“The London hotel hosting the event, Grosvenor House, has asked for an ‘exclusion zone’ between two of the shortlisted authors, Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson, on account of their now legendary personal feud having erupted into fisticuffs at a previous ceremony two years ago.”
Blog
What’s Wrong With Music Education
“Increasingly, musical tuition has become the preserve of the elite. The government’s obsession with targets and league tables does not help. The national curriculum affords less and less time to classical music. How many of those who do manage to take up and stay the course of learning an instrument are then encouraged, with little career advice at their disposal, to enter a confusing abundance of music colleges?”
What Are We Losing In Iraq’s Destructive Chaos?
“As the first images of a massive destruction at one of Iraq’s holiest shrines began coming in yesterday, it was hard not to think of the building, rather than what it stands for. How old was it? What was the architecture like? Was this another loss, like the Bamiyan Buddhas, needlessly destroyed by the Taliban? Is its destruction equivalent, say, to the bombing of St. Peter’s in Rome, or Chartres Cathedral? The mind grasps for an easy equivalence… Unlike so many images of terrorist destruction, the calculated demolition of the shrine in Samarra captures the ‘was’ and ‘is’ with rare power.”
Who Needs A Critic When You’ve Got An Army Of Teens?
Sometimes, all it takes to doom a film’s box office prospects is a slew of negative reviews in advance of the opening. As a result, more and more studios are bypassing the review process altogether, refusing to give critics an early look at flicks deemed unlikely to win them over, or unlikely to need a critical boost in any case. “In the past, a typical nonscreened movie was a studio mistake dumped to satisfy contractual obligations. Now, nonscreening is more often part of a conscious marketing policy, particularly flicks aimed at teens.”
Urban Renewal Through Art
“Can there be a weirder, more alienated place than [Tijuana’s] Avenida Revolución on a Saturday night? The dark side of the moon, perhaps? Yet Avenida Revolución also is the pulsing subconscious of an exciting and restless city — one of the world’s busiest, most notorious border towns.” There is plenty of illicit “fun” to be had in the new Tijuana, as you might expect, but surprisingly, the backbone of the city’s dramatic reinvention has been its embrace of contemporary art, and of the arts in general.
Canada’s Queen Of Fluff
At 49, Lise Ravary is sitting on top of Canada’s ever-expanding world of magazines, and she thrives on a synthesis of serious journalism and celeb-soaked pop culture that publishers can’t get enough of. “Arguably, Ravary is the most pivotal force in Canadian consumer publishing today. And in both official languages — probably no one else more closely experiences this country’s two cultures of magazine journalism.”
Does Google To Be An “Instant” Publisher?
So Google has these big book digitization projects going. The project seems to violate copyrights. So what’s the point? “Some in the industry wonder whether Google’s long-term aim isn’t to set itself up as a sort of instant publisher; that once it has all those books in its index, it could generate a print-on-demand shop that would bypass publishers, shipping a book to you even though it is officially out of print.”
Dawn Of A New Day
In a classical music world where soloists are almost forced to lean dramatically towards the conventional, and seem to exist mainly to lend star power and attract cash to the box office, soprano Dawn Upshaw has carved out an unlikely niche for herself as the diva of new music. In the process, she is changing not only the way that the public thinks about contemporary music, but how the critical press perceives performers who play it.
First Told: The Destruction Of Grozny’s Museum
In 1994 in Grozny, Chechnya, the city’s Museum of Fine Art was obliterated during the war. The destruction “has gone unreported, despite the fact that it is the first museum in Europe to be destroyed since 1945. A delegation found that about 90% of buildings in the city, once home to 500,000, have been partially or totally destroyed, mostly as a result of Russian bombing. The Museum of Fine Arts, which housed a collection of more than 500,000 artefacts and works of art, was one of them.”
You Don’t Know Jack
Jack Vettriano may be the most unpopular painter of the last 50 years – unless, that is, you measure popularity by what the general public thinks. “Vettriano is far and away Scotland’s most successful contemporary painter… But critics tend either to ignore Mr. Vettriano or to swat him lazily away with the backs of their cultured hands.” Is it pure elitism on the part of the critics, or is the public simply blind to such niceties as painting skill?