Britain’s tallest sculpture has been errected. It’s in Manchester and rises 180 feet. It’s a starburst of spikes “designed by Thomas Heatherwick and took 20 months to put together from 180 tapered steel spikes, connected 22 metres above the ground. To keep it anchored it has foundations weighing 750 tonnes, including a 400-square-metre reinforced concrete slab. The sculpture itself weighs 300 tonnes and leans at an angle of 30 degrees – 10 times more than the leaning tower of Pisa.”
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Needed: A New Internet Strategy For Movies
The director of Blockbuster Video in the UK says it’s time to get serious about a movie strategy for the internet. Films should be released simultaneously in all countires, he says. He also said that “film studios should follow the lead of the music industry and look at ways of releasing films on the internet where they can be downloaded legitimately. He called for downloads, DVDs and VHS to be made available at the same time films are released in the cinema.”
Hadid Gets Architecture Foundation Job
Zaha Hadid has been chosen to design the home of the Architecture Foundation in London. “On a site close to Tate Modern in south London, Hadid’s riveting sense of occasion has found appropriate fulfilment, as the winner of a competition staged to give a home to the Architectural Foundation.”
Frankfurt Garbage Collectors Destroy Artwork
Frankfurt sanitation workers mistakenly removed and destroyed some yellow plastic sheets on the street that were part of an art installation. “Thirty of the dustmen are now being sent to modern art classes to try to ensure that the same mistake never happens again. The head of Frankfurt’s sanitation department, Peter Postleb, took responsibility for the destruction of the sculpture, saying that confusing the plastic sheets with rubbish was an easy mistake to make. He thought they were abandoned building materials.”
Rattle Weathers Criticism
Simon Rattle is getting some of the first criticism of his career. “At 50, Rattle becomes a senior statesman, an establishment figure. He risks entering the kind of self-protective custody that turned Karajan from a powerfully engaged maestro into a misery on Parnassus, watching the world drift away from his concept and his grasp. Rattle has detached himself from his country without fully mastering German language or culture. He is perilously adrift from the way others are starting to perceive him. He may not enjoy reading bad reviews, but unless he gets to grips with shifting perceptions he will wind up in the ivory tower he has always struggled to escape. At 50, and on top of the world, Simon Rattle still has all to prove.”
Terfel Mimes Wotan At Covent Garden
Baritone Bryn Terfel loses his voices only hours before a Covent Garden performance of Das Rheingold. “The Royal Opera House was involved in a frantic dash to find a replacement, who stood in the orchestra pit to supply Terfel’s “voice”.
A Find: Leonardo’s Studio
“Researchers have discovered the hidden laboratory used by Leonardo da Vinci for studies of flight and other pioneering scientific work in previously sealed rooms at a monastery next to the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata, in the heart of Florence.”
Expert: Ruskin’s Turner Bonfire Never Happened
Evidence suggests that celebrated art critic John Ruskin didn’t burn a stack of Turner’s work, as he claimed. “Ruskin appears to have been tried and convicted by the standard version of his involvement with the Turner bequest, which characterizes him as the man who destroyed any surviving evidence of his hero’s sex life. Although the bonfire incident has passed into the popular imagination as one of the defining landmarks of Victorian censorship, what evidence there is to support this version of events is surprisingly slight.”
Painting – In… Or Out?
So some are prepared to declare that painting is back in. “An art form commonly reported to be on its last legs is about to skip jauntily back into the aesthetic arena. The tortoise of tradition catches up with the hare of technology. The old-fashioned canvas overtakes newfangled conceptualism. Or does it? I would not start peeling the champagne foil yet.”
Riding Laziness To Good Health
Want to live longer? A new book says the way to make it happen is kick back and be lazy. “The book begins with an explanation that we are all born with a limited amount of “life energy”. If we use it all up quickly – by exercising and getting stressed out – we will die early. If we do very little and live life at a snail’s pace, we can eke it out and live much longer. It’s a theory that doesn’t find much support in the scientific community…