New York’s Whitney Museum has decided to cancel plans for a $200 million expansion designed by Rem Koolhaas, a signal that there may be further belt-tightening for the institution. “We’re feeling the pinch. A project like this would be a big challenge, and we’re not in a position to proceed with it.”
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Hughes Pleads Guilty In Car Crash
Art critic Robert Hughes has admitted guilt in the car accident he caused in Australia in 1999. “A Perth court fined him A$2,500 (£960, $1,500) after he pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm. Prosecutors said Hughes was driving on the wrong side of the road when the crash happened. But he said he does not remember anything about the head-on accident 120 km (75 miles) south of Broome.”
Investing In Your Celebrity…
A British television show has created a stockmarket out of celebrities. Viewers “give real celebrities a ‘share price’ and ‘invest’ in them by predicting whether their ‘stock’ will rise or fall. ‘Celebdaq’ (its awkward name stems from Nasdaq) was created for the British Broadcasting Corp. last summer as a Web site, but this year it has also become a controversial Friday night TV show on the new digital channel BBC3, which is targeting an audience aged 25 to 34. The show has the look of a financial news channel. The stock value of some 250 celebrities – actors, musicians, sportsmen and the famous-for-being-famous – crawls across the bottom of the screen like tickertape. Stars have their own abbreviations: SALHAY is Salma Hayek, SANBUL is Sandra Bullock.”
San Francisco’s Last Fulltime Jazz Club Closing
“On Sunday it will be the end for Jazz at Pearl’s, the city’s last full-time jazz club. The room is losing its lease after 13 years. After a heated back-and-forth with the landlord over renegotiating a lease that, they hoped, would give them five years with an option, [owners] Buxton and Wong folded.”
Spike Lee On The Essential Marriage Of Music And Film
“One must come to music with complete respect. I don’t know how directors can do a film and after the script’s been written, and the film’s cut and all this money’s been spent – it’s like, well now let’s get the composer. It’s just insane to keep the composer out of the loop until so late.”
Kids Book – Is Everything Fair Game?
It used to be that children’s books were filled with niceness. It’s different now: “With the exception of fantasy, most books for older children eagerly embrace ‘unsuitable’ subjects: mental illness, poverty, crime, sex and drugs. Perhaps childhood is disappearing. When most information, as well as entertainment, came from the printed word, it was possible to isolate what children read from the fare on offer for adults. This came to mean the sheltering of children from adult secrets, particularly sexual secrets. The growth of radio, television and the internet obviously means that this isolation is now at an end; all children now have access to information that would have been automatically denied them as little as 20 years ago.”
Women Composers Gather In Seoul
Last week Seoul, South Korea, hosted the largest-ever gatherin of women composers from around Asia. Some “300 composers and musicians from 22 different countries presented research, participated in panel discussions, and performed 69 works in nine venues scattered around Seoul…”
What Are They Teaching In Art Schools These Days?
“It’s not easy sorting out how best to use the short time allotted to arts degrees; an undergraduate fine-arts major often spends only one of his four years in art classes—hardly enough time to learn the traditional skills of drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography, let alone today’s laundry list of new forms. Even a two-year master of fine arts (M.F.A.) program doesn’t provide much time for training, compared with the decades-long master-apprentice system of earlier centuries. Countless other challenges have art-school faculties reexamining their missions and values. The proliferation of programs and students; the embrace of diverse art forms and content; the professionalization of art practice; the rise of cultural theory; whether (and how) to teach the new technologies that have sprouted in the last decade.”
Defending American Expressionism
“For decades, American Expressionism has been denigrated, if not ignored. Postwar conservative art critics and politicians derided the work as art by ‘Reds and fellow travelers.’ Contemporary critics are no kinder.” But Bram Dijkstra says this is grossly unfair, and he’s making a case for it in a new book on the subject. “This is not just art with a social content, it is great art with a social content.”
LA Museums Still Pursuing Dreams
Southern California museums are facing money problems just like anywhere else. But though some high-profile building projects have been postponed or canceled, others continue. “For every local building plan that has gone awry, several others are shaping up. If all the major projects that are in the works materialize, by 2005 the museum landscape here will look dramatically different.”