Minneapolis/St. Paul’s alternative weekly paper turns 25 this month, and what better way to celebrate than to go back through the years and rip your own critics to shreds? The current issue of City Pages features a piece in which the paper’s various art, music, and theater critics apologize for specific wrongheaded judgments they’ve made over the years.
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Copyrights, Parodies, and Right of Fair Use
Creators of the satirical web site JibJab have decided to go to court to fight for their right to keep running a popular parody of a Woody Guthrie song featuring cartoon images of President Bush and Senator John Kerry. The site had been threatened with a lawsuit by Ludlow Music, which owns the copyright on the Guthrie song, but JibJab decided to strike first, filing a lawsuit of its own in a U.S. District Court. The case could have far-reaching implications for artists’ rights in the digital age.
But We Already Knew How Good The Shining Was
How scary is that new suspense movie that just came out? University researchers in the UK can tell you, right down to the tenth decimal place. The researchers claim to have invented a mathematical formula that can quantify such things: “[it] combines elements of suspense, realism and gore, plus shock value, to measure how scary a film is.” As it turns out, The Shining is the perfect formulaic scary movie, while Jaws exhibits the best use of non-gratuitous gore in a scary film.
This Is Why Most Ballet Companies Only Cast Swans & Mice
The Bolshoi Ballet needed a horse for its production of Marius Petipa’s The Pharaoh’s Daughter at the Royal Opera House in London. They planned to bring one with them from home, but quarantine laws interfered. So they found an English horse to stand in, and that animal promptly injured itself. Finally, a local trick-rider provided one of his horses for the Bolshoi’s use, but the difficulties didn’t end there…
Hitting Too Close To Home
A devastating indictment of race relations in the Upper Midwest is currently playing at a theater in the Twin Cities. “The Last Minstrel Show,” which details (and satirizes in explicit form) the lynching of three black men in Duluth, is hard to watch and even harder to analyze, and apparently, Minnesotans don’t want to hear it. The show is closing after only two weeks, due to abysmal ticket sales in a city that normally embraces theater of all types. “If virtually no one attends a play about an event virtually no one wants to talk about, then, as the show’s final production number asserts with nonchalant gaiety, ‘Nothing happened.’ Right? Isn’t that where we’re at societywise on the whole race issue?”
Is NY’s Mayor Shortchanging The Arts?
Whe New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced plans this summer to reinvigorate the city’s school arts curriculum, teachers and school administrators were thrilled, and observers dared to hope that the long, devastating slide in New York’s arts education program might finally be reversed. But upon closer observation, it appears that there may be a key ingredient missing from Mayor Bloomberg’s plan: the money to implement it.
Hoping Art Can Rise Like, Well, You Know
The city of Phoenix has announced a multi-pronged strategy aimed at nurturing the arts in the urban core. Under the terms of the proposal, a loan fund wuld be created expressly for the purchase and renovation of downtown buildings by artists, artists would be given economic incentives to locate downtown, and a portion of the city center would be designated as an official “arts district.”
Questioning The Premise
A reader responds to ArtsJournal’s newest blog by questioning the very foundation of the critical conversation. “While it is interesting to see what name critics apply to certain groups of individual composers, many of those composers eschew the categories anyway, preferring to simply do their own work and get on with it.” Alex Ross, for one, is stung a bit by the critique, but says such reminders may be for the best: “I feel as though casual posts are being scrutinized as if carved in marble. I guess, though, it’s always good for critics to get smacked around a little. Profound, mysterious irony: some of us don’t take criticism very well.”
An Art Magazine For Ordinary People
“James Truman, editorial director of Condé Nast, has developed a prototype of a luxe and glossy fine arts magazine that he hopes to begin publishing in 2006. The magazine is designed, he said, to bring visual art, or at least a magazine about it, to the masses.” The philosophy of the as-yet untitled magazine will be to treat art pieces as just one more type of desirable object to be coveted by consumers. Rather than adopt the high-minded intellectual tone of most art magazines, Truman plans on using his publication to tell what he calls “curated stories” about art and the people who create it.
Gehry Would Be Perfect For This Job…
For years, London’s South Bank Arts Centre has struggled with a plague of skateboarders. But the complex’s latest management team has taken a new approach, trying to improve relations between the arts community and the skaters. Now, five “skatable sculptures” have been commissioned for the centre’s undercroft, in the hope that skaters will embrace the idea of a designated area for their display of skills.