“These days, the icon of Renaissance art is Florence’s greatest single brand and the global Michelangelo market is booming. You might imagine that as the years go by, the chances of finding a long-lost Michelangelo would shrink. But no. As one expert has observed, as the price tag on the world’s greatest artists keeps soaring, so, miraculously, more hidden Michelangelo gems keep being discovered.”
Blog
Apres Le Carbuncle – UK Architecture After Prince Charles
Twenty years ago the Prince of Wales famously opened his attack on modern British architecture by comparing it to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.” “Perhaps what he could not see at the time was that far from retreating into a cosy world of agreeable Georgian architecture, British architects would return to the fray with a forward-looking architecture that is, on the whole, far superior to what had gone before the carbuncle speech at Hampton Court.”
A Downloading Plan That Pays Musicians
Harvard professor Terry Fisher has unveiled a plan that would pay artists for their music and allow (even encourage) rampant downloading. “Fisher advocates an alternative compensation system that would pay artists based on the popularity of their music. Artists would first have to register their work with the copyright office, which would track how many times that work was downloaded. Revenue generated from taxes on things like Internet access and the sale of MP3 players would then be used to pay the artists.”
Why Do We Focus On The $ Of Art?
Richard Chang wonders why magazines like ARTnews focus so much on the price of art. “Sure, folks are curious about money, and any journalist worth his or her salt should be following the buck to a certain degree. Plus, we are entering the auction season, which emanates out of New York, London and Paris. But don’t articles like these reinforce a small, ultrasuccessful cadre, ignoring the majority of skilled and passionate painters, sculptors, installation, video and performance artists?”
It’s Moore V. Eisner
“However it was cooked up, the confrontation between Disney and Michael Moore looks like a ready-made scenario for one of his films, since it casts him, once again, as a populist Paladin going into battle against a corporate enemy. It hardly hurts his cause that the company in question, in spite of its widely beloved, universally recognized brand name, is currently headed by Michael Eisner, one of the least beloved of modern chief executives.”
Seattle Public Library – Setting A New Standard
Next week, Seattle’s new public library – designed by Rem Koolhaas – opens, and Herbert Muschamp is ecstatic: “In more than 30 years of writing about architecture, this is the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review. I could go on piling up superlatives like cars in a multiple collision, but take my word: there’s going to be a whole lot of rubbernecking going on.”
Semiotically Speaking
“Shout the word semiotics across a room today, and the room will very likely shout back at you, ‘What do you mean, semiotics?’ It is a good question and at the same time, according to semiotics, a uselessly subjective question, for semiotics is the study of meaning itself — or rather how images and words (like semiotics, for example) come to mean anything at all. Put another way, semiotics is about how we derive meaning from context. Brown University semiotics program produced a crop of creators that, if they don’t exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it.”
Cannes’s Upbeat Opening
“Cannes 2004 may be only a few days old, but already, it seems, the winds are blowing in a different direction than Cannes 2003 — one of the more roundly criticized in many years. Last year’s Cannes was faulted, largely by American journalists, for slights to Hollywood and for too many lousy art films on the schedule — something the programmers, especially festival head Thierry Fremaux, seem to have taken to heart. Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and director Wolfgang Petersen of the multimillion dollar epic “Troy” have already provided much of the Hollywood star power critics said was missing in 2003.”
Saving A Prehistoric Hill By Calling It A Building?
Conservationists are attempting to have Silbury Hill in Wiltshire reclassified as a building to protect one of the most enigmatic prehistoric structures in Europe. The move would reclassify the largest manmade mound in Europe. “The guardians of the 4,700-year-old hill have been trying to persuade people to keep off Silbury since 1974, when it was closed to the public, without destroying its appearance with intrusive fencing. The monument came close to destruction three years ago when torrential winter rain seeped into shafts left by earlier excavation, which collapsed. Although English Heritage has carried out repairs, the whole structure is vulnerable.”
Are Britain’s Libraries In Danger?
A new report in the UK argues that, “although the use of museums and archives in Britain has doubled in Britain during the life of this government, there is an urgent and imminent library crisis. ‘If we do not address the fundamental structural problem of the library service,’ says the report, not mincing its words, ‘there may be no libraries in 10 or 15 years’ time’.”