Author: Douglas McLennan

CULT OF THE NEW

“Every year fresh new ranks of art-producers rise up almost fully-formed from the art schools, au fait with the current ways of art-knowingness, hard on the heels of their predecessors, intent on subverting the art world hierarchy and establishing their own rightful niches within it. They have to be seen to be doing something different from what was done before, or revamping the old in contemporary guise, to live up to and perpetuate the Western art tradition of continual innovation.” That we’re in a new millennium only accelerates the quest. – *spark-online

INSIDE OUT

A number of artists are experimenting with medical testing in their art. Scans, endoscopy, genetic testing – “to obtain images of their insides, artists are pushing the boundaries of self-exposure, subjecting themselves to painful scrutiny on many levels.” – ARTnews

WHO KNEW?

Georgia O’Keeffe was fond of secrets. But everyone thinks they know the artist’s work. Turns out not as well as people might think. In compiling the O’Keeffe catalogue raisonné its author “was stunned to find hundreds of carefully preserved sketchbooks, tiny line drawings, detailed renderings of landscapes, luminous floral pastels, and completely abstract late watercolors. The works on paper make up about half of the slightly more than 2,000 entries in the two-volume catalogue.” – ARTnews

OLD LOOT LAWS

Someone’s doing some work on your property. They find a cache of buried gold coins. They claim it for their own. Do they have a right to it? “Idaho Supreme Court will soon hear a dispute pitting media mogul Jann Wenner, the owner of Rolling Stone magazine, against  a construction worker who discovered a cache of gold coins buried on Wenner’s land near the Sun Valley resort area. The worker made his claim based on the ancient common law rule of treasure trove, which awards title of an artifact to the finder, be he looter or archaeologist.” Is this fair? – Archaeology Magazine

GOTTA DANCE

Ballroom dancing is very hot right now. Not just in studios and nightclubs, but onstage too. “The way I see it, ballroom has existed in this sort of cocoon, in the studios and competitions. It was almost its own unique little world, like a step back in time. When you think of ballroom, you think of the slicked-back hair and the fake tans and the sequins…. We want to sort of deconstruct that myth.” – Christian Science Monitor

READING THE SOUND OF THE WEB

A new freeware closed-captioning program for for video on the web has been released at Boston public station WGBH. “Before MAGpie, if you wanted to add captions, you had to type in formatting codes and timecodes. To caption a 10-minute clip, it took two to three hours. With MAGpie’s automation, it takes about 30 to 40 minutes.” – Wired 03/31/00

OUR HEROES

  • Much of the art on the web is, well, rather lacking in imagination. Etoy is trying to change that. Fresh from battles over the use of their name, the artist group is forging ahead. “Created in 1994 by seven original founders who describe themselves as ‘sound-producers, artists, designers, lawyers, PR and CI experts [public relations and corporate identity]’ etoy’s first project was to merge their individual identities into one digital identity and produce, ‘the first dot.com brand in the art world.’” – The Art Newspaper 03/31/00