A visit to this year’s exhibition of Turner Prize finalists shows that visitors aren’t much interested in the art there. “Is it just that this year’s shortlist is lacklustre? Or is this year just part of a larger problem? The answer is the latter. If there is a big message in the Turner prize exhibition, it is that there is a huge public demand for the arts, but it is not being met by the artists. Admittedly, this is a charge which has often been made in all the arts in the past, and has been made in many different societies, and by some very unsavoury figures. But it continues to be made, and it seems to be a particular problem for the visual arts.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Digital Art Accepted – Now What?
Digital art is finally gaining acceptance and finding its way into museums. But “the very existence of a market for digital work, with pieces priced as high as $150,000, is creating conflict among practitioners in a medium that was, until recently, a proud part of the artistic fringe. The ability to ‘objectify’ digital art and make it as palpable, and salable, as a sculpture or painting is raising questions as to whether a genre based on the community-focused ethics of open-source computer programmers has lost the edge that made it exciting in the first place.”
Lesson For The Day – Stealing’s Okay If It’s Educational
JK Rowling and Warner Bros. have lost an expensive lawsuit in Germany. A publisher of textbooks had used the Harry Potter character in printed homework assignments, so Rowling sued. “The judge in the case agreed with the publishing house’s argument that they did not need to obtain copyright for school books because they were for educational purposes. The practice of using images on German schoolbooks is apparently commonplace. According to the publishing house, authors are happy to be targeted because it gives them free publicity and even boosts sales of the original book as it means children have to buy them so they can complete the homework.”
I Just Called To Write I Luv U
A love poem has been declared the winner of this year’s Guardian “Text Message” Poetry Contest. The poetry is composed for mobile phones and “the text message format puts a limit of 160 characters on each poem, which tests the ingenuity and creativity of the poets. Combining poetry, one of the oldest literary forms, with texting demonstrates just how creative text messaging can be.”
Royal Art Replacement (Are They Fakes?)
Is a senior member of England’s royal family selling off art masterpieces and replacing them with fakes? A report claims that “the female royal, who was not named, is said to have sold two watercolours by Thomas Gainsborough to an antique dealer for £100,000. The paintings were said to have been replaced in their original frames by photographs of the watercolours, specially aged to look like old masterpieces.”
Finding Out What’s In The Hermitage
The Hermitage Museum “reportedly has three-million paintings, sculptures, drawings and decorative objects on its six-block site. But it’s not entirely sure of that number or precisely where among its 400-plus rooms all that stuff is located, since it’s never done a complete inventory in its 250-year history.” Now a consortium of foundations is helping the museum to audit its holdings and bring the Hermitage into the modern age, more or less, and on a footing equal, more or less, to that of the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum.”
Interpret This
There are curators. And then there are “Curators of Interpretation” who in the UK are “increasingly important people in the world of art, under a government that makes its grants to public galleries conditional upon the ‘accessibility’ of the works they display. It is their job to make the exhibits accessible to the masses, by helping Joe Public to see the point of what he is being shown. They also have an expanding role in deciding how exhibitions should be mounted, so as to make them welcoming and instructive to philistines like me.”
Pyramidal Efficiency
The Egyptian Council of Antiquities reports that one million stones were used in the building of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. “The number is under half of the previously estimated amount of 2.3 million stones, indicating that the Egyptian pyramid builders were even more organized and efficient than previously thought.”
Why Do Books Cost So Much?
“Consumers are often baffled at the price tag attached to what appears to be little more than a mass of paper, cardboard and ink. A whole host of factors, including the size of the book, the quality of paper, the quantity of books printed, whether it contains illustrations, what sort of deal the publisher can make with the printer and the cost of warehouse space, all affect the production costs of a book. But, roughly speaking, only about 20 percent of a publisher’s budget for each book pays for paper, printing and binding, the trinity that determines the physical cost.”
Big Publisher Settles With Upstart Internet Publisher
Publishing giant Random House and online publisher RosettaBooks have settled RH’s lawsuit against the upstart internet publisher. Rosetta has been selling electronic versions of books that predate the internet by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron. Rosetta claimed its editions as new publications and made deals with the authors and not the original publishers. “But the settlement announced Wednesday leaves the issue unresolved. The two sides essentially agreed it was better to work together than to fight.”