Modern sculpture has become big box office. Not just any sculpture though. The great big oversized sculpture found recently in the enormous turbine room at Tate Modern. “None of these works are necessarily great art. They have nothing much to do with Moore or Donatello. They are made not of bronze or marble but of ignoble materials such as plastic and neon. But they fit triumphantly into the 21st-century urban scene.”
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Won’t The Real Slim Shady Please Report To The FBI?
You may have missed it, what with the capture of Saddam Hussein and all the recent suicide bombings in Iraq, but rapper Eminem recently threatened the life of the President of the United States. Sort of. A line from an unfinished song off a bootleg recording of an Eminem concert reportedly includes the following: “I don’t rap for dead presidents. I’d rather see the president dead.” Of course, Eminem is just a pop musician in a frankly thuggish corner of the music industry, and he clearly isn’t planning an assasination attempt, so the Secret Service isn’t taking it seriously or responding to silly questions about it. Only, wait. Actually, they are.
I Don’t Get It – Why Is This Guy’s Art Suddenly Hot?
Painter John Currin is hot at the moment. But Blake Gopnik wonders why. “Within the art world, where Currin’s career and reputation have been forged, he can get praise as an original not because he’s doing anything new or special but simply because some vanguard curators and collectors don’t get out enough. It’s as though the elites of contemporary art are so engrossed in their own world that they’re not aware of what’s already going on in the American mainstream – at shopping malls, on boardwalks and in Sunday painting classes.”
Are Film Defections Hurting Theater?
As more veterans of the theatrical stage defect to Hollywood, establishing lucrative film careers, many in the theater world are lamenting the trend. But are stage actors really damaged goods the minute they appear on film? “Is [Judi] Dench less convincing as the Countess of Rossillion in All’s Well That Ends Well than, say, Peggy Ashcroft was, because the latter had avoided playing James Bond’s boss? Do [Ian] McKellen’s decades of speaking the greatest verse ever written help or hinder him and us when he starts spouting piffle about pixies chasing rings?”
Art By Celestial Navigation
Portable GPS locators are being used for art. One “technique involves holding a G.P.S. device, which records their path as a kind of line drawing, and then posting the results on the Web (www.gpsdrawing.com).” The artists travels in a shape as his progress is tracked by the GPS unit. “As G.P.S. receivers have become smaller and cheaper, a growing number of digital artists are exploiting the technology. Like much digital art, the ideas are often spiffier than the visuals.”
You’ve Got Literature!
“Cybersnoops, aspiring Web detectives and electronic voyeurs searching for a new kind of fix might find it in an emerging form of e-book fiction with a twist: the digital epistolary novel, or DEN. Created by Greatamericannovel.com, a DEN reveals its story line through a series of simulated e-mails, Web pages and instant messages.”
Is It Or Isn’t It? “Van Gogh” Auction Delayed
“The auction of a controversial painting attributed to Vincent Van Gogh has been delayed to re-examine its authenticity. The work was spotted at a Paris flea market in 1991 and bought for 1,500 euros ($1,800). It was expected to fetch more than 1 million euros ($1.2m) at auction on Saturday, but was withheld to allow further scrutiny by experts.”
Why The Met Is Worth The Money
$7 million per year. That’s what it costs to put the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the air each Saturday afternoon. With the Met scrambling for new sponsors, there are rumblings in the opera world that the price tag is just too high, and that the broadcasts aren’t worth saving. Nonsense, says William Littler. There are other great opera companies, but none that consistently match the Met’s high level of performance. “I’ve visited them all, and I’ve never encountered in any of them the sustained quality I experienced last weekend during four performances at the big house at Lincoln Centre. As Harold C. Schonberg, late music critic of The New York Times, once observed, The Met sometimes fails, but when it does, it does so on a level of its own.”
Since When Is Poetry Not Contentious?
Much has been made of the political difficulties being faced by the formerly tiny Chicago-based Poetry magazine, since it was the surprise recipient of a $100 million bequest last year. Philip Marchand is a bit surprised by the tone of some of the press coverage: “According to [one] story, the gift is ‘sowing discord in the normally harmonious realm of verse.’ Normally harmonious realm of verse! Where did the reporter, Robert Frank, ever get that idea? Read some literary history, Mr. Frank. Poets have been at each other’s throats since the invention of the sonnet, and several centuries previous to that.”
Mies House Goes To The Preservationists
The legendary “Farnsworth House” designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, has been purchased at auction by a group of preservationists backed by the National Trust, which intends to open it to the public. “The sale lays to rest months of fear that the 1951 steel-and-glass house in Plano, Illinois, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago, would be sold to a developer and moved from its site.” The winning bid was for $7.5 million, and followed a quick but intense bidding war between the preservationists and an anonymous telephone bidder.