Moby Bush? Jason Epstein equates Moby Dick to the current Bush Administration. "Melville's great novel is prophetic even if the resemblance of the Pequod to George Bush's White House is imperfect. Though Ahab's missing leg and the destroyed Twin Towers are symbolically comparable losses, as is Dick Cheney's lost opportunity to kill Saddam Hussein in 1991, Iraq will not crush and sink the United States as the whale crushed and sank the Pequod. Nor is George W. Bush a grizzled monomaniac whose mere glance strikes terror, but the callow instrument of neoconservative ideologues, obsessed since the end of the cold war with missionary zeal to Americanize the world, as previous empires had once hoped with no less zeal to Romanize, Christianize, Islamicize, Anglicize, Napoleonize, Germanize, and communize it." New York Review of Books 05/01/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 9:00 pm
Saddam Liked Fantasy Raunch In His Art An American artist named Rowena was surprised to discover that two of her oil paintings hung in Saddam Husein's personal quarters. The paintings are fantasy raunch, and "Rowena, 58, said she did the oil paintings that hung in the dictator's den about 15 years ago as covers for bodice-ripper paperbacks with titles such as 'King Dragon' and 'Shadows Out of Hell'." New York Daily News 04/15/03
Posted: 04/15/2003 7:13 am
Tracking Down Iraq's Treasures Archaeologists are trying to track down items plundered from Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities. "They can't put the sculptures, statues, and coins back on the shelves from which they were wrested. But they can put together a database of what was lost in the looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. By gathering as much detailed information as possible, they hope to render unsellable the thousands of artifacts stolen from Iraq's largest museum, one of the region's most important. The more that is known about the lost pieces, the less likely they will be able to pass into private hands on the black market, scholars and curators say." Boston Globe 04/15/03
Posted: 04/15/2003 6:06 am
US Says It Will Help "Restore" Baghdad Museum The United States says it will help restore the Iraq National Museum. "Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Baghdad museum was 'one of the great museums in the world' and that the US would take a leading role in restoring it. Coalition forces were criticised for not protecting the institution, which housed many treasures from 'the cradle of civilisation', when it was ransacked on Friday. But critics say it's too late. 'And it's gone, and it's lost. If Marines had started before, none of this would have happened. It's too late. It's no use. It's no use'."
See pictures of damage to the museum here BBC 04/14/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 9:08 pm
Whitney Puts Off Expansion New York's Whitney Museum has decided to cancel plans for a $200 million expansion designed by Rem Koolhaas, a signal that there may be further belt-tightening for the institution. "We're feeling the pinch. A project like this would be a big challenge, and we're not in a position to proceed with it."
The New York Times 04/15/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 8:55 pm
What Are They Teaching In Art Schools These Days? "It’s not easy sorting out how best to use the short time allotted to arts degrees; an undergraduate fine-arts major often spends only one of his four years in art classes—hardly enough time to learn the traditional skills of drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography, let alone today’s laundry list of new forms. Even a two-year master of fine arts (M.F.A.) program doesn’t provide much time for training, compared with the decades-long master-apprentice system of earlier centuries. Countless other challenges have art-school faculties reexamining their missions and values. The proliferation of programs and students; the embrace of diverse art forms and content; the professionalization of art practice; the rise of cultural theory; whether (and how) to teach the new technologies that have sprouted in the last decade." ArtNews 04/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:12 pm
Defending American Expressionism "For decades, American Expressionism has been denigrated, if not ignored. Postwar conservative art critics and politicians derided the work as art by 'Reds and fellow travelers.' Contemporary critics are no kinder." But Bram Dijkstra says this is grossly unfair, and he's making a case for it in a new book on the subject. "This is not just art with a social content, it is great art with a social content." Chronicle of Higher Education 04/14/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 4:49 pm
LA Museums Still Pursuing Dreams Southern California museums are facing money problems just like anywhere else. But though some high-profile building projects have been postponed or canceled, others continue. "For every local building plan that has gone awry, several others are shaping up. If all the major projects that are in the works materialize, by 2005 the museum landscape here will look dramatically different." Los Angeles Times 04/14/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 4:34 pm
San Francisco's Last Fulltime Jazz Club Closing "On Sunday it will be the end for Jazz at Pearl's, the city's last full-time jazz club. The room is losing its lease after 13 years. After a heated back-and-forth with the landlord over renegotiating a lease that, they hoped, would give them five years with an option, [owners] Buxton and Wong folded." Los Angeles Times 04/15/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:57 pm
Spike Lee On The Essential Marriage Of Music And Film "One must come to music with complete respect. I don't know how directors can do a film and after the script's been written, and the film's cut and all this money's been spent - it's like, well now let's get the composer. It's just insane to keep the composer out of the loop until so late." The Telegraph (UK) 04/15/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:51 pm
Women Composers Gather In Seoul Last week Seoul, South Korea, hosted the largest-ever gatherin of women composers from around Asia. Some "300 composers and musicians from 22 different countries presented research, participated in panel discussions, and performed 69 works in nine venues scattered around Seoul..." Korea Herald 04/14/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:39 pm
Kennedy Center - Right Building, Wrong Place? So there are big plans to improve the Kennedy Center and connect it up with the rest of the city. Great, writes Charles Paul Freund, but the Kennedy Center still lacks that element crucial to a great cultural institution... Reason 04/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:26 pm
Debating NY Arts Cuts New York Gov. George Pataki proposes cutting the state's arts budget as part of a series of cuts of the state budget. "He wants to trim the grants to arts organizations by 15 percent, from about $44.4 million to $37.8 million. But critics want far deeper cuts. The grants totaled more than $50 million a decade ago but have ebbed and flowed with the state’s economy. New York spent more than any other state on the arts last year, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies." Democrat & Chronicle (Rochester, NY) 04/14/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 4:40 pm
Investing In Your Celebrity... A British television show has created a stockmarket out of celebrities. Viewers "give real celebrities a 'share price' and 'invest' in them by predicting whether their 'stock' will rise or fall. 'Celebdaq' (its awkward name stems from Nasdaq) was created for the British Broadcasting Corp. last summer as a Web site, but this year it has also become a controversial Friday night TV show on the new digital channel BBC3, which is targeting an audience aged 25 to 34. The show has the look of a financial news channel. The stock value of some 250 celebrities - actors, musicians, sportsmen and the famous-for-being-famous - crawls across the bottom of the screen like tickertape. Stars have their own abbreviations: SALHAY is Salma Hayek, SANBUL is Sandra Bullock." Los Angeles Times 04/14/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 6:01 pm
Beseiged Moscow Theatre Production To Close "The musical being performed when Chechen guerrillas seized a Moscow theater last October will close next month as audiences stay away for fear of a copy-cat attack, the play's director said." Yahoo! (Reuters) 04/15/03
Posted: 04/15/2003 7:27 am
More From The Humana Festival This year's offerings at the Humana Festival of new plays followed some common themes. "Bad endings in America? Mopey zeitgeist? Metaphorical navel-gazing? Armchair quarterbacking the philosophical arc of the Humana is the second-most-favorite pastime of the festival. (Relentless schmoozing is, of course, numero uno.) And because so many of this year's scripts seemed not-quite-fully realized, there was plenty of room for interpretation." St. Paul Pioneer-Press 04/13/03
Posted: 04/15/2003 7:20 am
What Will It Take To Revitalize The Royal Shakespeare? Has Michael Boyd just taken on the worst job in theatre? He says running the Royal Shakespeare Company is "tricky," not bad. "Recently, it's been very difficult to resist the feeling of the RSC being the largest machine in an entrepreneurial theatrical world, but what we've actually got to be is the alternative to the entrepreneurial world. We've got to be a bit of a bastion of idealism, a bastion of research and development. We need room to experiment with our work, not always feeling the need to programme conservatively. We do Shakespeare for goodness' sake. That's commercial enough in its own right.' He wants to return the RSC to the cutting edge of British theatre." The Telegraph (UK) 04/15/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:47 pm
Has Political Comedy Lost Its Edge? "Many Americans, it's often remarked, who don't read the papers get their news from the likes of Jon Stewart and David Letterman. Comedy needn't have a political purpose. It can just be funny. But at its best, political humor can be subversive, pushing the world in at least a different direction. Rush Limbaugh, a former deejay, who is as much a humorist as polemicist, had this effect 10 years ago, though probably not any more. But, in general, because political comedy is so pervasive, it may have lost much of its ability to be persuasive. With political comedy now 24/7, it's startling to be reminded that the art form, as we know it, didn't exist until about 40 years ago." Washington Monthly 04/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:35 pm
Librarians Fighting The Patriot Act Librarians across America are debating how to protect the privacy of their patrons as the government demands to see borrowing records. "There's a huge concern in the library profession about it. The idea that you're free to read, to think, without government looking over your shoulder is sacrosanct." Chicago Sun-Times 04/15/03
Posted: 04/15/2003 7:36 am
Mobs Burn Down Iraq's Libraries Having destroyed Iraq's art treasures in the museums, mobs moved on to Iraq's libraries, destroying the country's written history. "The National Library and Archives a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze." The Independent (UK) 04/15/03
Posted: 04/15/2003 7:32 am
Kids Book - Is Everything Fair Game? It used to be that children's books were filled with niceness. It's different now: "With the exception of fantasy, most books for older children eagerly embrace 'unsuitable' subjects: mental illness, poverty, crime, sex and drugs. Perhaps childhood is disappearing. When most information, as well as entertainment, came from the printed word, it was possible to isolate what children read from the fare on offer for adults. This came to mean the sheltering of children from adult secrets, particularly sexual secrets. The growth of radio, television and the internet obviously means that this isolation is now at an end; all children now have access to information that would have been automatically denied them as little as 20 years ago." London Evening Standard 04/14/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:42 pm
Canadian TV Cuts Cuts in funding to the Canadian Television Fund, the Canadian government's mechanism for funding Canadian television will mean several longstanding shows will go off the air. "In all, 129 productions - 64% of all applicants - were denied funding from the CTF's Licence Fee Program, which contributes 20% of a show's budget. Seventy-three productions combined to receive a total of $75-million in funding, including Trailer Park Boys, Da Vinci's Inquest and Blue Murder." National Post 04/15/03
Posted: 04/15/2003 7:00 am
SAG And AFTRA Union Leaders Vote To Merge Directors of America's two main actors unions have coted to merge. "Aimed at providing more negotiating muscle, saving money and ending jurisdiction squabbles, the plan would fold the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists into the new Alliance of International Media Artists. Sunday's vote by SAG and AFTRA directors turns the issue over to members, who are expected to vote by this summer. Although the strong support by directors bodes well for the plan, at least 60% of the members still must OK it." Los Angeles Times 04/14/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 6:05 pm
Prisoner Of HDTV The transition from analog broadcast television to digital broadcast television (DTV), now an enshrined part of American broadcasting policy, faces a horde of technical, legal, economic, and social problems. Taken together, the problems look as unbeatable as any monster. Making things worse, many factions with a stake in the outcome are at war over such issues as technology mandates, copyright protection, and fair use." So who really cares? "There’s much more than digital television at stake. Bad government actions in this sphere - and you can be sure that Congress and the Federal Communications Commission will act rather than refrain from acting - could permanently shoehorn part or all of the computer revolution under government-driven design control. Not only would this likely kill the dynamism of the information-technology sector, but it is unlikely to do much to protect copyright interests." Reason 04/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:29 pm
Are NPR Underwriting Spots Too Commercial? Are public radio underwriting spots sounding too much like commercials? Many local public radio stations have been complaining about spots carried on National Public Radio. "In the past several months, stations have blasted the network for accepting a Microsoft spot that urged listeners to 'learn more about…' and one for Saab heralding a '. . . dynamic new look'." Current 04/07/03
Posted: 04/14/2003 5:18 pm
