The Politics Of The Next Big Thing What's the Next Big Thing in visual art? Some are making the case for figurative painting. But the truth? "There is no next big thing. In any case, the novelty of the YBA generation wore off a decade ago. For younger artists, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin probably look as old hat and establishment as Howard Hodgkin or Henry Moore. Emulating the strategies of the past generation - in terms of self-promotion as well as their more formal devices - would be pointless and self-defeating. Artists have to carve out their own territory." The Guardian (UK) 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:50 pm
Architecture: Not Just For Buildings Anymore In this era of superstar architects and buildings that are decidedly form-over-function, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that household objects are now popping up with names like Gehry attached to them. "The new objects of desire are consumables designed by architects to help everybody bond around design... The possibilities for invention with new materials are staggering. It takes a lot of extra sweat to get from having an idea about new manipulations with glass to putting the 'float' tea lantern on the shelf." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 6:36 am
A Badger Takes On City Hall A 47-year-old, radically queer homeless man named Badger is probably not many people's first vision of what an artist looks like. But to the residents of New Orleans, Gainesville, Asheville, Minneapolis, and other cities which Badger has temporarily called home who have been lucky enough to come across his work - large-scale installation pieces, usually constructed of found objects, and usually functional enough to double as a temporary shelter for anyone in need - there is very little question that the man is devoted to his work. The authorities, however, tend to take a dim view of art which they see as encouraging vagrancy, and this spring, Badger has been facing down the parks board of Minneapolis in a desperate fight to preserve what he creates. City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 5:43 am
Artists Of The Computer Underground "The idea that every hacker is an artist and every artist is a hacker isn't groundbreaking -- recent gallery and museum shows have focused on the link between art and coding -- but a new book by programmer Paul Graham gives the concept a fresh twist by advising hackers to improve their skills by borrowing creative techniques from other artists... Graham slams the artistic conceit that all art is good and taste is purely subjective, pointing out that if you aren't willing to say that some creations aren't beautiful then you'll never develop the aesthetic muscles necessary to define and develop good work." Wired 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 5:28 am
Whitney Back On Expansion Track "Little more than a year after the Whitney Museum of American Art scrapped its plans for a $200 million expansion designed by the Rotterdam architect Rem Koolhaas, its board has started the process all over again. A building committee has been interviewing other architects, including the Italian Renzo Piano, who is considered the favorite, people in architectural circles said." The New York Times 05/19/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 10:12 pm
The Turner Four "The four artists shortlisted for this year's Turner prize include a pair of sculptors exploring the relationships between people and architecture, an artist who uses his west African heritage to play with cultural identity and an artist best known for his re-enactments of battles which became turning points in British history." The Guardian (UK) 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:47 pm
Seattle Public Library - Best Of A Generation More praise for Rem Koolhaas' new public library in Seattle. Paul Goldberger calls it "the most important new library to be built in a generation, and the most exhilarating. Koolhaas has always been a better architect than social critic, and the building conveys a sense of the possibility, even the urgency, of public space in the center of a city. The design is not so much a rejection of traditional monumentality as a reinterpretation of it, and it celebrates the culture of the book as passionately, in its way, as does the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The Seattle building is thrilling from top to bottom." The New Yorker 05/17/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:20 pm
Judge Dismisses Neighbors Suit Against Met Museum A New York judge has dismissed a suit by neighbors of the Metropolitan Musem to block the museum from expanding. The judge said "she was dismissing the group's petition objecting to a 300,000-square-foot expansion, partly because some claims were made after a statute of limitations had expired and partly because the Met had already scaled back its plans." Newsday 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:05 pm
Art Auction Market Soars Last week's art auctions in New York took in $186 million and set numerous records. "The record price that resonated most was for a joke painting by Canadian artist Richard Prince, which was bought by a young American hedge-fund manager for $747,000, four times its estimate. On a stark grey canvas, the artist has painted the words from a cracker joke: "I never had a penny to my name. So I changed my name." With prices like this, contemporary art cannot be a joke – surely." The Telegraph (UK) 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:02 pm
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Thielemann Quits Deutsche Oper "Christian Thielemann is quitting as music director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper in a dispute with the city government over scarce funding, the opera said Tuesday. His departure follows years of bickering over the future of Berlin's three opera houses as the capital tries to balance its cultural ambitions with $57 billion of municipal debt. Thielemann has complained that the rival Staatsoper, headed by Daniel Barenboim, was getting a better deal and demanded equal treatment." Chicago Tribune (AP) 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 5:57 am
- The War Behind The Words The fierce battle between Daniel Barenboim and Christian Thielemann to become the one true leader of the Berlin opera scene was a tragic but inevitable conflict made necessary when the city decided that it could no longer afford to fully subsidize three full-time opera houses, says Martin Kettle. But Barenboim/Thielemann is more than a faceoff between two great artists scrapping over a common pool of money: it is a clash of ideologies, both musical and political. It is liberal versus conservative, innovator versus traditionalist, and Berlin is caught in the middle. The Guardian (UK) 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 5:52 am
Radiohead Frontman Gets BBC Composer Post The guitarist for the art-rock band Radiohead has been named the BBC's newest composer-in-residence. Jonny Greenwood will fill the role for the next two years, and is committed to composing at least one orchestral work in that time. Greenwood, who is a classically trained viola player, has never formally attempted composition before, although Radiohead's songs have been hailed by many in the art music world, and pianist Chris O'Riley has even transcribed them for solo piano. BBC 05/18/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 5:21 am
Chicago Lyric Back In The Black After last season's $1.1 million deficit, the Chicago Lyric Opera has bounced back with a surplus of $700,000 for the season that ended Mar. 21. The company sold more than 98 percent of its tickets this season. Chicago Sun-Times 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:26 pm
Stolen Strad Recovered In Dumpster The Stradivarius cello stolen from a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic a few weeks ago has been recovered. A woman found it damaged in a dumpster and took it home, asking her boyfriend if he might be able to repair it. "The woman also told her boyfriend that if he couldn't, the cello might make an unusual compact disc case. 'Thank God my boyfriend doesn't work too quickly on things of mine'." Los Angeles Times 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 3:42 pm
New Deal For Toronto Performing Arts Center A Threat To Some Tenants? A controversial motion passed recently by the Toronto City Council to change the governance of the St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts, has raised concerns that it amounts to a takeover by primary tenant CanStage." The center's six other, smaller resident tenants charge that their survival would be in doubt under the new arrangement. Toronto Star 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 5:17 pm
The Fine Line Between Artistic Genius and National Irritant To say that Istvan Kantor was not a popular selection as the winner of this year's Governor-General's Award in visual and media arts would be an understatement. "Even from within the art-world ranks, the reaction to the announcement was mixed, with many opining that Kantor had more of a genius for self-promotion than art-making." Some call Kantor a neo-Dadaist genius - others sniff that he's merely neo-annoying and full of himself. Trying to keep an open mind is critic Sarah Milroy, who, after viewing the artist's latest film, is wondering "what would happen if Kantor stopped screaming and started thinking instead." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 6:40 am
Battle Over Bernstein Leonard Bernstein's first national television appearance, on the program "Omnibus," saw him emerge as America's foremost bridger of the gap between high art and popular culture. But strangely, the "Omnibus" shows aired only once, and the tapes have never been released to the public. "The reason is the entire "Omnibus" series, which ran almost continuously from 1952 to 1961, is stored on kinescopes in Wesleyan University's cinema archives and is the victim of a legal stalemate between Wesleyan and the families of Bernstein and "Omnibus" creator Robert Saudek." Hartford Courant 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 6:02 am
Art, History, & Politics: Cy Thao & The Minnesota Hmong Minnesota state legislator Cy Thao is a prominent figure in the Twin Cities' large population of Hmong, a nomadic people of Chinese origin who fled to the U.S. from Laos following the Vietnam War. As a lawmaker, Thao is one of only two Hmong officeholders in America (the other is also from St. Paul,) and is steadily gaining influence at the Capitol. But Thao is also an accomplished artist who is determined to break the thousand-year cycle of lost Hmong history through his work. This week, a series of 50 of Thao's oil paintings goes on display at a Minneapolis museum. City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 5:34 am
Schwarzman On Tap For Kennedy Center Stephen A. Schwarzman, president and CEO of the Blackstone Group, is the leading candidate to be the new chairman of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. "Schwarzman, 57, runs a firm that has invested more than $60 billion in scores of companies across the globe. The Financial Times of London last week called him "one of the most powerful dealmakers in the world." Washington Post 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 5:08 pm
Off_broadway's Fearless New Generation "American theater always manages to reinvent itself at the worst of all possible times. The best of our new theater practitioners have already begun to imagine a set of goals and procedures in which perception requires no other justification than the beauty that entitles it. In this dramatic universe, theatrical high jinks are their own reward; and so it is with the new plays one is beginning to encounter these days in New York." Village Voice 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 5:02 pm
Judge: Playright Owns "Stones" Authorship "A theatre director has lost her high court claim that she should be credited as joint author of the hit West End play Stones In His Pockets by award-winning writer Marie Jones. But Mr Justice Park, sitting in London, ruled that Pam Brighton, who claimed she had made an "extraordinary" creative contribution to the comedy, did have copyright in a draft opening script of the play." The Guardian (UK) 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:54 pm
Scotland's Oldest Theatre Could Close "Owners of Scotland's oldest working theatre - the Theatre Royal in Dumfries - have warned that it could close if they are forced to abandon a planned multi-million pound renovation scheme. The playhouse, in Shakespeare Street, was built in 1792 and was saved from demolition in 1959 when it was bought by the Guild of Players. Robert Burns was a patron and JM Barrie was inspired at the theatre to write plays including Peter Pan. Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin were visitors."
BBC 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 6:59 am
The Mystery Of The Conan Doyle Papers The papers of Arthur Conan Doyle are about to go on auction. "Even as that auction house has attracted a stream of Conan Doyle enthusiasts thrilled at the newly released material, it has also been sharply criticized by some scholars and members of Parliament for allowing the sale because they say crucial legal questions remain unresolved. They also say that the material is too important to be sold off piecemeal." The New York Times 05/19/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 10:10 pm
Moore's Personal Propaganda Squad? Michael Moore is a hero to many American liberals, but with his tendency towards self-promotion, overhype, and constant broadsides against the right wing, he can also occasionally be a liability to his own cause. Moore, of course, is currently riding high on the wave of publicity he created when he announced to the world that those nasty right-wingers at Disney were trying to censor his film. In fact, Moore and his distribution company are so concerned about the attacks they believe will shortly be launched against him that they have hired a cadre of former Clinton/Gore spin doctors to help with the marketing push. Washington Post 05/19/04
Posted: 05/19/2004 7:01 am
Moore Wows Cannes "It took five separate screenings to accommodate the press demand to see Michael Moore's heavily anticipated anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, and when it came to turning up the political heat here, neither the movie nor its maker failed to disappoint. The audience at a afternoon gala screening responded with a 20-minute standing ovation." Toronto Star 05/18/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 5:14 pm
Looking At Our Radio Roots Increasingly, scholars are studying the history of radio. "Occupying a research niche between the older, higher-profile province of film studies and the more cutting-edge terrain of television studies -- and aided by an obsessive Internet-linked web of buffs devoted to old-time radio -- scholars are shuffling through the metal disks, wax records, and audiotapes that compose the archival remnants of the original broadcasting medium. Collectively these researchers seek to break through the static of moving-image centricity in media scholarship and remind us of the first true network of simultaneous mass communications in human history." Chronicle of Higher Education 05/17/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:31 pm
Morris' Sylvia: A New Fashion? Mark Morris essays a Sylvia, and it's a serious ballet, writes Joan Acocella. "In its classicism, “Sylvia” could start a fashion. The big ballet companies are always crying out for three-act story ballets, because that’s what the public wants. And what they end up with, usually, is either some same-old revision of “Giselle” or “Swan Lake” (the San Francisco troupe has these) or the opposite, a new-style, lurid, hauling-the-girls-by-the-crotch melodrama (San Francisco also has one of these, Lar Lubovitch’s “Othello”). “Sylvia” could point a new way: both purely classical—a symbol, not a soap opera—and also serious." The New Yorker 05/17/04
Posted: 05/18/2004 4:41 pm
