Why did this year’s Golden Globes seem so lacklustre? “Despite the hard evidence to the contrary, TV shows and movies still maintain the symbol of the shared experience; it’s partly what award shows are for, to honor what we talk about. Except that that equation doesn’t so much exist anymore.”
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Looking At Beck’s Art
What’s competing for this year’s Beck’s Futures prize? Here’s a gallery of the nominated work…
American Says Klimt Paintings Should Remain In Austria
The American woman who won ownership in an Austrian court of five Gustav Klimt paintings that had been looted by Nazis from her family, says she’d like the paintings to remain in Austria. But the Austrian culture minister says that “Austria could not afford to buy back the paintings, citing media reports that Adele Bloch-Bauer I, also called the ‘Golden Adele’, alone was worth between 70 million and 100 million euros. 70 million euros amounts to the whole budget for all museums in Austria — all public museums’.”
Britain’s Museum Crisis
“Since 1993, the acquisitions budgets of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum have dropped by 90 per cent. The Government says that museums can decide how much of their grant-in-aid they spend on purchases, but this is specious, because they are so cash-strapped that they cannot afford to allocate more to acquisitions.”
So Goes The Music Video…
Music videos, so much the hot thing in the 1980s era of MTV, have lost much of their influence. “While music videos have declined in value as promotional tools, they have fuelled the profiles of a new school of short-form auteurs, to the point where their works can now be savoured in a more rarefied context than in the frenetic flow on music channels.”
Canada’s Culture Debate (Where Is It?)
Why aren’t Canadian politicians talking about culture in the current federal election? “Compared to other countries, Canada has failed miserably at supporting its artists. “England’s national arts council funds in the amount of $24.36 per capita. Ireland is at $17.91 and Norway is at $10.97. Currently, the Canada Council receives $4.73 per Canadian.”
The Memoir Problem
“No one wants to read an 8,000-page memoir that pores over each waking moment. But now, the controversy surrounding James Frey’s bestselling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” is raising questions about how factual even the most carefully written memoirs are. The memoir is a strange kind of performance. It’s halfway between fiction and testimony. ‘Anybody in his right mind knows that a memoir is unreliable’.”
British Lottery Fund To Take Dip
The UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund, the cash spigot that has financed many cultural projects, is going to see a big drop in its funding ability. The HLF “will award £330 million in the current financial year, but this will fall to £200 million in 2008, down nearly 40%. There are three reasons for the anticipated drop”, including funding for Olympics projects and an accounting change.
How New York Became The Center Of The Art World
“To be sure, cultural power customarily follows financial power. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that postwar New York should have assumed the preeminence that Paris had enjoyed in 1900, or Rome in 1600. But what was remarkable was that a country with such a long record of philistine indifference to visual culture could move in a single generation from art’s provincial periphery to its very epicenter.”
Reconciling Mozart
“Our feeling of disconnection from Mozart the man—what Copland speaks of as our inability to ‘seize’ him—extends to the works themselves. Except for the greater sophistication that came with age, there is no readily apparent relationship between the expressive qualities of Mozart’s music and the emotional landmarks of his life.”