When Ben Brantley first heard about Deborah Warner’s “Angel Project,” a “theatre” piece that sends participants on a tour of Manhattan, it it sounded, he writes, “more like my idea of hell than heaven.” But “as the aesthetic philosophers of the early 20th century liked to point out, if you put a frame around anything it becomes art. Everyday objects begin to vibrate mysteriously. The mundane acquires instant drama; you start to see poetic patterns in flat surfaces. The immodest goal of Ms. Warner — the British director responsible for last spring’s brilliant and brutal “Medea” on Broadway — is to condition you to see all of New York in such terms.” So was it hell?
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Did British Culture Really Win The Lottery?
Britain’s lottery has funded dozens of major arts projects, and its supporters celebrate its remaking of the country’s cultural scene in the past decade. But the lottery’s success is rather more mixed than that, writes Norman Lebrecht. “Those lottery schemes which have indeed ‘made Britain a better place’ are the ones which would have happened anyway, but where a modest application of lottery lubricant facilitated a triumphant resurgence.”
Internet Radio Group To File Suit Against Recording Association
Small Internet radio stations are planning to file an antitrust suit against the Recording Industry Association of America, accusing them of using high royalty rates as a way to force websasters out of business. The internet group claims that “the existing royalty rates structure would force as many as 90 percent of small commercial Internet radio stations to close if left unchanged.”
Nailing Down Mother Teresa’s Copyright
Nuns of Mother’s Teresa’s order are trying to file a copyright on use of her name and insignia. “In her lifetime, Mother Teresa expressed on a number of occasions her wish that her name not be used by any other individual or organisation without her permission, or after her death, the permission of her successor, the Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity.”
Berlin’s Cultural Bite
Berlin is famed for its lavish cultural riches. But “after decades of floating along on generous public handouts, Berlin’s famed cultural world has been feeling the chill wind of the fiscal austerity that has now descended on Germany, with the German capital saddled with debts totalling more than EUR 40 billion and a massive hole emerging in the city’s annual arts budget. ‘Den Guertel enger schnallen’ (belt tightening) has suddenly become the new chorus rising from the German capital’s army of arts bureaucrats, forcing them to seek funds in very unknown territory the private sector.”
Painting Is Back (C’mon, It Never Went Away)
The art of painting seems to be refreshed, renewed, popular again… Or maybe it never really went away. Matthew Rose and Sabine Folie discuss the painting impulse. “The popularity of painting has neither to do with a market-oriented impulse nor with a retro-attitude of the artists. Painting was, and still is, a vehicle to think about the means of art. It is entirely conceived conceptually, and is in no way just a hedonistic, affirmative retro-academic salon activity. Painting may have been for a short time somehow denied by an overexposure of video-computer-art or photography, but in the end, its methods of representation and transformation were enriched by all those media and not diminished.”
Eye-In-The-Sky Archaeology
Scientists say that they have shown with tests that satellite imaging can show buried archaelogical sites from space. “Images from US space shuttle missions in the 1980s appeared to show ancient river drainage patterns beneath the Sahara desert. Satellites have revealed ancient river beds beneath the Sahara. Subsequent imaging turned up ring structures beneath the ice of Antarctica. But until now no-one has been entirely sure that these images definitely showed real objects.”
The Bad Reviews Are In (Aren’t They?)
When Greg Sandow wrote about the declining fortunes of classical music in last month’s NewMusicBox, he sparked a furious debate on the website. This month he’s back to address some of his readers’ comments. “When I talked about the decline and possible death of classical music, I was talking above all about classical music institutions. Classical radio stations are disappearing, classical record companies are in major trouble, media coverage of classical music is getting scarce (compared even to where it was 10 or 20 years ago). Will orchestras be next, along with opera companies, string quartets, and music schools?”
Are Laptops The New Accordians?
Laptop jamming – it’s musicians getting together in public, plugging their laptops into a sound system and creating “a kind of electronic music using new sounds and ambient textures. People can just pick up and do it just using the software. Laptop music may have an aggressive beat that sounds warped and filtered, or the atmospheric outer-space effect of ambient music; like electronica, it borrows samples from many different styles of music. When a group starts playing, the sound can be jarringly cacophonous because it takes a while for the performers to get in sync with one another.”
HipHop In The OED?
Editors of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary are considering the world of hiphop, and deciding which of the slang ought to make it in the new edition. “An unprecedented revision is underway that, finally, authoritatively, is expected to nail down those vexing questions of lexicology. To wit: What is the etymology of ‘bling-bling’? The editors are drafting a possible entry for the hip-hop slang, which usually refers to diamonds or other flashy jewelry that clinks together.”