“The Australian record industry has just had its best year ever. But it doesn’t want you to know about it. This month ARIA announced its sales figures for last year. In its press release, it talked about Delta, it talked about falling CD singles sales, it talked about the rise in DVD sales, but at no stage did it tell us it was the industry’s best year ever. Why bury the good news? Record industry types aren’t usually shy about success. But this time their success is a little embarrassing.”
Month: April 2004
The Internet Art Crash
The trouble with being an artist on the cutting edge is that when you discover that the trend you’re leading has just become a passe fad, it’s easy to become very irrelevant very quickly. “Internet art may have little direct connection to the dot-com financial bubble, but its reputation has suffered as the Internet itself has lost cachet. Many who work in the Internet art world report a sense of digital exhaustion.”
Anish Kapoor To Create 911 Memorial
Anish Kapoor is creating a sculpture to the British victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center. The sculpture will be placed in a square near the WTC site. “The sculpture will be crafted from a block of black granite into which a vertical chamber is carved of approximately 1m [3.3ft] by 2.5m [8.2ft] by 80cm [2.6ft]. The inner chamber is polished to give a mirrored surface,” said the Bombay-born artist. The chamber reflects light so as to form a column, which hovers, ghost-like, in the void of the stone.”
The New Movie Checklist: Ticket, Popcorn, Strip Search…
Your trip to the local multiplex to check out the big new Hollywood blockbuster may soon include an element you hadn’t bargained for: a bag search and pat-down to insure that you aren’t carrying any video cameras or camera phones that could be used to illegally record the film for later distribution. In-theater searches aren’t exactly a great PR move for the industry, but officials insist that they may be the only way to stem the tide of pirated films.
Portrait Of A Troubled Art Collection
“As the McMichael Canadian Art Collection prepares to host its second annual ‘100-per-cent Canadian’ fundraiser tonight at Toronto’s art-moderne masterpiece the Carlu, the art gallery is poised to undergo big changes in the months ahead.” But change is nothing new to the McMichael, which throughout its history has endured seemingly constant and “tumultuous disputes over the gallery’s governance and mission. Everyone, it seems, has gotten in on the debates at one time or another — the McMichaels first and foremost, governments, scholars, artists, art critics, auditors, lawyers, opposition politicians, and the courts.”
Anne Of The Public Domain
A controversial piece of Canadian legislation which would have extended the copyright of certain works of literature – most notably, the Anne of Green Gables series – has apparently died in Parliament, but the story of how it met its demise is as rife with political intrigue as the question of how such a specific measure found its way into legislative print in the first place. The estate of Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the Green Gables books, had pushed especially hard for passage, and questions are swirling about the political influence of the Montgomery family as a result.
Big Day For Canadian Prizes
The Writers’ Trust of Canada has awarded this year’s prize for political writing to retired Canadian lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire, for his examination of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Shake Hands With the Devil. The prize carries a CAN$15,000 cash prize, and is one of the country’s most prestigious literary awards. “Elsewhere, the Griffin Trust, sponsor of the world’s richest prizes for poetry — $80,000 — announced the 2004 nominees,” including Canadian poets Leslie Greentree and Anne Simpson.
English As The Global Language? Think Again.
“With the emergence of the Internet and the growth of global commerce, many assume English is on its way toward becoming the dominant global language, wiping out its competitors as it spreads around the world. Actually, the number of people who speak English exclusively is declining worldwide, while people who speak two or more languages are becoming more common.” Arabic and Spanish are on the rise, and Chinese (which, let’s not forget, is spoken by three times as many people as its nearest competitor) isn’t going away anytime soon. Nonetheless, researchers predict that English will remain the language of international business and commerce for the foreseeable future.
Legal Downloads Up, Choice Too
The amount of legally purchased downloaded music has increased 10 times in the past year. But what’s really interesting, is what is being downloading. “Music fans are downloading a wide range of songs, with the top 100 downloads accounting for just 11% of sales. This contrasts with CD single sales, where the top 100 CD singles account for 77% of total CD singles sales.”
Big Plans In Baghdad
In the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, the looting and ransacking of the Iraq Museum was viewed as a very avoidable tragedy indicative of the inability of the occupying forces to protect the country’s national treasures. But “ten months after its looting, the Iraq Museum has recovered nearly half of the artifacts stolen. Many of those treasures, like the museum itself, are in need of extensive restoration. And a more ambitious goal has emerged, as well: of returning the museum to a role it has not played in a generation, as a center of scholarship and as a place to display Iraq’s priceless archaeological heritage.”