Voters for the French Cesar film awards will be getting DVD copies of the movies that self-destruct. “The DVD of Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant turns black and becomes unusable with two days of being played, reports industry website Screen Daily. The DVDs, which are designed to be disposable, will be sent to members of France’s Academie des Arts et Techniques du Cinema, said the report.”
Month: December 2003
An Idea – Pay TV Viewers To Go Digital?
In the UK, plans are for all TV broadcasts to be digital by 2010. But the only way to get some viewers to switch might be to pay them. “There were only two ways of making everyone switch to a digital source, such as a set-top digital box, cable or satellite. One is to pay people to switch, the other is to force them.”
Edinburgh’s Brain Drain
“New figures reveal that Edinburgh has been overtaken by Glasgow as Scotland’s cultural capital. In the most comprehensive attempt to map changes in Scotland’s cultural employment in the first years of devolution, researchers found Edin burgh was undergoing a massive brain drain of creative talent.”
Winn: Breaking Out Of The Basic Newspaper Arts Review
A panel at the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors in St. Petersburg, Fla got to talking about the state of arts coverage in daily newspapers. Steven Winn – arts writer at the San Francisco Chronicle: “Over the years, I felt a kind of creeping alienation. No one but a critic attends the theater 150 times a year. I was becoming, gradually and inexorably, self referential. I wrote about theater in terms of other theater, because that was what I was living.”
Book Town’s A Success – But Can The Locals Afford It?
The experiment that transformed Blaenavon into a town of book shops has been a big success. But now, can the locals afford to live there? “A year ago anyone who suggested that the same thing could happen in Blaenavon, valley of the squinting plywood, would have been laughed all the way back down the mountain to the M4. Property in the town was in terrible condition, but cheap as chips. Now much of it is still in terrible condition, but you get far fewer chips to the pound. Local people stand in front of the estate agents, staring at the photographs, their jaws dropping.”
RA: Loved The Lloyd-Webber Show
Critics hated the Royal Academy’s show of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s art. One wrote: “Really useless. Why can’t the man keep his private collection of saccharine Victorian art private?” But more than 226,000 people – an average of 2,693 a day – paid to see his treasures. The doorstep-sized catalogue (£15 paperback, £35 hardback) had to be reprinted three times.” The show turns out to be one of the RA’s most popular exhibitions of the past decade.
The 20-Year-Old Who’s Outselling Harry Potter
Christopher Paolini is only 20, and he lives in a remote part of Montana. “This time last year, he was just another geeky teen with too much time on his hands. But now, thanks to Eragon, his 500-page rousing adventure story set in his imaginary world, young Christopher is suddenly rich.” The book “is a huge bestseller in America, where it has surged past the Harry Potter books. Almost half a million copies were sold in only two months, a screenplay is in the works and at least a dozen foreign-language editions are on the way.”
Why Is Music Just A Commodity?
“Seldom, it would appear, is music simply thought of or enjoyed as music anymore. It’s a commodity, a type of virtual contraband, the “sport” at the centre of cutthroat, Olympian competitions. Even the sense of community that a shared love of music is supposed to bring people has been supplanted by a pitched us-against-them mentality between the recording industry and the hordes of downloaders it longs to drag into court.”
Cooper-Hewitt – In Need Of A Makeover
The struggling Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York has plans to give itself a makeover. “Some in the design field say a rethinking is long overdue, but they remain skeptical about the museum’s ability to pull it off, given its recent history. ‘Under director Paul Thompson the museum has the same blurry identity it has always had. There’s still no strong thread holding it together’.”
Currin Dumps Dealer For Gagosian
Artist John Currin suddenly switched his gallery affiliation last week from his longtime New York dealer, Andrea Rosen, to Larry Gagosian. “Artists change galleries all the time, but Mr. Currin’s timing drew a great deal of attention. The show at the Whitney is the culmination of his 14-year association with Ms. Rosen, who gave him his first commerical gallery show, in 1992, and worked assiduously to foster and manage his success. Speculation about Mr. Currin’s move fueled conversation at art-world Christmas parties over the weekend, with expressions ranging from disgust to admiration for an astute business move.”