Is There Still A Role For Art Criticism? Get a group of critics together today and they're as likely to talk about the sad shape of criticism as they are about art. "The arguments today are no longer over whether one view of art is better than any other. Rather, the argument has turned on what should be the most 'appropriate' relationship between a writer, his writing and the work of art. Instead of a discussion about the desirable future of art and culture, we're presented with the cautious ethics of the responsible critic." spiked-online 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 5:01 pm
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Sanctuary Vs. Urban Sanction "Burning Man's renowned temple-builder, David Best, was one day from completing a towering art project dedicated to the day laborers in San Rafael's canal district when the city decided it was all too much. 'The Chapel of the Laborer,' a small-scale version of the respected plywood structures that Best builds for the weeklong festival in the Nevada desert and then burns in remembrance of the dead, was to be a temporary sanctuary where Latinos could gather, pray or light a candle for loved ones... But this week the city received a complaint and ordered Best to stop construction immediately. Yellow caution tape now lines the front of the 30- foot-tall structure, and a stop-work order sits near the Virgin Mary's hand." San Francisco Chronicle 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 6:50 am
National Gallery Goes Digital "Interactive displays have been a part of museum and galleries for about two decades but have rarely been successful at augmenting the whole visiting experience... [London's] National Gallery hopes it can change all that with its new service ArtStart. Visitors can search the entire 2,300-strong collection of the gallery and view pictures that have been digitised on a 100 megapixel camera. The captured images are not displayed in their full glory - that would take up too much storage space - but visitors can zoom in on any section of any painting." BBC 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 5:54 am
Stealing Art As Art Last summer artwork began disappearing out of galleries and houses in Seattle. Some of it was reported stolen, some not. But it turns out the thefts were part of an art project, an "art show that never happened. The proposed show—called the Repo Show—was to include works by more than a dozen artists, all stolen from galleries and homes by an art collective called Fillistine. The idea, as they described it to us, was to steal the work, then invite the artists to come retrieve it from a local gallery at a one-night, public 'opening'.” The Stranger (Seattle) 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 6:52 pm
Neighbors Protest Whitney Expansion Plan Neighbors of the Whitney turn up at a public meeting to protest a recently announced expansion plan. But "a well-organized contingent of artists, architects and museum directors who support the expansion, designed by the architect Renzo Piano, countered their arguments. Among them were the painter Chuck Close, the sculptor Mark di Suvero, architects like Maya Lin, and museum directors including Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art." The New York Times 02/02/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 6:22 pm
Art Fair Agnostic The big corporate art fairs are a triumph. Of what? Jerry Saltz says start with the money: "Welcome to the branded and marketed art world of 2005. Maybe it's always been this way, but it's certainly more so now. These days art fairs are perfect storms of money, marketability, and instant gratification—tent-city casinos where art is shipped in and parked for five days, while spectators gawk as comped V.I.P.s and shoppers roll the dice for all to see. And in this game, everybody plays: artists, dealers, and buyers." Village Voice 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 5:47 pm
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Rhetorical Punches Finally Thrown In St. Louis The St. Louis Symphony strike/lockout (depending on whom you ask) is now a month old, and the odd civility that initially surrounded the situation appears to be all but gone. As the musicians crank up the PR machine, playing a free children's concert at a local church, they are also taking shots at the SLSO management for refusing mediation and failing to make any counterproposal to what the musicians offered several weeks back. In return, the orchestra's president is calling the musicians "really dumb" for not being willing to accept the management's last contract offer, which would have dealt them a pay cut of more than $10,000. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 7:28 am
Forget Classical! Is Rock Music Dying? "Not quite. But judging from its performance on the charts - and compared to its biggest bands and trends from a few years ago - it's wheezing. Cast your eye down 2004's Top 10-selling album list and you won't see a single new rock band." Even as the popularity of country, hip-hop and R&B continues to soar, rock groups can't seem to buy attention, and many blame the influx of crossover sugar-pop acts for diluting rock's pool. "When rock was more muscular - during the eras of grunge (mid-'90s), punk-pop (late '90s) and rap-metal (turn-of-the-century) - no such tepid pop crossover was even necessary." New York Daily News 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 6:38 am
Classical Recording Dead? Don't Tell Naxos. At a time when many big record labels are shedding their classical divisions and many smaller niche labels are going dark altogether, Naxos is an unusual and telling success story. "Ten years ago, some people were more than a little sniffy about the Naxos phenomenon... [but] these days, Naxos is picking up awards, with two mentions in the New York Times last year for adventurous recordings of William Bolcom and Peter Maxwell Davies. The British Gramophone and Penguin Guide magazines regularly hand out praise." The label has released some 3,000 albums since its inception in 1987, and has made nearly its entire catalogue available online. The New Zealand Herald 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 5:46 am
Was This Actually In Doubt? The Last Night of the BBC Proms is not exactly what most classical musicians would consider high art - in fact, it's mainly a bunch of flag-waving and patriotic folk songs with a raucous crowd singing along - but it couldn't be much more popular, and so this week, shortly after being appointed the new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony, Jiri Belohlavek went through the usual motion of dashing the faint hopes of critics across the UK and assuring the public that Last Night would continue to be just as it has always been. The Guardian (UK) 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 5:38 am
The Composers And Their Letters "The best way to find out what the great composers of the past were like is to read their letters. Even those who left few or no other writings of significance (among them Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Ravel) often come through with special clarity in their correspondence with friends, colleagues, spouses, and lovers. As for those composers who doubled as part-time professional writers, their letters almost always supply strikingly fresh perspectives on their life and music—as well as no less strikingly candid opinions of the music of other composers." Commentary 02/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 5:12 pm
BBC Orchestra's New Conductor Jiri Belohlavek, former direector of the Czech Philharmonic, has been named as the new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, replacing Leonard Slatkin. BBC 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 4:30 pm
The Language Of Music (Forget The Mechanics) Today, however, the teaching of music—even at the great conservatories—is often a more mechanical affair. The problem, Bob Abramson says, lies in what these students have been taught about what matters musically—not experimentation, but repetition; not invention, but perfection. His students come to Juilliard knowing how to decode the symbols of music but not knowing how to infuse them with meaning. "We teach reading without literacy," he says. Slate 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 9:47 am
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Fighting Online Diploma Mills A new online database launched this week by the U.S. Department of Education is aiming to make it easier for prospective students seeking online or correspondence degrees to distinguish between accredited online schools and deceptive diploma mills which essentially trade worthless degrees for cash. "The white-list database could be a useful tool for would-be students and prospective employers who do not know how to distinguish between Hamilton University, a diploma mill in Wyoming, and Hamilton College, a small, distinguished and legitimately accredited liberal arts school in New York." Wired 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 6:03 am
Britain Backs Anti-Piracy Plan The UK intends to throw its weight behind a pan-European clampdown on digital piracy. Piracy costs about £11 billion a year in Britain, a fifth of the annual £53.4bn worth of the UK's creative industries. The Guardian (UK) 02/02/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 8:53 pm
Turkey's Case To The EU: Our Culture Turkey is trying to join the European Union. How to get member countries to vote yes on admittance? Through traveling shows of Turkish culture. "Before Europeans hold referendums on whether to admit Turkey, they must better know a people whose popular image is still largely shaped by the clichés of warriors, harems and immigrants. Certainly, few Europeans today recognize Turkey as a modern secular state with a rich and sophisticated past. So, yes, if "Turks" travels around Europe, as proposed, it should prove something of a revelation." The New York Times 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 6:17 pm
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Hytner: Racial Hatred Law Would Have Bad Consequences For Art A proposed law against incitement of religious hatred would have a chilling effect on UK theatres, says National Theatre boss Nicholas Hytner. "I claim the right to be as offensive as I choose about what other people think, and to tell any story that I choose. No one has the right not to be offended." The Guardian (UK) 02/02/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 8:36 pm
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Critics Just Wanna Be Liked? "I often get letters from readers of the Sunday Telegraph literary pages complaining about misleading book reviews. Usually they say that a book they’ve bought on the strength of a favourable review was nothing like as good as our critic had made out. I have some sympathy for this, as reviewers on the whole want to be loved, like everyone else, and are rarely as harsh in print as they could be." The Spectator 02/02/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 10:27 pm
A Machine That Learns By Reading "Narrowing that cognitive gap between humans and machines — creating a computer that can read and learn at a sophisticated level — is a big goal of artificial intelligence researchers. The Pentagon has granted a contract worth at least $400,000 last fall to two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors who are trying to build a machine that can learn by reading. The academics hope to create a machine that can read sections of textbooks and answer questions based on the material. Down the road, professor Selmer Bringsjord believes such artificial intelligence, or A.I., machines might be able to read military plans or manuals and adjust on the fly in the heat of battle." Yahoo! (AP) 01/31/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 9:51 pm
LA Times Book Editor Leaving? "Could Steve Wasserman soon be leaving the L.A. Times? Buzz is getting louder that the head of the book review at the West Coast's biggest paper could be getting ready for a departure, with sources reporting that over the last few weeks he's had conversations with East Coast editors about other jobs." Publishers Weekly 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 10:07 am
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Sundance, Festival Of Contradictions Sundance certainly still has the right to call itself an independent film festival, and it can't be denied that the Park City hoedown remains a mecca for up-and-coming filmmakers. But this year, the festival also dug deep to reach new heights of comparatively safe, traditional Hollywood excess. "Welcome to Sundance, where a studio's ode to a porno auteur's independent vision earns thunderous applause at a world premiere stuffed with industry execs and billed in the festival program as an example of 'bravery and courage.' (Not just bravery, mind you, but bravery and courage.)" City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul) 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 6:14 am
So Good, Even The Enemy Uses It iPods are wildly popular in the little town of Redmond, Washington. So what, you say? They're popular everywhere, you say? Yeah, well, Redmond just happens to be home to the Microsoft Corporation, and those people wandering the streets with the telltale Apple-produced white earphones trailing from their ears are all Microsoft employees. And don't think that seeing their closest competitors product dangling from the heads of their own people doesn't have Microsoft's notoriously competitive management all in a tizzy. Wired 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 5:57 am
Even Duplicate News Rates Higher Than Classical? One of Washington, D.C.'s public radio stations is considering what has by now become a familiar format switch - dropping nearly all its classical music programming in favor of news and talk shows. WETA has been plagued by low ratings in recent years, and executives at the station fear that a classical format simply isn't viable in an era when public broadcasters are forced to play much the same numbers game as commercial stations. However, there is a twist to WETA's proposed change - the District already has an all-news public radio station, and the new format at WETA would likely duplicate a great deal of the programming that area listeners can already hear on WAMU. Washington Post 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 5:22 am
Movies Beneath The Excess "In the eyes of many movie idealists, Sundance is a paranoid fantasy come true, an art mecca devoured by a commercial mecca. Once the preserve of purists who decried Tinseltown philistines and revered long, slow movies about long, cold pioneer winters, now it's a place where $16 million deals are struck hot and fast while Paris Hilton dirty-dances with Pamela Anderson prior to picking up free underwear at Sundance's innumerable star-fucking freebie emporiums. It's the best way to expose brand names to the widest possible audience, whether the product is a gritty indie flick or a pricey brassiere." Seattle Weekly 02/02/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 10:11 pm
The Lessons Of Sundance So Sundance is over for another year. Several trends are obvious, judging by this year's offerings. And the first? Indie film is dead. Long live indie film. Village Voice 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 5:41 pm
The Oscar-Nominated Films The Rest Of The World Hasn't Seen Why does it often take so long for Oscar-nominated movies to play in countries outside the US? "The delay between US release and the rest of the world is often to the frustration of movie buffs keen to see the latest films before Oscar nominations are revealed. But it is the tactics adopted during the fierce competition of film festival season that determine when and where a movie will make its mark. The studios vying for cinema's most prestigious prize know that when it comes to taking home the goods, timing is everything." BBC 02/01/05
Posted: 02/01/2005 4:44 pm
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From PBS To PBT Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre has tapped the former COO of the city's public television station to serve as its interim managing director. Robert Petrilli is credited with helping station WQED out of a serious fiscal hole, a relevant bit of experience, since PBT is running a $1 million deficit and recently asked its pit musicians to take a 50% pay cut. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 02/02/05
Posted: 02/02/2005 6:44 am
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