“The stuff you dig out of the earth’s crust becomes, in an information economy, less important than the information that informs it, what you think about the stuff. Yet the more you ponder that information, the more you understand about that stuff, the more real the stuff becomes. To put it in terms of the art world Andy Warhol lived in, the more you see that style matters more than substance, the more you see the vital role, the vitality, of substance.”
Blog
Portrait Of A Movie Critic
“People wishing to make their mark as movie critics must either be able to express opinions like ours better than we can, or else they must be in charge of a big idea, preferably one that can be dignified by being called a theory.”
Documenting Broadway In An Hour
“Some 400 filmmakers spread out simultaneously along the thoroughfare for one hour Tuesday to capture every block of Broadway, which runs almost the entire length of Manhattan and a section of the Bronx.”
Jung On The Block
An important collection of Carl Jung’s papers is up for auction. “The collection shines a light on Jung’s personal and professional preoccupations and includes material that has never been seen by researchers before. ‘They have been seen by Jung scholars and they have been dumbstruck. Gobsmacked was one word that was used’.”
What For Book Expo?
“It’s ridiculous, this pageant of the weird where everyone gets together to celebrate books by ritually destroying their bodies for a weekend and pretending that they’re on a first-name basis with celebrities, but you cannot deny the fact that all of it, from the hundreds of lonely nights of nerdy solitude to the once-a-year chaos of BEA, is done out of love. Love for books. Well, books and free shit.”
A Controversial New Business Model For Trading Music
A new website “allows fans to trade music discs for just $1 plus shipping, pledges to give a fifth of its sales to all the musicians, including lesser-known session studio players, involved in the making of CDs exchanged on its site. In a move that is certain to stoke controversy with music promoters, the founder of the Silicon Valley startup said la la will circumvent traditional copyright and royalty payment systems to compensate identifiable working musicians.”
Warner Rolls Up Classical Label
Warner Classics is no more. “Warner Classics is being rolled into Rhino, Warner’s reissue division, though it is unclear at the moment of the parent company’s ambitions in the classical music world. This move by Warner reduces the so-called majors in the classical record arena to just EMI, Universal and Sony-BMG.”
Ottawa Arts Center Posts First Deficit…
Ottawa’s National Arts center posts its first deficit in six years. “The year’s planned deficit of $891,720 was funded by surpluses accumulated during the past six consecutive years,” the statement says, adding that the NAC still retains an accumulated surplus of almost $355,000.”
The Digi-Book, 2.0
Techies are taking another shot at making a digital book that someone might want to read a book on. Alex Beam is skeptical…
Outlook For Culture…
We hear all the time about the arts being endangered. But maybe that’s not the reality… “Pop culture remains mass culture, of course, and people who consume entertainment with the help of electronics continue to outnumber those who prefer the real thing. But the doomsayers who expected the arts to be swept away in the “digital tsunami” of the past decade, as it’s been called, turn out to have been gratifyingly off the mark.”