“The Canada Council for the Arts unveiled its plans yesterday to host a World Summit on the Arts and Culture. Two thousand representatives of arts councils and funding bodies from more than 50 countries will meet in Ottawa this December.” – CBC 10/01/00
Month: October 2000
POLITICIANS AGREE ON VIOLENCE AND MEDIA
Aren’t politicians supposed to disagree? So what’s with all the concern over violence and the entertainment industry? “When you actually look back through the public record and study the candidates’ various utterances on this topic, the striking thing is how similar – virtually identical, in fact – their stated positions are.” – Hartford Courant 10/01/00
RALPH’S/FOOD 4 LESS CONCERT HALL?
Big donors are essential to financing art these days, particularly arts buildings and big opera productions. But the largesse as often as not comes with strings. Slapping a picture of your most prominent donor in the program is one thing. But renaming your home or producing art because a donor wants to fund it is something else. – Los Angeles Times 10/01/00
THE ARTS MAYOR?
Chicago’s Mayor Daley doesn’t just pay lip service to the arts. “He has realized that good arts and entertainment is good for the city, and, in a non-artsy way, he has given the arts of Chicago a public and accessible forum.” Better yet, his attentions are resulting in things happening for the arts. – Chicago Tribune 10/01/00
THE PATHOLOGY OF HISTORY
Is England “an average nation with a fairly typically chaotic past?” You might think so given the lack of care with which modern-day Britons view their own history. But a new book and BBC series seek to take a fresh look at the country’s identity. – The Sunday Times (UK) 10/01/00
CLICKS AND MORTAR ART
Online art auctions are making a play for a piece of lucrative business. “What’s for sale online? You can find everything from landscape paintings by little known contemporary artists for $1,000 or less, to a $50,000 Tiffany lamp or a $3.5 million oil painting by French painter Maurice De Vlaminck.” – MSNBC
BUT IT’S OUR MUSEUM
Daniel Terra’s jingoistic promotion of American art was difficult to take. And the reputation of his small museum of American art suffered in the museum world for his antics and boasts. But now that his widow wants to take the museum out of town (Chicagoans don’t appreciate it enough, she says) a feeling of community pride wells up in those who want it to stay. – Chicago Tribune
NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET
It’s fashion week in London. “Fashion, the cuckoo of popular culture, has been using an assortment of modern galleries and London museums as venues for the drunken wastages of resources that are known as fashion launches. A few artists have gone to some of these parties. This is all the evidence it takes for a shower of journalistic Sloane-brains to put one and one together, and arrive at three. But art and fashion are not growing closer together.” = The Sunday Times (UK)
WRITING BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Dissident writers in the old USSR had to be wary. Since their work could not be printed at home they memorized it “The two most important phenomena in dissident writing in the Eastern bloc surrounding Samizdat and Tamizdat were the underground press in the authors’ own country and the opportunities for publication abroad.” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
THE NEW LIT CRIT
“Run mostly by thirty-something writers and editors, this latest generation of New York literary journals are stylishly packaged, serving up a mix of prominent names, undiscovered aspirants, and lost treasures from the vaults. Each has staked out a different aesthetic territory, but between them they cover a wide swath of contemporary literature.” – Village Voice