A historic exhibition of 18 works by Caravaggio is drawing crowds in Naples, further cementing the realist master’s reputation as one of the greatest painters of all time. “The reason for the success of this magnificent show has less to do with numbers than with the quality of the works and the period that they document: the last four years of Caravaggio’s life, spent peripatetically outside Rome, where he had made a name for himself before he died at 39 of malaria.”
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Supreme Court To Hear File-Sharing Arguments
“The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider whether two internet file-sharing services may be held responsible for their customers’ online swapping of copyright songs and movies. Justices will review a lower ruling in favor of Grokster and StreamCast Networks that came as a blow to recording companies and movie studios seeking to stop the illegal distribution of their works… The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in August that file-sharing services were not responsible because they don’t have central servers pointing users to copyright material.”
Let Liverpool Be Liverpool Again
A spectacular complex of museums, shops, and apartments known as the Fourth Grace was supposed to be the architectural cornerstone that would take the city of Liverpool out of its post-industrial doldrums and into a brave new future. “But when escalating costs killed the £325 million project off in the summer, the Fourth Grace became an icon for another kind of Liverpool, an inescapable reminder of the constant stream of failed projects and broken promises in the city.” The real tragedy, though, may be that Liverpool is still trying to reinvent itself with expensive new buildings, when it already has all the raw ingredients of a beautiful city waiting to be highlighted.
FCC: The Olympics May Be Hazardous To Your Moral Compass
The FCC has asked the NBC television network to turn over tape of the opening ceremonies of last summer’s Olympic Games, so that the agency can investigate viewer complaints about its content. No one seems to know exactly what portion of the Athens ceremony raised hackles with American viewers, but it may have something to do with the partially unclothed state of some of the traditional Olympic poses adopted by actors in the show. Or maybe it was the woman wading in a puddle who “appeared to have been impregnated by someone who was radioactive, but we cannot say with certainty whether that was Greek or just weird.”
Neighborhood Surrealism
Looking at photographs of Toronto’s surreal and gravity-defying new Sharp Centre, one wonders whether such a bizarre and whimsical structure could possibly exist in reality. But as Benjamin Forgey discovered, the building – a huge horizontal rectangle with a distinct crossword-puzzle motif, balanced precariously atop six pairs of stilts – is every bit as real as the photos suggest. “The marvel is threefold: that folks rather enthusiastically allowed this thing to be built, that it works so well as a practical matter, and that, quite simply, it is beautiful.”
Forget Direct-To-Video, How About Direct-To-Phone?
The evolution of cell phone technology is looking an awful lot like the early days of television, when no one was quite sure what direction the new medium would take. At the moment, the strategy of most companies seems to be to throw every available technology at the consumer wall, and see what sticks. “The increasing power of cellphones is shaping innovative forms of compact culture: micro-lit, phone soap operas and made-for-mobile dramas that can be absorbed in a few glances.”
If Only It Weren’t Quite So, Well, Canadian
“Situated between the lordly British and German digs [at the Venice Biennale], Canada’s stage, designed by Milan-based architects for our best artists… is a curiously self-effacing structure, more likely to be found near Georgian Bay than near the Canale di San Marco. Overcoming its cramped, curved interior space has been as much a problem for the artists as their own pieces.”
Coming Soon: Dali Kong
A Canadian artist was gazing at a famous Mondrian painting some years back, when something told him that he’d seen a similar layout before, in his old 1980s-era Atari video game system. “Pac-Mondrian is the meeting ground in arcade-game format between Toru Iwantani’s classic 1980s Atari game Pac-Man and Piet Mondrian’s oil painting, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), the motionless but vibrant jangle of red, yellow and blue rectangles representing the expatriate Dutch painter’s reaction to the hectic, well-travelled grid of New York in the early 1940s.” The unauthorized mish-mash has become a legitimate Internet art smash, with tens of thousands of visitors playing the game and admiring the art.
The Great Big FCC Road Show
Some FCC commissioners have been taking the broadcast regulation biz on the road lately, hosting public forums in cities across the country. A stop in St. Paul revealed a growing public discontent with corporate consolidation of American mass media, but little consensus over what should be done about it. In Minnesota, where the biggest media presence is actually a public radio network, some activists are stressing the importance of diverse community involvement, while others lament the decline of programming that serves rural residents, such as farm news.
St. Louis Joins The Megaplex Age
“Just three years removed from a rash of bankruptcies and cinema closings, [St. Louis’s movie] theater business is growing again. By early 2006, a building binge will add at least 56 new screens to the region’s western edge… In a transition that’s been far from painless, theater operators are continuing to move to these newer, larger cinemas. The trend takes amenities that debuted in the 1990s, such as stadium seating, and makes them standard theater fixtures. As a result, modern megaplexes are replacing smaller theaters from the 1970s and ’80s.”