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Monday, January 26
The Voynich Code: Gibberish For Profit "A British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century's best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars." As it turns out, the entire thing is a bunch of meaningless gibberish, designed to mystify scholars and make a substantial profit for its author based solely on the mystique of the unknown. Worked like a charm, apparently. The Observer (UK) 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:17 am
Everybody Wants A Bilbao Frank Gehry will unveil his plans for the Art Gallery of Ontario this week, and the pressure is mounting. "Unlike any of Gehry's other projects, the Art Gallery of Ontario is a two-headed client: There's AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum and then there's the publishing magnate Kenneth Thomson, who has donated not only his massive collection of art but also $70-million in cash to a reinvented art gallery. Added to the froth is a residual expectation that maybe, if everybody tries a little harder, $200-million -- the estimated budget for the project -- will buy the architectural ecstasy of Bilbao." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/24/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:14 am
Thinking Small(er) Some days, it seems as if every museum in America is mounting a major expansion, or at least talking about it. But at The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, the desire for more space is tempered by the realities of the marketplace, and the museum's directors are anxious to do more with less. Rather than attempt a massive new building project, MOCAD is planning a modest expansion with a price tag of less than $4 million, which it hopes will generate buzz without endangering the institution financially, or alienating the public with demands for government subsidies in a notoriously conservative state. Denver Post 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:09 am
The Whitney's New Direction The Whitney Museum is undergoing a dramatic behind-the-scenes makeover, with new director Adam Weinberg restructuring the administration, creating a "council of wise persons" to advise him, and shaking up the curatorial designations put in place by his predecessor, Maxwell Anderson. Weinberg is still interested in looking at expansion options for the Whitney, which famously cancelled a recent planned expansion designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, but his short-term goals lie in the stabilization of an institution which has been perceived as chaotic and directionless for some time. The Art Newspaper 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 4:32 am
The Day The Music Died The Bottom Line, the legendary New York venue which showcased acts from Joan Baez to The Police, officially shut down last week after losing a financial battle with its landlord, New York University. "For a music lover the place always seemed too good to last. The Bottom Line was a grand anomaly among clubs: a place where the music came first. In the end, it seemed, its owners weren't greedy enough." The New York Times 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:59 am
Desperation Tactics The Louisville Orchestra is changing the way it does business, it says, but it's difficult to tell exactly what that means, or how it will improve the fortunes of the financially distressed ensemble. Louisville fired its music director largely because of poor ticket sales, and is loudly declaring to anyone who will listen that it is going to give its audience whatever it asks for. That sort of marketing strategy is bound to backfire, says Andrew Adler. "The orchestra is so afraid of anything that smacks of elitism that it's hurtling headlong in the opposite aesthetic direction: celebrating small-d cultural democratization to the exclusion of more challenging repertoire." Louisville Courier-Journal 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:45 am
Why Crossover Singers Almost Always Sound Stupid From the first time the Three Tenors stepped up to a microphone and began belting Broadway tunes, discriminating listeners have known that there is a serious disconnect between the vocal styles of classical musicians and, well, everyone else. In fact, the real failure of the "crossover" genre is not that it has dumbed down the classical market, but that the singers almost always sound like fish out of water, says Richard Dyer. "Too many opera singers have had the wrong tonal quality, the wrong diction, the wrong rhythm -- and the wrong arrangements. There is a kind of arrangement that knows no period; Las Vegas lies in a land beyond time and place, and that's where the hearts of too many arrangers lie." Boston Globe 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 5:56 am
Sony Not-So-Classical Casey Stratton is a talented singer-songwriter from Michigan, who recently got himself a record deal. But the record company he signed with is Sony Classical, which has never marketed a pop singer before, and observers have been left wondering exactly what Stratton and Sony think they're doing. The truth is, of course, that classical labels are willing to try anything to stay afloat these days, and if that means trying to balance the books on the back of a talented non-classical performer who would never have been given a chance by the increasingly risk-averse pop labels, then so be it. Boston Globe 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 5:51 am
Blaming The Audience If classical music is really dying, or at least becoming a culturally irrelevant fringe entertainment, we have no one to blame but ourselves, writes Bernard Holland. "An implicit contract has been signed but is not necessarily being honored. It states that if I understand a piece of music, I'm likely to like it, too. This is not true. No amount of experience and analysis can by itself induce the stab of communication between art and its beholder... The consumer, it would seem, bears the fault. The product is rarely held accountable." The New York Times 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 5:37 am
Why Not Anne? The idea of a woman conducting an orchestra is no longer revolutionary by any stretch, but there still has never been a woman who has approached "major" status in the profession. Generally, the top candidates to bust through the glass ceiling are said to be those who promote themselves most skillfully, but the quiet competence and determination of Anne Manson makes her an attractive candidate as well. In fact, in a profession still plagued by sexist notions of women's abilities, Manson is a calm and non-threatening rebuttal. Her unwillingness to be cutthroat may hurt her career in the short term, but in the long run, it may just be what vaults her to stardom. The New York Times 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 5:21 am
Bono & The F-Word: The Next Cultural Battleground Ever since the FCC ruled that the pop singer Bono hadn't violated any obscenity laws by uttering the word "fucking" on a live awards telecast, with the rationale being that he used the word as an adjective, conservative watchdog groups have been up in arms. Congress is considering a bill which would ban such language outright from the public airwaves, and the Supreme Court may even have to weigh in eventually. Such histrionics often miss the point, says Brian Lambert, and the fact is that the Supreme Court is already on record concerning what constitutes obscenity. Not that such niceties as facts have ever stopped culture warriors on either side of the political divide... St. Paul Pioneer Press 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:37 am
Nobody Knows Art Like Customs Inspectors "The definition of art is not something that anyone would lightly undertake. Nor would it normally be left to a US customs official to decide. But that is exactly what happened in October 1926," when an extraordinary legal battle erupted over a Constantin Brancusi statue being brought into the U.S. "The point was that ordinary merchandise was subject to duty at 40 per cent, while art was not. And the customs official on duty at the time happened to be an amateur sculptor – just the sort of person to have bumptiously confident views about matters aesthetic. He took one look at the Brancusis, concluded that they weren't art, and levied $4,000 duty." The Telegraph (UK) 01/24/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:29 am
Always Get Written Permission For Your Corpse Art Dr Gunther von Hagens is not a popular man in the art world to begin with, having made his name by embalming human corpses with plastic, skinning them, and then displaying them with organs exposed. But Svetlana Krechetova is no ordinary art critic: according to a lawsuit she has filed against Hagens, the good doctor used her father's body without permission, after corrupt mortuary staff told her that the body had been cremated. Hagens is also facing charges that he recently accepted the bodies of executed Chinese dissidents. The Observer (UK) 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:22 am
The Dangers Of Copyright Protection The current push by musicians, writers, and publishers for ever-increasing levels of copyright protection seems to have taken on a life of its own, and it may just be threatening everything we take for granted about the freedom of information. "In less than a decade, the much-ballyhooed liberating potential of the Internet seems to have given way to something of an intellectual land grab, presided over by legislators and lawyers for the media industries." New York Times Magazine 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 5:45 am
Castro & The Librarians "A bitter, months-long dispute within the American Library Association - the largest nation-based organization of librarians in the world - continues as to whether to demand that Fidel Castro release 10 imprisoned independent librarians found guilty of making available to Cubans copies of George Orwell's 1984 and the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights." The ALA had the chance, at its recent convention, to call for the release of their Cuban colleagues, but a motion to this effect was overwhelmingly defeated in favor of a tepid statement of "deep concern" over the imprisonments. Chicago Sun-Times 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 4:51 am
The New Heifetz? "Nikolaj Znaider, still only in his late twenties, is already being spoken of in the same breath as some of the great violinists of the past – Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin. The point is not so much that he sounds like any of them but that he is in that illustrious line of musicians who are able to use technique with wisdom and sensibility to exert a strong personality in their playing." Znaider has very little use for the type of career-obsessed musicians he encountered at Juilliard, and believes that many in the classical industry have completely lost sight of what's important in their playing. So naturally, critics love the guy. The Telegraph (UK) 01/24/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:33 am
Grilling The New Guy As James Cuno prepares take over the leadership of the Art Institute of Chicago, he faces not only the scrutiny of the local critics, but the pressure of leading a major art institution at a time when much of the industry is looking for a way out of the "blockbuster" trend, without risking irrelevancy in the eys of the public. Cuno seems unfazed by the challenge: "Increasingly, people come to museums at different times of their life. We shouldn't only think of the learning museum as something for young people. Increasingly it's for older people. Our generations have been aging differently. So we need to be responsive to young and mature and senior learners as much as anything." Chicago Tribune 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:03 am
- Previously: Cuno Named To Head Art Institute Of Chicago James Cuno, currently director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, has been named director of the Art Institute of Chicago. "For nearly 12 years Mr. Cuno was director of the Harvard University Art Museums, a complex that under his leadership doubled the size of its staff and budget and emerged as one of the best smaller museums in the United States. At Harvard in the 1990's he directed a $37 million capital campaign that ended up raising $55 million." The New York Times 01/22/04
The Best 95-Year-Old Filmmaker You've Never Heard Of Unless you're a real amateur film buff, the odds are that you've never hard of Sidney N. Laverents. But as filmmakers go, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more influential or prolific amateur. "Now 95, Mr. Laverents is a distinctively American artist: a rec-room tinkerer with the can-do optimism of someone who got through the Depression and found comfort in the suburbs. Following his own whims rather than any cultural movement, he turned himself from a one-man band into a one-man independent movie studio." This week, 34 years after the release of his award-winning special-effects feature "Multiple SIDosis," Laverents has earned an L.A. retrospective. The New York Times 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 5:31 am
The Electric Kool-Aid Writing Test Two new Ken Kesey books have recently been posthumously released, begging the question of exactly what Kesey could have accomplished in life, had he just been able to focus on writing, rather than on the drugs which so many of his contemporaries insist were the source of much of his creativity. "When Kesey forsook literature in 1964 to become a man of letters—LSD—did he blow it? Or did he ignite a refining fire that still burns bright at the heart of every rave in America? Did drugs make him, or undo him?" Seattle Weekly 01/21/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 4:43 am
Goodspeed's Dilemma Connecticut-based Goodspeed Musicals, which for years has made its home in the town of East Haddam, has been planning to build a new 700-seat theater across the street from its current stage. But last year, the nearby burg of Middletown came calling, offering a better site, a tax abatement, and loads of other perks if Goodspeed would move its base of operations. As yet, Goodspeed's board has made no decision on where the new theatre will go, but the spectacle of two cities battling over a cultural jewel is a bit sickening, says Frank Rizzo. And besides, how exactly is Middletown planning to make back its investment in Goodspeed if it wins the battle? Hartford Courant 01/25/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 5:15 am
Big Changes Afoot At Times Book Review When The New York Times starts to talk about monkeying around with its books section, a large sector of the publishing industry sits up and takes notice. So the rumors currently circulating have to be causing some near-aneurysms, particularly among writers, editors, and readers of fiction. The Times is planning to cut way back on the number of novels it reviews, with arts editor Steven Erlanger saying that, "To be honest, there's so much s---" in the current fiction market. Non-fiction will get the lion's share of the focus in the future, and there will be fewer straight reviews, and more coverage of the publishing industry in general, as well as a new focus on reviewing the type of "popular" books once shunned by high-minded books sections. Poynter Online 01/21/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 4:58 am
- What Have They Got Against Fiction? ArtsJournal blogger Our Girl In Chicago is upset at some of the changes coming to the Times books section. "It's not as though my reading habits are going to take a big hit even if the NYTBR banishes fiction reviews from their pages altogether. Yet the blinkered reasoning proffered by [Times executive editor] Bill Keller rankles. First there's his general blithe condescension toward novels, apparently based on an assumption that while nonfiction is serious, fiction is just playing around. Even if Bill Keller really thinks this, it astonishes me that he'd say it, let alone that the Times would base editorial policy on it." About Last Night (AJ Blogs) 01/22/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 4:57 am
Hobbits And Cubicle Drones Win Big At The Globes The Golden Globe Awards were as unpredictable as ever last night, with the critically acclaimed Cold Mountain getting all but shut out despite leading the field in nominations, and the final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy taking home four awards, including best dramatic film and best director for Peter Jackson. On the television side of the slate, the satirical BBC sitcom The Office, which airs only on a little-known cable network in the U.S., was the surprise winner of best comedy, and also garnered an acting award for the show's creator and star, Ricky Gervais. CNN 01/26/04
Posted: 01/26/2004 6:53 am
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