“This is going to be the most important year for the British music industry in nearly a decade. Many of its challenges have already been documented: from expensive Pop Idol flops to the effect on CD sales of illegal internet downloads. But the real problem is that the UK business is in danger of becoming nothing more than a regional office for the rest of the world. Where we used to amaze and confuse the competition with our maverick, sulky, ingenious pop star exports, the past year has seen the UK left in charge of the stationery cupboard.”
Blog
Little Book Makes Big
The reality of the publishing business these days is that it’s the rare “little” book that gets any traction in the marketplace. All the more remarkable then, for Matthew Sharpe’s “stunning, offbeat coming-of-age novel,” The Sleeping Father, which, though rejected by 20 publishers and published by a small press for only a $1,000 advance, has become a hit.
Schjeldahl: A Whitney Based On Good Instincts
Peter Schjeldahl appreciates the instincts demonstrated by artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial. “All of a sudden, artists are again plainly smarter in their bones than art intellectuals are in their brains. The operative word is ‘plainly.’ Painting and drawing are back. That’s the big news of this Biennial.”
Is Elliott Carter Too Hard For Detroit?
When the Pacifica Quartet came to perform at the Chamber Music Society of Detroit this week, they were specifically asked not to perform the Elliott Carter quartet they had planned. Why? Fear of “alienating” subscribers. “Never mind that Carter’s Fifth (1995) is a brilliant work in the composer’s late style, muscular but communicative, full of spry dialogue and texture. Never mind that the Pacifica’s reputation is based partly on its passionate advocacy of Carter. Never mind that removing Carter to placate a few reactionary patrons drives a stake through the heart of the society’s artistic integrity and tightens the noose more securely around the future of classical music. If you do not play the music of today, to paraphrase composer Gunther Schuller, there will be no masterpieces for tomorrow.”
Rust-As-Art – Florida County Relents on Public Sculpture
Officials in Tampa Florida have relented in insisting that an artist scrape the rust off a public sculpture he made. The artist – Bradley Arthur – insisted that the rust wasn’t an error, but part of his artistic intentions for the piece.
The Meaning Of Rust
As public officials attacked his public sculpture because it was rusting, Artist Bradley Arthur suggests that the rust is part of the pieces’ status as living art, a common theme in works subjected to the elements. He’s a gregarious sort who loves discussing meaning and subtext and symbolism. He’s given to making lofty statements that can sound pretentious to people less aesthetically minded. At the Ybor City sculpture, he kneels to rub off a reddish smudge. ‘It’s like the piece is crying,’ he says wistfully.”
Claim: Da Vinci Code Is Bestselling Adult Novel Ever
The publisher of The Da Vinci Code says that in its first year the book has become “the bestselling adult novel of all time. Doubleday announced Thursday that after 53 printings – including 14 consecutive weeks in first place on The New York Times bestseller list – there are 6.8 million copies in print.”
Writers Guild President Resigns
Charles Holland has resigned as president of the Writers Guild of America’s Western branch after only two months on the job. Questions have persisted about “the accuracy of claims he made about his past.”
The Blog Niche Goes Mainstream
Blogging is no longer a mere blip on the cultural radar screen. In the last year, blog readership has nearly tripled, and bloggers focusing on everything from politics to culture to wartime survival have become fringe players in an increasingly crowded and diverse global media scene. Traditional media sources are predictably wary of bloggers, who have no obligation to follow traditional journalistic codes of conduct and who frequently bring strong biases to their work, but there’s no denying that the online journals are becoming increasingly powerful in the information-delivery game.
Elementary, My Dea… actually, it’s fairly complicated.
“The British Library is urging that the planned sale of 3,000 personal documents of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this May by auction house Christie’s in the United Kingdom be halted until a dispute over the papers’ true owners has been resolved. The British Library has argued that some of the papers… actually belongs to them since Conan Doyle’s daughter Jean Conan Doyle bequeathed some of the documents to them when she died in 1997. Meanwhile, the Toronto Public Library is concerned that the Christie’s material… might actually have been part of a legacy from Conan Doyle’s daughter-in-law, Anna Conan Doyle, who left five items to the library’s Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, the largest publicly accessible collection of Conan Doyle items in the world.”