This year’s Turner finalists (surprise, surprise) are out to shock again. The Chapman Brothers’ entry depicts oral sex and incorporates decaying bodies. “The controversy threatens to dwarf even the rows that have engulfed the Turner Prize over its past 20 years when Death goes on display on Tuesday. Grayson Perry, one of the other nominees for the award, said the Chapman brothers ‘are going for the shock horror jugular’.”
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In It For The Shock Value (And This Is A Surprise?)
The Turner Prize always seems to find new ways of being controversial. “It ought to be impossible, in this, the 19th year of its art world stranglehold, to create controversy by any means at all, short of eating a human baby. Whereas in fact, the Chapman brothers, shortlisted this year for their piece Death, are already at the centre of a storm over some garden-variety oral sex. The Turner prize does feel gimmicky and hollow – and there is a reason for this.”
Forget Controversy – This Year’s Turner Is Great Stuff
Too bad for the Chapman controversy, writes Richard Dorment. “This has become a Turner Prize tradition, one I am sorry to see. Because, otherwise, the exhibition of the shortlisted artists is curiously coherent. In their different ways, they all share a pessimistic view of nature, history, sex and society, expressed in work that is often beautiful, always compelling.”
Yerba Accident: Don’t Call 911!
An overturned truck on the steps of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center looks like an accident has just happened, and has prompted passersby to call 911. “Open at the back, the truck holds about two dozen video and computer monitors, some of which flicker with chopped-up animation, scrambled convenience-store surveillance tapes and footage of a man rolling paint over graffiti on an outdoor wall. The man has a Sisyphean counterpart in real space: a mechanized wood cutout figure who brandishes a spray can up and down, up and down, reminiscent of Jonathan Borofsky’s famous Hammering Man.”
Amazon… In Search Of Not Paying For Books
Amazon’s new search function that allows browsers to search pages of thousands of books seems like a great thing. But some authors and publishers have concerns. “Authors Guild staff members had managed to view and print as many as 100 consecutive pages of several books by searching repeatedly for different terms. Recipes from some cookbooks and details from travel books were also available, meaning that users could print recipes or destination descriptions without buying the books. You don’t even have to wait for Amazon to deliver.”
Presidential Peter
“A couple of new recordings of Peter and the Wolf – narrated by Sophia Loren and Bill Clinton. “His famously pock-marked voice is strangely alluring. He sounds sincere and avuncular, and acts with a fair amount of ease. This is something more complex than a statesmanlike reading of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. Hidden talents? No. After all, it was Ronald Reagan who said during his presidency that there had been times when he wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”
Lethal Weapon – Book Review As Blunt Object
Dale Peck is “a 36-year-old novelist and critic who has created a furor in the literary world by lobbing grenades in the back pages of The New Republic intended not to disparage, not to bring down a peg, but to destroy his victims – usually established writers whom Peck deems a threat to literature. To puncture the inflated reputations of these (mostly) Living White Males is a matter of the greatest urgency, Peck seems to believe, and he goes about the task with a crusader’s obsessive zeal. At the end of a Peck essay, his subjects – Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Colson Whitehead – are wounded, their books in ruins, massacred.”
IS LA Theatre Healthy?
Los Angeles’ theatre community is huge. But is it vital? “In this awful economic climate for the arts, and because of the quality of the actors here, Los Angeles’ own off-off-Broadway — 90 percent of what’s produced here — serves as one of the nation’s most vital laboratories not just for new plays, but for companies that are working to incorporate movement and text into combinations that keep providing alternatives to the products of our mass media.”
London Needs Theatre Aid
London’s West End theatres are in dismal shape, many of them shabby and run-down. A new survey declares that the historic theatres need an urgent £255m facelift.
Taking Back Fair Use
New rules allowing media companies to restrict the recording of TV shows are needed to protect the industry. But consumer advocates say the rules overly restrict fair use.