“The global financial meltdown is likely to have one unintended side effect, predicts David Chipperfield: Fewer attention-seeking buildings will go up. ‘It’s an architecture of excess, a consequence of there being too much money around,’ says the British architect. ‘At a time when people are worried about other things, those things become really irritating, and probably less relevant.'”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Frank Capra, Shakespeare and Trollope On Trade and Trust
“You recall George: in the person of James Stewart he stopped a run on the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan Association that would have destroyed it in the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ His predicament, with its eerie prefigurement of the present, provokes a closer look at the crossroads in which culture and finance intersect.”
Good For Google, Bad For Broadway?
Google and other tech companies are likely to get an Election Day gift “when the Federal Communications Commission votes on a proposal to make a disputed chunk of radio spectrum available for public use. … But a coalition of old-guard media — from television networks to Broadway producers — is objecting to the proposal, saying it needs a closer look. The opponents argue that signals sent over those frequencies could interfere with broadcasts and wireless microphones at live productions.”
The Meltdown, Explained In Terms Arts People Understand
“If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism.”
Publishers, Authors Settle With Google On Book Scanning
“Google has reached a landmark agreement with authors and publishers to make millions of books available online, in a deal that includes a $125m (£80m) payout and the end to lawsuits filed by companies including Penguin. The agreement, part of which is subject to the approval of the US District Court in New York, comes after two years of negotiations between the parties and will mark the end of two lawsuits against the Google Book Search tool.”
£60M Gallery, Open Two Days In June, Remains Shuttered
“The Public Gallery in West Bromwich closed just two days after its grand opening in June because of technical problems with the high-tech art installations. The Will Alsop-designed arts centre cost £60m, nearly half what it cost to open Tate Modern in 2000. … The Public Gallery told us that it will reopen this month, although no date has been given.”
Task Force To Target A Scourge: Music-Fest Tent Thefts
“Tent thieves, it is time to tremble! No longer will British music festivals sit idly by as you nick tent poles, nab canvases or whisk lean-tos back to your lairs. The newly formed Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) has announced its first initiative – a security taskforce that will target tent thefts and campsite crime at the country’s music shindigs.”
Indie Bookshops Disappear, Replaced By Circle Of Hell
Given the abysmal experience that awaits customers within the walls of chain booksellers, Charlotte Higgins wonders, how is it that “capitalism has not winnowed out such obviously unsatisfactory stores as Waterstone’s and Borders”?
Overlooked But Indispensable: Local Critics
“[W]hile arguments over things like the value of criticism and mainstream reviewers versus bloggers continue to rage, there is one group of writers who get consistently ignored – local critics. Yet given that most of our mainstream critics rarely travel beyond the M25, the coverage these local writers give to work happening all over the country plays a vital part in informing potential audiences what is out there.”
Publishers See $$$ In Economic Pain
“Except for high school musicals of ‘Annie’ and maybe a James Cagney film festival, Americans have done a great job of burying the Great Depression in the nation’s psyche. It took a financial collapse of today’s magnitude to reawaken the visions of that long, hard time of nearly 70 years ago. Publishers, naturally, are huffing and puffing to come up with the most appropriate new book to explain the current economic miseries.”