“It’s not alarmist, given the plain-as-day trajectory of policies – including the FCC’s own recent actions – to suggest that the Net’s promise is in jeopardy. A few giant media and telecommunications companies could well grasp full control of the Net. Earlier this year, the FCC gave U.S. regional phone companies the right to control access to their high-speed data pipes. This basically mirrored earlier policies allowing the cable companies, which also created networks by getting government-granted monopolies, to refuse to share access to their lines. In other words, U.S. high-speed data access will soon be under the thumb of two of the most anti-competitive industries around.”
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Chapmans: We Don’t Welcome Casual Attention
Now that the Chapman Brothers have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, a wider audience is sure to be examining their work. The inevitable casual examinations of their work isn’t exactly a good thing, they say. “The reason I say that is not because I intend to offend people who have a casual encounter with art because casual encounters can be very rewarding and interesting. But I’m obsessed with countering the idea that it’s necessary to those people’s lives and the necessity is brought to bear by people who have an institutional interest in art.”
Just Who Are The Chapmans?
“The Chapman brothers are the best-known of the shortlisted artists, and recently hit the headlines for adding comical and grotesque faces to Goya etchings. Their work is often restricted to adult viewings because of its content, and they took part in 1997’s Sensation exhibition with dolls with penises instead of noses.”
Be-Littling The Big Read
Sales of 100 favorite books chosen by the BBC in its Big Read program have soared, as people check out what’s on the list. Bookseller “WH Smith, however, has taken a different tack. It has launched a set of ‘Little Reads’, flimsy little paperbacks priced at £1 apiece, reprinting just the first chapter of a book from the Big Read 100 as a ‘sampler’.” David Sexton writes that it’s a “potty” idea.
Damien Hirst In Space
There is a flurry of spacecraft from earth on its way to Mars and beyond. “For now, Beagle 2 has stolen the limelight. It goes into space with a spot painting by the British artist Damien Hirst – which also acts as a colour calibration chart for its cameras – and a callsign composed by the Britpop band Blur.”
Canada’s Classic (Controversial) Artwork (They Took It Down After 8 Days)
Canada’s most controversial artwork? It’s got to be “Greg Curnoe’s notorious magnum opus of 1968, the 170-metre-long Homage to the R-34 (the title refers to the first dirigible to cross the Atlantic to North America from Britain), otherwise known as the Dorval Mural, a spectacular, Technicolor work that existed at its intended site – the arrivals area of the Montreal airport – for just eight days before being packed up and stored. The mural was deemed by the federal Department of Transport that commissioned it to be too controversial, too provocatively antiwar and anti-American, to greet our Vietnam-weary visitors from south of the 49th parallel. Since its fiery demise, Homage to the R-34 has remained sequestered in storage crates, briefly coming up for air at the National Gallery of Canada in 1998, when the mural was finally officially transferred to its collection.”
Canadian Musicians – The Road To Success Is Through Europe
Canadian music acts have a tough time getting recognition at home. So they try to make it big in the US. But though many Canadian musicians have hit it big there, it’s getting tougher. “Smartening up, many underground acts have been looking elsewhere for international record deals. Like the jazz greats in post-First World War Paris or the ignored-at-home Detroit techno DJs in 1980s Europe, Canadian artists are discovering the Old World can provide a more receptive audience than the new. Ironically, that transatlantic success is often enough to garner American attention.”
Faith And Yann Martel
Booker Prize winner Yann Martel has become famous, and “now has a life which includes arguing his way through forums such as the Hong Kong Literary Festival, because of his novel about a 450 pound tiger in a lifeboat with an Indian teenager, Pi Patel. Pi embraces Hinduism, Christianity and Islam and debunks agnosticism and an excessive reliance on reason, which the novel describes as ‘fool’s gold for the bright’.”
A New Gehry On The Skyline
LA’s new Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall is turning heads (and it hasn’t even opened yet). “The city centre more in need than even Bilbao of something worth looking at has got a shimmering pile of twisting metal. Yet this isn’t ‘me too’ urbanism, more ‘hey buddy, we were here first’. The $274m (£150m) Walt Disney Concert Hall was designed before Bilbao (in the late 1980s) but was held back by funding and other problems, which makes it the prototype architectural regenerator, a pivotal, if tardy, building. The hall is an exuberant pile of twisting steel encasing public spaces of generosity and wit, finished internally in Douglas fir, light streaming in where the external structure peels away from the façade – this is a building with no windows but plenty of light. It could exert a major impact on the city’s feeble downtown, its contorted, lumpy profile looming impressively over the skyline.”
FCC Seems Determined To Deregulate Media Ownership
“Despite massive opposition, it looks like the Federal Communications Commission will approve relaxing regulations on media ownership. “The proposed changes are such a threat to First Amendment freedoms that even some Republicans on Capitol Hill have been brave enough to oppose them. And yet, a fat lot of good it does. FCC Chairman Michael Powell wants to plow ahead with his deregulation scheme no matter what. It appears he is trying to do more damage than any other chairman in FCC history.”