The Continuity Trap Behind any story is the concept of "continuity." It gives stories coherence, a logical framework in which the story can unfold. But "we have reached the point where continuity is almost an end in itself. Film directors and comic-book writers and TV producers will go to incredible lengths to make sure their creations have a natural-seeming history. This has resulted in some pretty strange narrative contortions." CBC 07/23/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 10:24 am
A New Initiative In Public Cultural Discourse This Wednesday, in partnership with the Aspen Music Festival, ArtsJournal will host a new 10-day blog - Critical Conversation - featuring a dozen of the best classical music critics in America. They will discuss whether or not it is still possible for a Big Idea to animate classical music. Our bloggers include: Alex Ross from the New Yorker, Kyle Gann from the Village Voice, Justin Davidson from Newsday, Scott Cantrell from the Dallas Morning News, Charles Ward from the Houston Chronicle, Wynne Delacoma from the Chicago Sun-Times, Andrew Druckenbrod from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Kyle McMillan from the Denver Post, John Rockwell from the New York Times, and John von Rhein from the Chicago Tribune. Then, on August 7 in Aspen, Greg Sandow of the Wall Street Journal, Anne Midgette of the New York Times, David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle will participate in a live discussion of the topic, moderated by ArtsJournal editor and founder Douglas McLennan. That event is free and open to the public. This is a new initiative in public cultural discourse, the first of what we hope will be a series of such events. ArtsJournal.com 07/28-08/06
Posted: 07/25/2004 9:23 pm
America's New Culture War, As Viewed From Britain "If it is true to say in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election that America has never been more politically divided, then it is equally true that the battle for control of the country's cultural landscape has never been more bitterly fought... Ironically, the push for more controls on what is shown [on television] is coming largely from right-wing, religious politicians and organisations who have long argued that market forces should prevail in every aspect of society: education, healthcare, social services - everything except broadcasting, it seems." The Observer (UK) 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 7:18 pm
Not To Mention The Whole Spelling Issue The English language as we know it today has deep roots in both Latin and Greek, and that dual history can sometimes cause conflicts, especially when two different words develop independently over the centuries to mean the same thing in two different English-speaking cultures. For instance, North Americans use the Latin-based word "quadriplegic" to describe an individual who has lost the use of all four limbs; in the UK, the common form is the Greek-derived "tetraplegic." So, who cares? Well, linguists do, especially since many such idiomatic expressions have begun to gradually vanish from several Western languages. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/24/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 7:06 pm
Edinburgh's New Art Fair The Edinburgh Festival is one of Europe's great cultural institutions. But it didn't include visual art. After years of griping, a visual art festival will now be included. "The new Edinburgh Art Festival has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes of despair. It was absurd that a festival founded in 1947 on the principle of showing, as the Lord Provost put it at the time, 'all the best in music, drama and the visual arts', should ignore an entire medium'." The Scotsman 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 8:05 am
Does The Pentagon Have "Undiscovered" Art? So Philadelphia schools have found a trove of artworks in their possession. Where else might there be public-owned art? Perhaps at the Pentagon? A Department of Defense employee "is/was resposible for maintaining accountability for this art collection, and in the mid 90s she was apparently fired/quit in part because a military Inspector General's team discovered that the works were generally unaccounted for and in many cases improperly stored (leaky buildings, rain, moisture, etc.)." Washington DC Art News 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 8:02 am
Loaned Aboriginal Art Seized In Australia Two pieces of Aboriginal art on loan from the British Museum have been seized in Australia. "Members of the Dja Dja Wurrung tribe secured an emergency order preventing the items being returned to the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens. The two bark etchings and a Aboriginal ceremonial headdress were on loan to Museum Victoria in Melbourne. Gary Murray, of the Dja Dja, accused the museums of 'colonial arrogance'."
BBC 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 7:52 am
In Santa Fe: A Biennale With A Coherent Message Biennales are generally big agglomerations of a lot of "stuff" that rarely works together to deliver a coherent statement. But "last weekend, in a minor miracle of contemporary curating, New Yorker Robert Storr opened the fifth Santa Fe biennial, titled Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque. Storr's show, held at a contemporary art center called Site Santa Fe, channels the unnatural elegance of Raphael's Vatican decor, almost 500 years after the Italian master's death. At Site's invitation, Storr has brought together 53 contemporary artists whose works speak to one another, and to how the ancient notion of the grotesque pans out today." Washington Post 07/25/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 7:43 am
Why Wait For The New Building? New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art is currently homeless, as it waits for its new home in the Bowery to be completed, but rather than merely vanishing from the scene for two years, the museum is hoping to renovate its image in the interim. "The museum's curators were... acutely aware of the need to use the transition to the new building as an opportunity to think again about the definition of the museum. And so, while it has taken 7,000 square feet of space on the first floor of the Chelsea Art Museum on West 22nd Street for a year, its curators decided that the first major show would not be within walls, but outside them." The New York Times 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 6:42 pm
Taking Inventory Of An Unexpected Treasure Trove When the Philadelphia public school district discovered earlier this month that it was in possession of an art collection potentially valued at tens of millions of dollars, it was hard to know what to do about it. What the district is doing is to mount a full-scale measure of what exactly it has, where it all came from, what it may or may not be worth, and how such a varied and amorphous collection of works could best be utilized in an educational sense. One thing is for sure - the district doesn't intend to sell any of the works - but it will take great resolve for officials to avoid being stampeded by the various interested parties sure to come out of the woodwork. Philadelphia Inquirer 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 6:35 pm
- Previously: Philadelphia Schools Unearth Art Windfall Philadelphia public schools go on a hunt for artwork in schools and come up with art worth millions. "The artworks -- 1,200 in all, including paintings, sketches, sculptures, murals, tapestries and ancient artifacts -- had been donated to the school system or bought for small sums long ago. Over the decades, many of them were taken down when the walls were painted and were put into storage, where they apparently were forgotten altogether. The collection is probably worth tens of millions of dollars, school officials and art experts said." Washington Post 07/08/04
Tibetan Art To Shine At New NYC Museum "The Rubin Museum of Art opens on Oct. 2 with kite flying on the West Side piers, a Himalayan dog parade and some 100 fluttering prayer flags by contemporary artists. An infusion of $60 million has transformed a decommissioned temple of haute consumerism into an elegant, multihued jewel of a museum, designed by the architect Richard Blinder of Beyer Blinder Belle. Its 70,000 square feet, decked out in bright red, green, gold and blue, comprise America's largest, boldest and most significant museum devoted entirely to Tibetan and other Himalayan art." The whole gaudy enterprise is the brianchild of collector Donald Rubin, who bought the building that became the museum on a whim back in 1998. The New York Times 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 6:22 pm
MIA - Good Political Campaign Music The disappearance of decent election music is a sad reality in this age of artistic angst. In previous generations, well-crafted campaign songs were as plentiful as gas-guzzling four-door sedans and helpful service from government employees. Democrats could adopt catchy little tunes such as Happy Days Are Here Again (Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932) or High Hopes (John F. Kennedy in 1960) and be assured that nothing in the impossibly peppy lyrics would inspire impressionable youth to burn down their school or have unprotected sex on a Ferris wheel. At some point in the late 1960s, it was no longer commercially viable for most mainstream musicians to be happy, and campaign-worthy songs became an endangered species." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 9:57 am
CD's Aren't Forever After All When CDs were first introduced, they were advertised as almost indestructable. Turns out that isn't true. "CD deterioration may start with a smattering of pinpricks or what appears to be rust creeping inwards from the edge of the disc. Certain tracks jump or emit clicking noises. Eventually, the CD loses all data and is better used as a shiny coaster." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 9:50 am
Plenty Of Words Between The Notes Musicians who spend their careers in the pit of an opera house or theater are something of a different breed than those who get to solo in front of thousands or take repeated bows as members of a symphony orchestra. For one thing, the players in the New York Philharmonic aren't generally found reading novels during the performance to stave off boredom... Boston Globe (LA Times) 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 6:50 pm
A Cross-Country Rail Rock Extravaganza, Only 34 Years Late It was more than a quarter-century ago when some of the brightest lights of the rock 'n roll world - including Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy, and the Grateful Dead - boarded a train in Toronto and proceeded to ride it 2,100 miles across Canada, performing festival-style shows in three cities and, more importantly, capturing the whole trip on film. "The shows for the paying customers... were terrific, but the real action took place during the impromptu jam sessions and inebriated socializing on the train." Thirty-four years later, the sights and sounds of the Festival Express are finally getting a public viewing, after decades of legal battles over copyrights and unpaid bills. The New York Times 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 6:25 pm
Call To Culture - UK's £20 million Culture Initiative The British government has awarded £20 million of National Lottery money to be spent on cultural events throughout the country. "The European City of Culture competition stimulated the creation of a wonderful range of creative and ambitious plans in cities across the UK. The Lottery-funded Urban Cultural Programme will mean that many of those aspirations can become reality." BBC 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 8:00 am
What Makes Chicago More Deserving Than Toronto? "Last night Chicago threw a spectacular party to celebrate the opening of Millennium Park, an extravagant and stunning waterfront development that features two flamboyant new creations by celebrated architect Frank Gehry... And in a few years, another Great Lakes city hopes to celebrate its first Frank Gehry building. That city, of course, is Toronto. But Gehry, who was born here but left at the age of 18 for Los Angeles, recently he made it clear that Toronto has no right to consider itself architecturally on the same plane as Chicago... The problem with his home town, in his view, is that the mindset is too conservative, too timid, too restrictive." Toronto Star 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 7:26 pm
The Secret Identity of O When the erotic novel The Story of O was first published under a pseudonym a half-century ago, it scandalized French, British, and American society alike with its explicit but beautifully written descriptions of bondage and sexual violence. The identity of its author was much speculated upon, and many were convinced that it had to be a man. It wasn't, and the woman behind the book that revolutionized erotic literature wrote it for her lover on a dare, never intending for it to see the light of day. The Observer (UK) 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 7:11 pm
Living The Living Theatre "Founded in 1948 by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the Living Theatre is so much a part of American theater history that many people are surprised to learn it's still active. It is, though. The company that pioneered off-off-Broadway performance in the '50s, and became an icon of experimental techniques and radical anarcho- pacifist commitment in the '60s, is still going strong -- in both Italy and New York, where it's building a new theater, and conducting political-theater workshops all over the world." San Francisco Chronicle 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 10:16 am
A Direct Theatrical Assault on Guantanamo "British judges rarely inject themselves into politics. Even more rarely do they directly attack foreign governments. But on Nov. 23, 2003, Lord Justice Johan Steyn, Britain's third-highest ranking judge... delivered a blistering attack on what he saw as the 'arbitrariness' of the detentions and procedures involving international individuals held by the United States military at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba... At the time, the judge had no idea that, in less than six months, his words would be turned into the moral center of an intensely provocative, artfully conceived and rapturously reviewed piece of modern political theater, written, rehearsed and produced all in a matter of weeks." Chicago Tribune 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 6:56 pm
A Post-"Partisan Review" View A new magazine "n+1" launches. “They’re pushing literary fiction … in ways that aren’t obviously commercial but are simply based on exquisite writing and writerly insight. The magazine is dissatisfied with the coarsening public discourse. 'We live in a time when a magazine like Lingua Franca can’t publish, but Zagat prospers'.” New York Sun 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 9:05 am
Ruminating On An Institution's Demise Ruminator Books, a Twin Cities institution and a nationally known indie bookseller, is closing its doors forever this week, but the man who has steered it for its entire 34-year life insists that he isn't despairing. In fact, David Unowsky admits that it wasn't competition from big chain bookstores that drove the store into insolvency, but a series of business mistakes and good ideas implemented at the wrong time. "One of his problems was running a 21st-century bookstore on 30-year-old ideals." St. Paul Pioneer Press 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 7:21 pm
PBS Offer: How About $5 Billion For Our Analog Signals? PBS president Pat Mitchell has a proposition: Congress should give the network $5 billion in return for giving up its analog broadcast signals. "Trading analog signals for digital is a big regulatory issue right now. The old analog signals are worth billions, since they can be used to transmit streaming data. Mitchell's idea is that a one-time 'grant' is better than the feds' reluctantly doling out a mere $300 million to PBS annually." Denver Post 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 9:31 am
A History Of Politics In Movies Hollywood has always been obsessed with politics, and there is a long tradition of films with political stories. "Such movies provide windows on the vast changes that have sculpted the political landscape over the years; if Frank Capra's Depression-era civics lesson is innately optimistic, then Michael Moore's wartime anti-Bush-administration harangue seems afflicted by a whopping dose of cynicism. But in ways that may not be immediately apparent, the two films share similarities; each is a snapshot of a political system that works only if the citizenry pays attention and, perhaps more importantly, is given the opportunity to pay attention." Baltimore Sun 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 9:22 am
Fahrenheit Box Office Tops $100 Million Michael Moore joined the $100 million club as his political assault 'Fahrenheit 9/11' became the first documentary ever to top that mark at the domestic box office." Baltimore Sun (AP) 07/26/04
Posted: 07/26/2004 9:17 am
And This, 007, Is Called An iPod... "When the engineers at Apple originally designed the iPod, it's doubtful they thought of their gizmo as a potential security risk. But in corporate and military circles, that's exactly what the digital music player has become. Circles like Britain's Ministry of Defence (MOD), which last week added the iPod to its list of restricted devices." At issue is the ease with which an iPod user can download information of any kind (not just songs) from other machines. Toronto Star 07/25/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 7:28 pm
CBC Chief Dodges Flying Memos The new chief of the CBC's English-language TV division has had a rough first week on the job, as he seeks to distance himself from a controversial memo which recommended privatizing large chunks of the public broadcaster and splitting the TV channel into three specialty networks. Richard Stursberg insists that, while he may have been involved in discussions which touched on the subjects contained in the memo, he does not support any of its proposals, and wants to use his position to strengthen the CBC's regional presence, and to make it "more Canadian" in general. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/24/04
Posted: 07/25/2004 6:59 pm
