“Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived… It was a cacophonous, confrontational subgenre of punk rock, Dadaist in style and nihilistic in attitude. It began around 1976, and within four years most of the original bands had broken up.”
Month: June 2008
Profile Of The 21st Century Artist
“More Americans identify their primary occupation as artist than as lawyer, doctor, police officer or farm worker… Drawing from the census, the [National Endowment for the Arts] has compiled what it bills as the first nationwide profile of professional artists in the 21st century.”
Quantity Over Quality When The List Is On The Line
When a bestselling author becomes a bestselling brand, does the quality of his/her work inevitably suffer as a result? “Publishers are asking ever more of their writers to get on to the bestseller lists, [and] as genre readers, we’re unfortunately complicit in this.”
Is Beijing’s Boom Creating An Identity Problem?
Beijing is growing at a dizzying pace, and while progress is presumably to be celebrated as a concept, some are asking whether architectural identity is being sacrificed in the name of speedy modernization. “Are we in danger of replacing one form of cultural imperialism with another?”
The Updating Of Dorian Gray
“Dorian Gray reimagined as a gay aftershave model for our times?” No, it’s not a performance art piece or a bad TV movie – it’s the latest project from star choreographer Matthew Bourne. “Bourne is toying with the possibility of giving Dorian a doppelganger, an evil twin, and is still working out how to avoid having a literal version of the novel’s notorious portrait in the attic.”
Architects In The Zoo
“Norman Foster, the world’s most celebrated hi-tech architect – the Sultan of Seamlessness, so to speak – has just completed an elephant house at Copenhagen Zoo that is not just low-tech but, to an almost shocking degree, earthy in its materiality… Foster’s team sought to deliver an architectural paradigm-shift in a genre that is utterly foreign to them.”
New Rule Of Thumb: If You’re Long, You’re Done
Gone With The Wind was supposed to be the show of the year in London’s West End. Instead, it flopped badly and will close this weekend. So what happened? Well, the thing was over four hours long when previews began, for one thing, and that doesn’t play in the fast-paced modern world in which “the days of a slow story build-up are gone.”
Arguing With The Critics
Last week, a London art critic panned a high-profile Klimt show at Tate Liverpool, and the museum’s director isn’t taking the shot lying down. “It is disappointing when a show’s gift shop receives more coverage than the show itself… What counts is the ambition and quality of the exhibition.”
UK Artist Albert Herbert Dies
“Albert Herbert, who has died aged 82, was probably the greatest of contemporary religious artists. [He] was a maverick, liked but seldom taken seriously by art establishments… His subject matter was looked upon with suspicion by those holding the public art purse-strings, and there is no Albert Herbert in the Tate.”
Drunk Driver Who Killed OR Musicians Found Guilty
“A Salem woman who drove her car with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit was convicted Tuesday on two counts of first-degree manslaughter, assault and drunken driving for a collision that killed two Eugene Symphony musicians and injured a third in February 2007.”