Richard Dorment describes this year’s annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition as “the largest festival of bad art in Europe.” The quality of chosen work is mediocre this year after a couple of good years. “Let me start with the amateurs. By sheer chance, I happen to know four people – none is a professional artist – who regularly attend a weekly painting class run by Maggi Hambling. Any single one of them is a better painter than most of the artists chosen from the open submissions this year.”
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Can Books Compete With Big Entertainment?
Publishers meet to discuss how to revive their waning business. “Consumers now occupy some 300 more hours per year with ‘entertainment’ activities, compared to 15 years ago. It’s a full plate of entertainment choices. Not surprisingly, consumers have an attention span of ‘maybe 10 days,’ which might explain why big authors aren’t selling as well as in past years. The public is increasingly disenchanted earlier, and then rushes off to the next new thing. Consumers are no longer loyal to products or channels.”
Tower Records For Sale
The troubled Tower Records is looking for a buyer. “Tower has been particularly hard hit by the decline in sales of recorded music. For the six-month period ended January 31, Tower’s sales fell 8.2%, to $306.9 million, and the company had a loss from continuing operations of $33 million, compared to a loss of $10.7 million in the first half of fiscal 2002.”
The New Architecture – Look To Smaller Cities
“With buildings by Peter Eisenman in Columbus and Cincinnati, and by Frank Gehry in Toledo, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, the state of Ohio is beginning to seem as hospitable to cutting-edge architecture as the Netherlands. But avant-garde architects are getting commissions from small cities and institutions all over the country, not only because such places are eager to use architecture as a way of establishing their cultural credentials. Smaller cities are less likely to be encumbered by the political and economic pressures that affect projects in big cities, and, these days, they are more likely to take risks.” As in two new buildings from Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry…
The ArtWorld’s Best-Sellers
Who are the best-selling living artists in the world right now? Jasper Johns clocks in at No. 1. “Johns’ artworks have sold for more than £92m over the last three decades, the survey by magazine Artreview showed.”
Guthrie Gets Money To Expand
After delays, the Minnesota legislature reportedly has a deal in place to provide funding for construction of a new Guthrie Theatre and the Children’s Theatre Company. “Guthrie leaders had warned that without state support the theater’s planned $125 million three-stage complex on the Mississippi riverfront, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, would be derailed. The theater has privately raised $65 million, officials said.”
Scotland’s Funding Crisis
Scotland’s major cultural groups are warning that “without a substantial cash injection in the autumn, national companies and some of the country’s best-loved theatres will be forced to cut productions and could even face the prospect of closure. ‘Inevitably you come to a point where certain organisations – including the national companies – are forced to cut back on the number of productions’.”
Conceptual Retreads – Who Needs It?
“Clearly Britain is in a bad way. A watered-down conceptual art is the current orthodoxy. Much of what looked new and radical when it first emerged in the 1960s is now being run past us again, and it’s limping badly. And so much of it is the same. It really looks as if art students were issued with a pattern book of how to come up with a show — six ideas on the back of an envelope: good tried-and-tested old concepts that won’t cause anyone too much trouble. How has this come to pass? The decline of one of our greatest glories — the art schools — has much to answer for.”
Timid New Report Fails To Address Canadian TV Woes
Canadian TV is in a crisis, but you’d never know it from a new report on Canadian television. The McQueen Report “smacks of a contrived and unworkable pseudo-solution to a crisis. ACTRA, the organization that represents Canadian actors and performers, has already dismissed McQueen’s report as ‘all carrot and no stick’ for private broadcasters. The time for intricate therapy is long gone. In the past four years, the number of continuing drama series airing on Canadian TV has dropped from 12 to 4. That figure screams for action now, not for the prolonged prodding and nudging of broadcasters.”
Some Brain Disorders Might Improve Artistic Abilities
New research suggests that “some types of dementia may release new areas of creativity, which grow and develop as language skills decline.” An artist in her early fifties was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a rare type of inherited dementia, but though some of her other abilities declined, her work as an artist got markedly better. “Whatever the mechanism, our patient represents a remarkable example of how a truly talented individual can continue to evolve and create in the face of a degenerative brain disease.”