Why are there so few older characters on Australian TV? And those older characters there are don’t seem realistic. There’s a “failure of local dramas to depict the 60-plus generation as people with sex lives, aspirations, careers and sporting ability. ‘Everyone knows we’re not all young and gorgeous so why doesn’t television show it’?”
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Arab World – Looking For legacy
A thousand years ago the Arab world was a center of learning, a civilization that led the world. So what happened? “According to a number of highly self-critical reports that have come out in the past few years, the 21 countries that make up the region are struggling to teach even basic science at the university level. For poor countries, such as Yemen and Sudan, the problem is a lack of money and resources. For wealthier ones, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, complacency and a relatively new and underdeveloped university system have hampered progress.”
Consolation Prize – Money For Runner-up Cultural Capitals
The British government is offering those UK cities that lost out in the compatition for 2008 European Capital of Culture a pot of £15 million to spend on cultural projects. “The lottery-generated money, channelled through the Millennium Commission and the Arts Council, is intended for festivals, exhibitions and other events which show that culture and the arts are contributing to the area’s regeneration.”
Hockney: Photography Is Dead
David Hockney says he believes that photography as an artform is dead. “Hockney says he believes modern photography is now so extensively and easily altered that it can no longer be seen to be true or factual. He also describes art photography as “dull”. Even war photography, once seen as objectively “true”, has now been cast in doubt by the ubiquitous use of digital cameras which produce images that can be easily enhanced or twisted.”
Kandinsky – Prisoner Of Schoenberg?
Kandinsky was very interested in music and admired Schoenberg, write Terry Teachout, “but he was also an idea-besotted intellectual manqué who followed many a half-baked notion down a blind alley, most spectacularly when he embraced theosophy, a pseudo-religion popular at the turn of the 20th century whose amorphous tenets played a part in his own turn to abstraction. Just as theosophy preached the unimportance of the material world, inspiring Kandinsky to portray in his paintings an “immaterial” universe of spiritual “thought-forms,” so did Schoenberg’s break with tonality—a break that Schoenberg himself thought to be historically inevitable—seem to Kandinsky a necessary stage in the larger quest for a spiritual art freed from the shackles of materialism. Both men, however, were mistaken.”
Architect Proposes Huge Moscow Artist Project
A Dutch architect has proposed building “five blocks of luxury flats, each block decorated in the style of a Russian artist. While the mayor backs the project, architectural critics have panned it as another example of the scars millionaires are inflicting on the city’s skyline.”
Pope Sells Million Books
A book of poems by Pope John Paul II has sold more than one million copies. “The pontiff first published the poems in 2003 but the print run was expanded after sales topped 300,000 in his native Poland.”
Gelb: William Shawn, Petty Tyrant
For years Arthur Gelb had idolized William Shawn and his New Yorker magazine. But when Gelb commissioned a profile of Shawn for the New York Times in 1966, he discovered another side of the legendary editor. Up close, Shawn was “ridiculously petty. He lived in a world he helped create, protected it against outsiders who might penetrate that world a little too deeply and might expose it.”
My Amazon Addiction…
“From the day their book first lands in stores, most writers will start spending minutes, hours—nay, days, weeks, months and years—tracking its progress on Amazon.com. Never mind that the online retailer accounts for only about 10 percent of a trade book’s total sales (slightly higher for business books, somewhat lower for children’s). By my count, the reviews and the ranking system on Amazon.com count for about 95 percent of writers’ hopes, anxieties and dreams.”
Newsome Changes Roles
“Steven C. Newsome, the director of the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture, resigned yesterday but will remain with the Smithsonian Institution to help plan a national black museum. In his 12 years at the helm of the Anacostia Museum, Newsome directed a successful campaign to raise $8.5 million for a renovation of the museum’s Southeast Washington building, which was completed in 2002.”