IDEAS
http://www.artsjournal.com/ideas
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Decades Of Media Consolidation Media mergers and ownership consolidation aren't just a recent phenomenon. Back "in the late 1960s, during a flurry of media-industry mergers, The Atlantic published several articles that pointedly asked, Who controls the media? and How big is too big?" Some of the questions the magazine explored then seem applicable once again. The Atlantic 06/02/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/ideas/redir/20030605-24239.html
Art Or Cruel Exploitation? Santiago Sierra creates "art" that uses people - exploits them, actually. They make powerful messages, but are they really art? He has "created pieces that involved workers from the local underclass being paid to do meaningless tasks: support a piece of Sheetrock at a 65-degree angle for an entire day; sit inside a cardboard box; or push around two-ton blocks of concrete. By designing such deliberately pointless 'jobs,' he highlighted the disjunction between such workers and their work, showing labor as an imposed condition rather than a choice one makes. 'The remunerated worker doesn?t care if you tell him to clean the room or make it dirtier. As long as you pay him, it?s exactly the same. The relationship to work is based only upon money'." ARTNews 06/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/ideas/redir/20030605-24237.html
Ode To Liverpool. Yes, Liverpool, Damn it. Liverpool has been a blighted hulk for a long time. Now it's been named the European Capital of Culture, and maybe that will help pick up the city and return it to its former glory. "A hundred years ago the city was the gateway to the empire, the port from which nine million emigrants sailed off to the promised lands of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand." It was then "Britain's only really multicultural city which teemed with Lascar seamen from the Indies, the descendants of African and Black American sailors, Jews from the Pale of Settlement, and the largest Chinatown in Europe. It was a city with its back turned against the land, one which barely inhabited the country it was nominally part of." The Guardian (UK) 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/artsissues/redir/20030606-24251.html
Colorado Governor Slashes At Arts Staff First Colorado Governor Bill Owens is instrumental is slashing the state's arts budget from $1.9 million to $200,000. Now Owens is telling the arts council that it mustn't spend the money on itself. "Currently, he said, 82 percent - $165,000 - is allotted to infrastructure. Owens asked that only $40,000 be used." Rocky Mountain News 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/artsissues/redir/20030605-24249.html
Artists Angry Over Plans For Arts School Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a "self- proclaimed champion of the arts," has hundreds of artists mad at him. He's proposed expanding his Oakland School for the Arts, but he wants to expand it into a building that already houses artists, and the plan would evict them. "To displace working artists who are serving thousands of kids and adults for a school for the arts that will serve maybe 400 students at most is perverse. It makes no sense." San Francisco Chronicle 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/artsissues/redir/20030605-24214.html
UK Film Audiences Forsake Brit Films, Buy American More and more Britons are going to the movies. But British films are losing ground, says a new study. "Although younger people are flocking to the cinema in ever increasing numbers they are overwhelmingly watching films made by the big US studios. No solely British film reached the list of top 20 films released last year, nor the top 20 list for the past 10 years." The Guardian (UK) 06/06/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/media/redir/20030606-24253.html
Is Pixar The New Disney? After five consecutive hits—Pixar's other two movies are the inspired Toy Story 2 and the middling A Bug's Life—the animation studio must now be considered 'the most reliable creative force in Hollywood. Perhaps not since Preston Sturges made seven classic comedies in a row between 1940 and 1944 has one name been such a consistent indicator of audience and critical pleasure.' The 'next Disney' comparisons that have long been lavished upon Pixar and its creative head, John Lasseter, have become more emphatic: Now Pixar and Lasseter are compared not just to Disney, but to Disney during its 'golden age some 60 years ago,' as the Los Angeles Daily News put it." Slate 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/media/redir/20030605-24246.html
If You Play Contemporary Music And No One Comes, Is It Still Good Music? Birmingham's Floof! Festival of contemporary music was first rate. But there was no one there to listen. "The trouble with Britain is that it has a showbiz culture, and things are not regarded as worthwhile unless they fill halls. It is important for those involved in contemporary art music to push home the notion that small audiences are acceptable, that new music deserves a protected status, that it should not be judged by how many bums are affixed to seats. This is reasonable. But while it is fine to accept the position that new music can be a minority interest, which ought not be judged according to popularity, it by no means follows that we should be satisfied with that." The Guardian (UK) 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/music/redir/20030606-24252.html
70s Stars Are The Stadium-Sellers "While new artists like Norah Jones, 24, dominate the airwaves and sell millions of albums, the old folks are cleaning up at the box office. Last summer, five of the top 10 grossing tours were artists that came of age in the '70s, including Billy Joel and Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Neil Diamond and The Eagles. Three others were acts that debuted in the '60s: Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, and Cher. Creed and The Dave Matthews Band rounded out the top 10." San Jose Mercury-News 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/music/redir/20030605-24248.html
All About The Piano It's the 150th anniversary of the founding of the American Steinway company. Time was when pianos were a big status symbol. "By the end of the 19th century, about one in six New Yorkers worked in some piano-related job..." The New York Times 06/06/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/music/redir/20030605-24244.html
The Problem With Jazz Criticism Jazz critic Stanley Crouch was fired from JazzTimes magazine last month, and he says there's much wrong with the field of jazz criticism today. "There is such consistency in the jazz press, and its predilections, that it represents a virtual conspiracy?not one that includes clandestine meetings or muttering in code?but a conspiracy of consensus based in modernist European ideas of avant gardism. It?s stapled to concepts that Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg pushed into the art world during the 1940s and 1950s, championing the narrows of Abstract Expressionism as 'advanced' because they ignored the body of basic classical skills in the interest of autobiographical methods devised by the painters themselves. But right now, while mouthing those theories, jazz criticism is actually dominated by an adolescent vision of rebellion that arrives from the world of pop music, rock in particular. That is why I was fired last month from JazzTimes." Newsweek 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/music/redir/20030605-24240.html
Will Fans Outgrow Harry? Publishers of the new Harry Potter installment are having 8.5 million pcopies printed in the US. But "as the young wizard enters adolescence in the series' fifth book, will his original fan base follow, now that many of them are teens themselves? That is the question facing Rowling and her U.S. publisher, Scholastic, with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Yahoo! (USAToday) 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/publishing/redir/20030605-24247.html
Publishers In A Price-Chopping Mood What were publishers thinking about at last week's annual BookExpo? "Lower prices were on many people's minds at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where BookExpo America, the industry's annual national gathering, ended Sunday. Publishers and booksellers agreed that in a slow economy they needed to find ways to conform to the budgets of their customers. With hardcovers often costing $25 or higher, publishers are cutting the price of some hardcover editions and going straight to paperback." Chicago Tribune (AP) 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/publishing/redir/20030605-24206.html
Tonys - Predicting A Good Hair Day "Ask anyone on Broadway what's going to win best musical, best book and, yes, best score, and the answer is 'Hairspray,' the big favorite in many musical categories, a blockbuster hit that broke early from the gate — it opened in August — and never let up." The New York Times 06/06/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/theatre/redir/20030605-24243.html
Some Predictable Tonys? There's not much suspense about this Sunday's Tony Awards. "Think 'Hairspray,' 'Take Me Out' and 'Long Day's Journey Into Night,' and you could be more than halfway there. Still, hopes are high for the entertainment portion of the telecast, particularly with Hugh Jackman as host and the decision by CBS to devote three hours of network time to the show, after several years of letting PBS broadcast the first hour. The Tonys may be perennially low-rated but the ceremony attracts those upper-income viewers certain advertisers love." Backstage (AP) 06/05/03
http://www.artsjournal.com/theatre/redir/20030605-24238.html
Will Disney Hall Be LA's Defining Building? Many cities are anxious to have some sort of iconic defining piece of architecture to add to add to their skyline. "This sense of a great city with a vast meeting place at its heart is important. Los Angeles has failed as a place for public spaces, but civic connectedness is something L.A. needs to be a truly great city." So will Frank Gehry's new Disney Hall be that building? Christian Science Monitor 06/06/03
http://artsjournal.com/visualarts/redir/20030606-24250.html
Christo Project To Raise Money For Central Park Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always raised money for their big projects themselves. But their Central Park project - due to take place in 2005 - might cost $20 million. And there are environmental concerns about protecting the park. "While the potential for marketing products related to these project is almost limitless, the artists have never allowed any licensing or taken any such initiatives themselves. Until now." The artists have allowed a foundation to license worldwide marketing rights to the project, with all the proceeds going to protecting an restoring Central Park. The New York Times 06/06/03
http://artsjournal.com/visualarts/redir/20030605-24245.html
Selling Saatchi "For many, this is a veritable freak show - one now worth an estimated £50 million - in large part due to the yBas, a group of young British artists who fought a frenzied fight for attention in the late 1980s and '90s. It was a conflagration that Saatchi, advertising man to the core, had an instinct for uncovering and promoting. One suspects that Saatchi perceives himself as a kind of magus, someone whose primary motive is control. It seems quite possible that his pleasure comes from the manipulation of taste, the general public and art community." ArtNet.com 06/04/03
http://artsjournal.com/visualarts/redir/20030605-24213.html
