Author: Douglas McLennan

BUSTED

  • Recording industry has filed briefs in court to shut down Napster. The industry will use internal Napster e-mail and memos “in which Napster executives, primarily co-principals Shawn Fanning, 19, and Sean Parker, 20, openly discuss the use of their service as a tool facilitating the exchange of copyrighted material by established recording artists, statements the RIAA says are proof that the service represents a haven for music piracy and should be closed immediately.” – Inside.com

THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER

A new book wades into the politics of collecting indigenous artifacts. “Using the recent controversy over “Kennewick Man”–the 9,500-year-old skeleton from the Columbia River that some anthropologists have incautiously described as “Caucasoid”–as allegory for 200 years of scientific aggression against indigenous identity, he argues that contemporary Indian intransigence about history has been largely shaped by the hubris and ghoulish exploits of the great men of science whose statues adorn our museums.” – New York Observer

OPENING THE CULTURAL FLOODGATE

Now that the leaders of North Korea and South Korean are talking to each other, there is a whole spectrum of possibility for cross-border cultural exchange. – Korea Herald (Part I of IV)

  • ART AS COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA: Even though the cultural climate in North Korea has become less politicized in the last few years, “arts and culture are subordinated to political and economic aims and considered to be a tool for facilitating a Communist revolution.” Now, state-run broadcasters become a bit more lax: they have allowed television programs with once-prohibited scenes of men and women holding hands in a public park.  – Korea Herald (Part II of IV)

A PLACE OF THEIR OWN

Like anywhere, New York has a shortage of rehearsal space. So the raves are pouring in for a new $29.6 million rehearsal center on 42nd Street that hasn’t even opened yet. “It’s the first building built specifically for a range of art forms, and for both nonprofit and commercial uses.” – New York Times

THE ART OF PATRONAGE

“When it comes to telling the stories of living patrons—that is, collectors who buy contemporary art and give it to museums—the most blatant conflicts of interest make it all but impossible to give the public a candid, disabused account of the way our system of contemporary art patronage actually works.” So what’s actually wrong with this picture? – New York Observer

ABRUPT RETURN

Russia’s Hermitage Museum loaned Matisse’s “La Danse” for an exhibition in Italy. It was the first time the collection had been seen outside Russia and after the exhibition finished last weekend in Rome, the art was scheduled to be put on show in Milan until August. “But in a surprise legal move the heirs of the original owner demanded that the Italian courts confiscate the huge painting. So the painting was quickly transported back to Russia before it could be enmeshed in legal action.” – The Independent (UK)

DISPUTED ART WHISKED BACK TO RUSSIA

“[Matisse’s] ‘La Danse’, painted in 1910, was one of many works of art confiscated from private collections by Lenin and the Bolsheviks a year after the Russian Revolution of 1917. It belonged to one of pre-revolutionary Russia’s most eminent art connoisseurs, Sergei Ivanovich Shukin, who came from a Russian-Jewish family that made its fortune in textiles.” – The Times (UK)

POLITICS OF PUBLIC ART

The University of Massachusetts thought it was doing a neighborhood-improvement thing when it tried to organize a sculpture garden of important work. But now the neighborhood is objecting big time, and someone even went so far as to smash the base for one of the sculptures. “The big issue isn’t the desirability of a sculpture park filled with millions of dollars’ worth of work that would go a long way toward improving Boston’s current reputation as a completely dysfunctional city when it comes to public art. The issue is town-gown friction, a variation on what happens every time Harvard wants to expand its art museums, world-class institutions that enrich not just the university community, but the community at large.” – Boston Globe

THE NAKED TRUTH

Spencer Tunick has been arrested five times for organizing his photo shoots of crowds of naked people. So he sued the city of New York and last weekend a judge ruled he could go ahead with a project placing 125 naked volunteers under a Manhattan bridge. “I like that it brings more attention to the background of the photograph. There’s equal tension. First you look at the background, and then your eyes are drawn to the body and the relationship between the vulnerability of human nakedness and the public space.” – National Post (Canada)