The Golden Globe Awards were as unpredictable as ever last night, with the critically acclaimed Cold Mountain getting all but shut out despite leading the field in nominations, and the final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy taking home four awards, including best dramatic film and best director for Peter Jackson. On the television side of the slate, the satirical BBC sitcom The Office, which airs only on a little-known cable network in the U.S., was the surprise winner of best comedy, and also garnered an acting award for the show’s creator and star, Ricky Gervais.
Blog
Faking It
How good are today’s art forgers? So good that some of them make quite a nice living selling their work to collectors who are fully aware that they aren’t buying the original painting. “The pursuit of authenticity can encounter nasty opposition,” as many would-be whistleblowers have discovered, and after all, isn’t the desire to own “the real thing” nothing more than a greedy desire for prestige? “A beautiful artwork does not cease to be beautiful once its authorship is cast in doubt, but it can cease to be precious.”
Desperation Tactics
The Louisville Orchestra is changing the way it does business, it says, but it’s difficult to tell exactly what that means, or how it will improve the fortunes of the financially distressed ensemble. Louisville fired its music director largely because of poor ticket sales, and is loudly declaring to anyone who will listen that it is going to give its audience whatever it asks for. That sort of marketing strategy is bound to backfire, says Andrew Adler. “The orchestra is so afraid of anything that smacks of elitism that it’s hurtling headlong in the opposite aesthetic direction: celebrating small-d cultural democratization to the exclusion of more challenging repertoire.”
Bono & The F-Word: The Next Cultural Battleground
Ever since the FCC ruled that the pop singer Bono hadn’t violated any obscenity laws by uttering the word “fucking” on a live awards telecast, with the rationale being that he used the word as an adjective, conservative watchdog groups have been up in arms. Congress is considering a bill which would ban such language outright from the public airwaves, and the Supreme Court may even have to weigh in eventually. Such histrionics often miss the point, says Brian Lambert, and the fact is that the Supreme Court is already on record concerning what constitutes obscenity. Not that such niceties as facts have ever stopped culture warriors on either side of the political divide…
Exit Järvi…
Neeme Järvi’s last season with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is unveiled, and it plays like nothing so much as a summing up of the 15 years of artistic growth which the Motor City has enjoyed under the Estonian maestro. There are crowd-pleasers (Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana,) and critic-pleasers (Ned Rorem’s Third Symphony,) but mostly, there is the enthusiastic personality of Järvi himself, capped off in the final three weeks of the 2004-05 season, when Järvi the father will be joined, on stage, by his three children: flautist Maarika, and conductors Paavo (of the Cincinnati Symphony,) and Kristjan.
The New Heifetz?
“Nikolaj Znaider, still only in his late twenties, is already being spoken of in the same breath as some of the great violinists of the past – Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin. The point is not so much that he sounds like any of them but that he is in that illustrious line of musicians who are able to use technique with wisdom and sensibility to exert a strong personality in their playing.” Znaider has very little use for the type of career-obsessed musicians he encountered at Juilliard, and believes that many in the classical industry have completely lost sight of what’s important in their playing. So naturally, critics love the guy.
…Enter Wigglesworth?
Handicapping a music director race is always a dicey proposition, since symphony orchestras tend to treat such matters with the secrecy normally reserved for international war plans, but one of the best ways to distinguish the front-runners from the also-rans is to note carefully which conductors keep popping up unexpectedly during the time that the search is ongoing. In Detroit, current conventional wisdom says that 39-year-old Mark Wigglesworth, a talented Briton who has been making the rounds in North America for the last several years, may be high on the DSO’s list to replace Neeme Järvi.
Nobody Knows Art Like Customs Inspectors
“The definition of art is not something that anyone would lightly undertake. Nor would it normally be left to a US customs official to decide. But that is exactly what happened in October 1926,” when an extraordinary legal battle erupted over a Constantin Brancusi statue being brought into the U.S. “The point was that ordinary merchandise was subject to duty at 40 per cent, while art was not. And the customs official on duty at the time happened to be an amateur sculptor – just the sort of person to have bumptiously confident views about matters aesthetic. He took one look at the Brancusis, concluded that they weren’t art, and levied $4,000 duty.”
Always Get Written Permission For Your Corpse Art
Dr Gunther von Hagens is not a popular man in the art world to begin with, having made his name by embalming human corpses with plastic, skinning them, and then displaying them with organs exposed. But Svetlana Krechetova is no ordinary art critic: according to a lawsuit she has filed against Hagens, the good doctor used her father’s body without permission, after corrupt mortuary staff told her that the body had been cremated. Hagens is also facing charges that he recently accepted the bodies of executed Chinese dissidents.
The Voynich Code: Gibberish For Profit
“A British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century’s best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars.” As it turns out, the entire thing is a bunch of meaningless gibberish, designed to mystify scholars and make a substantial profit for its author based solely on the mystique of the unknown. Worked like a charm, apparently.