Two Venetian electricians have been sentenced to six- and seven-year prison terms for negligence in starting the fire that burned down Venice’s La Fenice Opera House seven years ago (it still hasn’t reopened). “A court last year decided that the two electricians had negligently laid electric cables, which short-circuited, and the two were found guilty of arson. A number of high-ranking city officials, and the director of the opera house, were acquitted by the same court on charges of negligence.”
Blog
Turner Online
The Tate Museum has put an enormous collection of JMW Turner images online. “The vast Internet resource includes color images and descriptions of more than 2,000 works by Turner, held in private and public collections in countries including Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan and Greece. The catalog also has 30,000 works bequeathed to the British nation on the artist’s death in 1851.”
We© Sue® You© – Get It?
Artists have long borrowed trademarked imagery from corporations, holding them up in an effort to critique consumer culture. But today artists say that such commentary has been increasingly hard to pursue as corporations are quick to sue for infringements of their copyrights…
Small Dances, Or Small Dancers?
Carlos Acosta has dance all the “big classical roles of the Royal Ballet’s repertory – Siegfried, Albrecht, Basilio – are in the bag. He’s conquered the Nureyev role in Apollo. He’s even wooed La Fille mal gardée. He’s pegged for 25 shows a year at the Royal, and the rest of the world wants a piece of him too. Yet for all his extravagant successes, Carlos Acosta is not content. He is ready to confess in his sensuous Cuban drawl that ‘ballet is started to feel a lil’ bit small for me’.”
Lights, Camera, Theorize…
A generation ago, going to film school meant picking up a camera and making movies. Now it’s learning words such as “diegetic,” “heterogeneity,” “narratology,” “narrativity,” “symptomology,” “scopophilia,” “signifier,” “syntagmatic,” “synecdoche,” “temporality.” “Is there a hidden method to these film theorists’ apparent madness? Or is film theory, as movie critic Roger Ebert said as I interviewed him weeks later, ‘a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a New Age cult, in which a new language has been invented that only the adept can communicate in’?”
E-Book Piracy Comes Of Age
Book piracy hasn’t been a huge issue up til now. But the new Harry Potter book is being scanned, electronically published and downloaded all over the internet. “Last week, enthusiastic readers put unofficially translated portions of ‘Order of the Phoenix’ on the Web in German and Czech, only to remove them after the publishers that own the rights in their respective countries threatened legal action.”
War – An Excuse For Rampant Art Looting
The Iraq war has resulting in extensive plundering of archaeological sites, and there doesn’t seem to be much political will to stop the looting. Or to stop the worldwide sales of pillaged art. Unfortunately, the theft is business-as-usual. Everytime there’s a war, looting is rampant…
Recording Out Of The Mainstream
The digital music-copying phenomenon isn’t hurting music outside the big pop genres. Indeed, the ability of small do-it-yourselfers has been a blessing. “Now, a substantive majority of music that merits repeated listening—whether classical, jazz, or even alternative rock and so-called world music (another meaningless genre name), is being released only on independent labels. And, ironically, many important back-catalog items once issued by the majors are only available now on independent label imprints, which these labels have painstakingly licensed from the majors.”
Nothing But The Best (Seller?)
What books really make the British best sller lists? One reporter reads the top ten to see if he had discern a common thread. “The idea, if I remember it rightly – it seems so very long ago – was really two ideas. First, why these particular books, these particular, very big books, out of the thousand or so new novels available, have risen to the top of the pile. And, second, what it might say about the great British reading public that these are the fictions we most want to escape into in the middle of July 2003. One of the things about reading many different books sequentially, many long and different books, is that they all come to seem a little like chapters in the same story.”
Emin: Leave Me Alone If You Don’t Like It
Artist Tracey Emin is tired of critics slagging off on her. “If you don’t like me, leave me alone. I get completely slagged off by people whose mortgage I’m paying. They write 500 words about me, they pay their mortgage that week. Someone on The Independent called me a ‘retard’ which really wound me up. I responded. I’m not saying how, but I totally responded.”