Saul Bellow On Getting Close To Art: The “trained sensibility,” he says, is unavailable “unless you take certain masterpieces into yourself as if they were communion wafers.... If you don’t give literature a decisive part to play in your existence, then you haven’t got anything but a show of culture. It has no reality whatever. It’s an acceptable challenge to internalize all of these great things, all of this marvelous poetry. When you’ve done that, you’ve been shaped from within by these books and these writers.” InsideHigherEd 04/07/05
Posted: 04/08/2005 9:16 am
Knowledge - Of Art And Science "In the modern world, we have seen scientific knowledge assume a status as the most valuable or authoritative kind of knowledge, while artistic knowledge and intelligence is relegated to a secondary status. Science usually struggles when that which is unquantifiable can't be squeezed into an equation, while music and the arts often stretch perception away from the steady state. Yet equations are metaphors for reality and perhaps have more similarity to art than we might usually accord them." NewMusicBox 04/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 9:48 pm
Is Multi-Tasking Rotting Our Kids Brains? "As U.S. children are exposed to 8½ hours of TV, video games, computers and other media a day — often at once — are they losing the ability to concentrate? Are their developing brains becoming hard-wired to "multi-task lite" rather than learn the focused critical thinking needed for a democracy?" USAToday 03/30/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 7:30 pm
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Magazine: Seven Modern Architectural "Wonders" Conde Nast makes a list of the seven modern architectural wonders of the world. What makes the list? Projects in Chicago, Seattle, Germany, London and Japan... Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 04/08/05
Posted: 04/08/2005 8:47 am
Bellevue Art Museum To Reopen The Bellevue Art Museum in a Seattle suburb plans to reopen in June as a crafts museum. When the museum abruptly closed in September 2003, the "museum was running out of money and faced low attendance after moving to a new $23 million building downtown in 2001. Some of the problems were attributed to lackluster exhibits, a cold, unwelcoming feeling inside the building, an unclear mission and poor management." Seattle Times 04/07/05
Posted: 04/08/2005 6:54 am
Pompidou Picasso Recovered A Picasso painting stolen last year from the Pompidou, has been recovered. "Following a tip-off, police traced the painting - worth 2.5m euros (£1.7m) - to a house in Paris where the painting was hidden behind a wardrobe. Cubist painting Nature Morte a la Charlotte, completed in 1924, was reported missing in May last year from a restoration workshop." BBC 04/08/05
Posted: 04/08/2005 6:49 am
Kahlo Cache Discovered A two-year renovation project at the home-turned-museum of legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has uncovered a vast wardrobe of previously undiscovered clothing and other valuable artifacts. ABCNews.com (AP) 04/07/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 8:15 pm
Lifestyle Of Fake Architecture Forget malls. How 90s of you. Today's temples to shopping aggregation are called "lifestyle centers" (we kiddeth thee not). "While these new malls may appear to be public space, they're not public at all—at least if you want to do anything but shop. They represent a bait-and-switch routine on the part of developers, one that exchanges the public realm for the commercial one. They're also enormously successful—by the most recent count, there are about 130 lifestyle centers scattered around the country." Slate 04/07/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 7:32 pm
LA County Museum In A Leadership Void What does Andrea Rich's sudden retirement running the LA County Museum mean? "Everybody is trying to put the best face on the sudden "retirement." LACMA still has tens of millions of dollars to raise for construction and endowment in its multiphase expansion plan, and now there are two big jobs to be filled, not just one. (Perhaps the nascent deputy will be promoted.) For that, unfortunately, LACMA will have to go to the back of a lengthy line; major director searches are already underway at heavy-hitters such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Cleveland Art Museum and the Minneapolis Art Institute. But what ended badly, started badly. The vacuum in professional conscience from both the boardroom (expected) and the director's suite (unexpected) means LACMA has been a rudderless ship for longer than a decade. Los Angeles Times 04/05/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 7:24 pm
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Do Pulitzers Proclaim The Best In American Music? What to think about Steven Stucky winning this year's Pulitzer for music? Particularly after last year's decision to broaden the definition of music eligible for the award? Frank Oteri chews on it: "I do think in some ways, we music folk are a little too obsessed with other people determining for us what the best is—residue from Beethoven and the gang, which is the same "masterpiece syndrome" that keeps so many in the classical community from ever paying attention to any new music in the first place. I sincerely wonder if novelists and poets scratch their heads in dismay every year when their favorite writer fails to win a Pulitzer. So then, what to make of the results of the 2005 Pulitzer jury?" NewMusicBox 04/07/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 6:56 pm
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Sports Or Arts? You Make The Call What's more exciting - a great basketball game, or the theatre? Respondents to this Chicago Tribune query were pretty evenly divided. Chicago Tribune 04/08/05
Posted: 04/08/2005 7:16 am
Australia Arts Council Restructured A plan restructuring the 30-year-old Australia Arts Council that was loudly opposed by many has been approved. "The boards that give grants for community cultural development and new media projects will be killed off and their responsibilities spread across existing boards and two new departments. A $9million pool will be set up to fund projects the council deems significant. And an internal restructure will help staff become more active in finding projects to fund, rather than simply reacting to grant applications." The Australian 04/08/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 7:54 pm
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Bellow Was Best "The greatest of late-20th-century American novelists, Saul Bellow, who died Tuesday at 89, resembled his fellow immortals above in a way Americans especially trust. He won the stats game: three National Book Awards, one Pulitzer, and The Big One, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Yet like any cultural giant, Bellow bestowed more prestige on the prizes he received than they conferred on him." Philadelphia Inquirer 04/07/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 7:44 pm
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Tomorrow's TV Writers? From Today's Theatre "Back in the golden days of Hollywood, studio executives would often scour the theatres of New York and Chicago, searching relentlessly for talented new playwrights to bring out West to join their studio's creative staff of writers. In that spirit Fox has teamed up with New York's Naked Angels Theatre Company to produce Naked TV, an innovative project that mirrors those historic days in its attempts to discover and develop new writers for television." Back Stage 04/08/05
Posted: 04/08/2005 8:57 am
Brook: Ticket Prices Are Killing Theatre " Director Peter Brook is on a mission. "Wishing to make theater accessible to all, he’s the first internationally known director to lead the way by insisting that ticket prices must come down. Mr. Brook is saying, in urgent effect, if so many people can no longer afford to go to the theater, what’s the point of theater? It’s the most pressing question of all. The cost of tickets is killing the audience. They’re also killing the future. Kids can’t afford to go. Broadway will always be opportunistic Broadway. The bottom-line choices, the safe, star-driven revivals, are by now normal. We’ve come to expect no better. But in our proudly multi-ethnic city, the loyal audiences at our big nonprofit institutions remain noticeably white, middle-class and aging." New York Observer 04/07/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 8:54 pm
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Report: Thousands Of Small Publishers Add Up A new report says that there are thousands of small publishers in America "earning between $1 million and $50 million on their own, but adding up to an estimated $11 billion market. Traditional studies released by the study group, the Association of American Publishers and others assume that the solid majority of book sales comes from the larger organizations, with the top 50 making at least $20 billion out of a $28 billion market. Wednesday's report, titled "Under the Radar," asserts that the industry is both larger and less concentrated than previously believed." Yahoo! (AP) 04/07/05
Posted: 04/08/2005 8:54 am
German Author Accused Of Plagiarism Best-selling German author Frank Schätzing has been accused of plagiarizing "large chunks of his latest blockbuster from the internet. The book, The Swarm, is an apocalyptic eco-thriller which tells the story of how a mysterious undersea being known as Yrr incites the natural world to revolt against humans. It has been an extraordinary success, selling more than 700,000 copies in Germany. It has even been credited with saving the lives of several German holidaymakers who fled to safety after reading its vivid description of how the tide goes out before a tsunami. Yesterday, however, a German biologist accused Schätzing of "plundering" much of the material used in the book from his scientific website." The Guardian (UK) 04/08/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 9:35 pm
A Wedding Verse? (How To Make It Memorable) (You Can't) One of Andrew Motion's jobs as British Poet Laureate is to compose a poem to comemorate Prince Charles' Royal wedding. "Every single time, it's an impossible job. One's not entirely clear why anyone bothers to do it."
The New York Times 04/07/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 7:27 pm
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Study: Video Games Beats Music A new study says that men are now spending more on video games than they do on music. "The survey by Nielsen Entertainment shows that DVDs are the number one purchase for men each month. It also found that games are starting to attract significant numbers of players beyond the core target market of males aged eight to 34." BBC 04/08/05
Posted: 04/08/2005 6:46 am
TV Failing At The Arts TV isn't showing arts very well in the UK. Everyone's bored with it, and it's easy to criticize. The question is how to make it better. "TV has lost a sense of self-esteem, even if it has plenty of arrogance and self-assertion. It has lost that 1960s mandarin view of art that took its responsibilities very seriously. I'm not saying we should turn back the clock, but TV should be proud of what it does." The Guardian (UK) 04/08/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 7:38 pm
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Capturing Margot Fonteyn (Not Hardly) They're trying to make a biopic of Margot Fonteyn. But it doesn't seem doable, writes Norman Lebrecht. "What Fonteyn possessed, more than the gift for dance, was a presence that transcends charisma or any of the usual qualities of attraction. She was not a woman of great intelligence. Her conversation was mundane and her interests narrow. Unlike world leaders she was not driven by raging ambition or a desire to improve society. She was Peggy Hookham by birth, and Peggy Hookham by nature, pleasingly down to earth. Yet she could enter a crowded room and everyone present knew she was there. Those who worked with her speak of an aura, an impermeable state of being." La Scena Musicale 04/07/05
Posted: 04/07/2005 7:49 pm
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