Reining In Museum Architecture’s Mission Creep

When the new home of New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art is completed sometime in 2007, Nicolai Ouroussoff expects it to have a profound influence on an art scene that has sometimes forgotten that art and architecture are supposed to work together. “It is now razor-clear that the building will do more to freshen the bond between Manhattan’s art and architecture communities than any building since Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum of American Art opened on Madison Avenue four decades ago.”

Sundance May Not Be Good For Indies, But It’s Good For Film

The Sundance Festival opens today in Park City, Utah, with 120 feature films and 73 shorts on the schedule. And as usual, the “true indie” filmmakers will complain that the fest has forgotten its roots and become a pawn of the major studios. These detractors certainly have a point, but Manohla Dargis says that “despite the hype and the frigid climes Sundance remains invaluable – wildly annoying, but invaluable. The American independent film movement may be a fiction, but it is the fiction we now live by.”

What We Lack In Prestige, We Make Up For In Quantity

Los Angeles is not a city known for its art fairs, but organizers of the new Art Week Plus are hoping that the confluence of four smaller fairs can lead to a whole greater than its sum. “Each fair has its own opening gala, designed as much for hobnobbing as art viewing. And along with pushing Rubenses and Rauschenbergs, promoters are touting the celebrity angle.”

Taylor Prize Takes A Turn For The Tragic

“This much can be said with certainty: The CAN$25,000 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, the richest prize of its type in Canada, will go to a book with a tragic story at its core. The four short-listed nominees, announced yesterday in Toronto… include James Chatto’s The Greek for Love: A Memoir of Corfu; Laura M. Mac Donald’s Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion of 1917; J.B. MacKinnon’s Dead Man in Paradise; and John Terpstra’s The Boys: or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter.

Chicago Fest Hires Weschler

Ren Weschler, the author and self-described “oldest guy in the room” at the literary journal McSweeney’s, has been named as the first-ever artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. Weschler, who won’t move to Chicago, will be part of a new five-person team running the fest, which is being reorganized following the departure of longtime president Eileen Mackevich.

Quick, Impress Me… Too Late

A new study suggests that you and your snappy new website have something on the order of 1/20th of a second to impress the consumers who click on your particular URL. “Researchers discovered that people could rate the visual appeal of sites after seeing them for just one-twentieth of a second… But the results did not show how to win a positive reaction from users.”

Piracy Not Abating, But Legal Downloading Up

A new study says that, despite all the lawsuits and threats being propagated by the recording industry, illegal downloading of music is continuing at roughly the same level as before the anti-piracy efforts began. However, the number of tracks being made available for illegal file-swapping appears to have fallen somewhat. The industry also points out that “global sales of legal downloads [have] passed $1bn and music downloaded onto mobile phones [is] now worth $400m per year.”