Still, political music is marked by the same tension that always feeds pop music: the desire to connect to a legacy versus the impulse to try something new. The activist songbook includes major contributions from punk and hip-hop as well as folk-rock. Benefit concerts and albums have become part of the star-making machinery." The Nation 12/23/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 10:45 pm Penalties For Success The 7-year-old New West Symphony, which calls an LA suburb home, has an unusual problem - one fanned by its success. The orchestra has a budget of $2 million, and has run every year in the black. Its musicians are part-timers, professionals who for the most part make their livings playing in LA's recording studios. The problem? If the orchestra gets bigger, it'll lose its part-timers, and the quality of the players might decline. And yet, there is pressure to grow... Los Angeles Times 12/30/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 10:00 pm Disney Hall - Opening Times Three Los Angeles' dramatic new Disney Hall, scheduled to open next October, is opening in a flurry of gala fundraising benefits expected to earn $3 million for the LA Philharmonic. "On the first night they'll hear the tried-and-true classics. On the second, the new music of the 21st century. And on the third, we'll honor the European composers who fled Nazi Germany to come to Hollywood and were hired by the film industry." Los Angeles Times 12/30/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 9:57 pm Tune Smith San Francisco's Davies Hall is "tuned" for every performance. The computer-controlled acoustical canopy that dangles over the stage looks like some huge constructivist sculpture and reflects sound back to the musicians and out to the audience. It's composed of 59 slightly bowed 6-foot squares of Plexiglas - they collectively cover 3,400 square feet - whose height and angle are adjusted according to the size of the ensemble or to the piece being performed." San Francisco Chronicle 12/30/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 9:13 am Arts Issues A Bare-Bones Art Repatriation "The Canadian Museum of Civilization is preparing to return dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of bones taken from native burial grounds to the Algonquin people whose ancestors inhabited the Ottawa area before white settlers arrived in the 19th century and began unearthing Indian graves. The proposed 'repatriation' of human remains... follows a series of [Ottawa] Citizen stories earlier this year revealing that a communal cemetery holding about 20 aboriginal skeletons was dug up 160 years ago on a point of land in Gatineau now occupied by the museum itself." Ottawa Citizen 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 6:04 am Toronto's Unfinished Business The local and provincial governments serving Toronto have finally agreed to allocate a significant bit of cash for a grandiose set of architectural and cultural plans which aim to revitalize Canada's largest city. But even as art lovers rejoice over the influx of public money, observers are quietly noting that the government's CAN$232 million is a drop in the bucket compared with what's needed to stabilize the city's major cultural players. From the National Ballet to the Canadian Opera Company, Toronto's arts groups are still in need of nearly half a billion dollars of additional investment. National Post (Canada) 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 5:57 am Previously: Toronto's New Star Potential Toronto is on the verge of a building boom - and billions of dollars are being spent. "After more than a decade of devastation, Toronto's cultural institutions have regrouped into a position of civic leadership. By the time the cranes are down, Toronto will have works by some of the world's leading architects, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Will Alsop among them. Already, controversy is swirling." Toronto Star 12/28/02 People Spiegelman Leaving New Yorker. Yes, Again. Cartoonist-and-so-much-more Art Spiegelman is leaving The New Yorker, as he has several times before, citing differences with the direction the venerable magazine has taken since 9/11. Spiegelman, who has never hesitated to express unpopular ideas in his work, praises editor David Remnick, but says that "the place I'm coming from is just much more agitated than The New Yorker's tone. The assumptions and attitudes [I have] are not part of The Times Op-Ed page of acceptable discourse." New York Observer 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 6:52 am Can We Freeze Her Assets Until She Finishes The Next Book? Harry Potter may not measure up to Lord of the Rings on the big screen, but J.R.R. Tolkien isn't alive to rake in the residuals, and J.K. Rowling is, with the consequence that Rowling is now officially the highest-paid woman in the U.K. (And the Brits count Madonna as one of theirs, so you know we're talking serious money!) Rowling, who was last seen trying to stall for more time to finish the latest Potter installment by auctioning off an index card, reportedly made $77 million in 2002. Washington Post (AP) 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 6:26 am Previously: Potter Clue Sells For Heavy Price A 93-word teaser describing the next installment of the Harry Potter series and written on a notecard by JK Rowling was sold at auction for £28,680 in London this week. "The fan site www.the.leaky.cauldron.org managed to raise £15,240 to buy the card, but were outbid by an anonymous US bidder." BBC 12/12/02 Brazilian Pop Star Takes Government Culture Job When Brazil's new government takes office on Wednesday, its culture portfolio will be held by one of the country's biggest pop stars for the last 35 years, the singer-songwriter and guitarist Gilberto Gil." The appointment, to say the least, is controversial. "The challenger of the establishment will now experience things from the other side." The New York Times 12/31/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 9:52 pm Theatre You've Got To Spend It To Make It A respected figure in British theatre, Peter Longman is imploring the government to invest more than £1 billion in the country's theatre companies, in order to correct what most in the business have viewed as a long and dangerous slide in public monetary support. Longman is not alone in his call for increased public investment, but the word "billion" has the theatre world talking, and government officials stunned. BBC 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 4:55 am London Theatres Falling Down "The physical condition of London's theatreland, a unique treasury of mainly Victorian and Edwardian theatres, is beginning to cause anguish among the people who earn their living there. One estimate is that the buildings need well over £200m spent to bring them up to the modern standards that audiences increasingly expect, and to faintly humane working conditions for staff." The Guardian (UK) 12/31/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 9:32 pm Publishing Protesting The Patriot Act Two thirds of Vermont's independent bookstore owners have signed a letter protesting the Patriot Act. "The Patriot Act gives the government the power to seize bookstore and library records to check customers' and patrons' reading lists. A gag order in the legislation prevents bookstore owners and librarians from telling anyone about the seizure." Publishers Weekly 12/30/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 11:11 pm Media Death As A Plot Device A filmmaker is engaged in a court battle with three Hollywood studios over whether his documentary on Tinseltown's bizarre and undeniable obsession with death and killing will ever see the light of day, or the dark of a screening room. Peter Livingston's film uses clips from the 25 most-watched movies of all time, and notes that "only four had no humans killed at all, 16 showed dead people being resurrected, just two showed natural deaths, only one had a birth in which the baby survived, and some portrayed mass killing to such an extent the total came to nine-billion corpses."The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 5:41 am Defending The Film Cleaners Not many in the film world have stepped forward to defend the companies being sued by Hollywood for marketing "clean" versions of movies with all the sex, violence, and foul language removed. But one critic thinks the Directors'Guild, which initiated the lawsuit, is being awfully hypocritical, since its members have been releasing edited versions of their work for decades: "Those alternates are used not just on airplanes, but also for broadcast television and overseas release. If the DGA is so concerned about artistic integrity, it should work to make those personally supervised versions available to families who want to see them."Chicago Tribune 12/31/02 Posted: 12/31/2002 5:17 am Previously: Movie Studios Sue Companies That Edit Their Work Eight major studios have joined to sue companies that edit parts of movies they find objectionable out the original versions and make them available to consumers. The movie studios charge that the companies are violating copyright laws. "The studios also allege the companies violate trademark law when they rent or sell an altered movie in the original packaging." Nando Times (AP) 12/15/02 TV Station Under Fire For Controversial Documentary Britain's Channel 4 is being criticized for its plans to air a controversial documentary on Chinese performance artists. Among the controversial scenes are one "showing a performance artist eating the flesh of a dead baby" and "a man drinking wine that has had an amputated penis marinaded in it." The station defends its plans: "The programme will be controversial and will shock some viewers but a warning will be given before it goes out on air."The Guardian (UK) 12/31/02 Posted: 12/30/2002 9:34 pm