Classic Pose - Get Your Picture Done Is there a question anymore about the traditionalist turn art has taken in the past couple of years? "In these times when any visitor to Times Square can sit for an artist whose oeuvre includes fine sketches of Tupac Shakur, James Childs has turned a clever living immortalizing what was once called upper-case-S Society, in a heroic, labor-intensive style you might have thought even more antiquated than Society itself. Working in the formal discipline of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or John Singer Sargent, Mr. Childs takes about four such commissions a year, for which he charges $150,000 and up for full-length portraits." The New York Times 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:36 am
Read...er...Watch All About It "As technology and programming continue to be refined, the border between artwork and interpretive information will probably blur further. All sorts of boundaries in the arts got blurred or erased beginning in the '60s, with the rise of Pop art, Fluxus, Happenings, earthworks and other innovations. We may be witnessing the erasure of yet one more." San Francisco Chronicle 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:38 am
America-As-Idea - A Flawed Concept The Whitney's "American Effect" show is an idea worth exploring, on its face, writes Blake Gopnik. But there's a fatal flaw in the working out of the idea. "Many, maybe most, of the dozens of brilliant artists working today aren't American, and it's hard to think of a single one of those foreigners whose art, however socially engaged, centers on ideas about America. Of course, that's why none of those artists is in the Whitney show. The exhibition mostly features little-known foreign artists who deserve their lack of recognition." Washington Post 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 8:54 am
Modern Architecture - A Cautionary Tale Thirty years after it was built (in 1972), Smith College's fine arts center was "uninhabitable." Why did this relatively new building fail to hold up while Smith's other buildings are doing fine after a century? "Before the era of the modern movement, buildings were built in predictable and conventional ways. Builders knew how to build in that manner. Architects didn't ask them to do anything else. But with the arrival of modernism, architects began to invent new kinds of construction. They experimented. A gap opened between the traditional builder and the modernist architect. No longer could the builder correct the architect's mistakes. What happened to Andrews's building is only too typical." Boston Globe 08/23/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 7:33 am
The New Dissonance Gone are the days of experimenting with sound just for its own sake and calling it music. Now dissonance has to mean something. "Our generation was made to feel we had to come to grips with 12-tone music. We had a psychic investment in it. I have to say my students today don't feel any such obligation. Back then we would have considered them yahoos. But my students have a lot of honesty." The New York Times 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:59 am
Arena Shows Shrinking The big arena pop music shows are dwindling. Rather, the number of bands that can fill an arena are shrinking. So "arenas around the country are reacting to a changing marketplace by shrinking themselves into more intimate, theater-style setups while hoping to lure the plethora of midsized acts who can only draw between 5,000 and 8,000 spectators per show." St. Paul Pioneer-Press 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:43 am
Australian Court Fines Big Music Companies Music giants Warner and Universal have been fined $2 million in Australia for trying to coerce retailers into not selling budget CD's. "The commission originally launched legal action after the companies first threatened then refused to supply four Australian retailers that stocked so-called parallel-imported CDs." The Age (Melbourne) 08/23/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 7:28 am
Connective Tissue - Why Flash Mobs Are Interesting Some critics have quickly tired of flash-mobs that began this summer, writing off the phenomenon as "a slightly annoying fad, the techno equivalent of streaking. Others detect a 'social revolution' in the offing. Flash mobs are worth paying attention to. They offer a lesson about the evolving nature of networks: from Friendster, a six-degrees-of-separation dating service, to the 'relationship mining' software that combs through employees' electronic address books to identify which of their contacts might be useful to the employer. What flash mobs do is make networks tangible." New York Times Magazine 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 7:42 am
Elliott Carter - On Top At 94 "Though considered in certain circles to be America's greatest living composer, he is, in others, demonized for alienating audiences with music that's so dense, so packed with information in so little time, that it's like street noise. Anyone listening to Carter expecting typical classical symmetry and tunefulness is primed for disappointment. If heard in the anything-can-happen spirit of progressive jazz, Carter's hairpin turns and animated chatter among instruments are anything but mysterious. He tests listeners at the beginning of his pieces, often with a jarring chord that all but says, 'If you can handle this, the rest is easy'." Philadelphia Inquirer 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:09 am
Lawrence Summers - Reinventing Harvard? As president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers has a radical agenda - transforming the very nature of the way one of the world's great universities does business. "Even if Summers were a guileful and calculating figure with a hidden agenda of drastic change, he would have a tough row to hoe. But he's not: he's a blunt and overbearing figure with an overt agenda of drastic change. It should come as no surprise that Larry Summers is not quite as popular a figure as his gracious predecessor was." New York Times Magazine 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 7:46 am
Direct This! "Willful directors can either enliven or distort. Enliven, if they accept the gulf between a playwright's time and immediate intentions on the one hand and the sensibilities of today on the other, and set up a critical dialogue between past and present, text and audience. Distort, if they just lay a simple-minded, ideologically monolithic interpretation on a multi-faceted play. The temptation to distort is particularly powerful in a climate that discourages the new, like commercially cautious Broadway or the West End today." The New York Times 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 11:17 am
Stepping Up To Support Edinburgh Fringe? Scotland's new culture minister says more support for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival might be on the way. He "said the Fringe was a product others would kill for and could be enhanced by strategic funding of its infrastructure. In a clear shift in the Executive’s position, Frank McAveety acknowledged an investment in the bricks and mortar of the event - its venues, accommodation and transport - was something which could be pulled together".
The Scotsman 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:26 am
Scotland To Get National Theatre? After years of delay, it looks like the Scottish government is ready to fund a National Theatre. "This is a very significant moment in Scottish culture. There is a paradox in Scottish culture, which a national theatre can bridge. On the one hand, the Executive have been supporting events like Scotland at the Smithsonian, which took Scottish culture to America. But almost immediately afterwards, we stage these great festivals which offer no real focus. If the Executive is serious about presenting Scottish culture, it needs a champion like a national theatre." The Scotsman 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:22 am
How About Investing In My Novel? Novelist Kent Nelson needed $5000 to help finish his novel, so he went to a friend and offered to cut him in on the profits if he'd put up the money. Trouble is, Nelson didn't exactly have a track record of profits from his writing, and he didn't even have a publisher. But the friend put up the money, Nelson snared a major publisher, and the book is getting great reviews. Are profits next? Rocky Mountain News 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:58 am
Hollywood's Romance With Books "Hollywood has had a long love affair with books, and like any relationship, it has had its highs ("Gone With the Wind") and lows ("The Great Gatsby"). There are movies that are better than the books ("The Godfather"); movies that drastically depart from books with disastrous consequences ("The Scarlet Letter" starring Demi Moore); and movies that differ to one degree or another but still capture the spirit of the book ("The French Lieutenant's Woman")." Orange County Register 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:30 am
Embracing Our Digital Movie Future (But When?) "There is little question that digital is the future of movie exhibition. The real questions are when it will happen and who will pay for it. The major studios are gung-ho on the technology because transmitting a movie over phone lines or on discs or by satellite will save them the expense of making individual prints of their films. At $10,000 a copy, a studio spends millions to duplicate a film like "The Hulk" that opens on 3,000 to 4,000 screens. Digital imagery is ostensibly incorruptible and theoretically as vivid as photographs on film. The digital revolution was supposed to happen four years ago..." St. Louis Post-Dispatch 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:53 am
The 70s - When Movies Were Golden (Weren't They?) In the past 10 years, 1970s cinema has become an unqualified cult. Directors like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Spike Jonze make films under its influence; fan-boy Web sites extol its glories. Not long before she died, Pauline Kael wrote that the 1970s were 'when the movies seemed to be about things that mattered.' Yet, there's something troubling about the way 1970s cinema has evolved from mere fandom to become its own genre, especially among younger cinephiles." St. Paul Pioneer-Press (LATimes) 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 9:47 am
Remembering Bil And Arnie In The Kitchen Eric Bogosian remembers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane and their early days at The Kitchen in New York. "They brought to the dance works grace and intelligence. But they also brought aggression, something that interested me. They brought stillness. And they weren't happy just moving around. Language had to be part of it, and has been ever since. Sexual politics, race politics, tremendous movement, a surreal soulfulness all were thrown into the mix." The New York Times 08/24/03
Posted: 08/24/2003 10:51 am
