The current push by musicians, writers, and publishers for ever-increasing levels of copyright protection seems to have taken on a life of its own, and it may just be threatening everything we take for granted about the freedom of information. “In less than a decade, the much-ballyhooed liberating potential of the Internet seems to have given way to something of an intellectual land grab, presided over by legislators and lawyers for the media industries.”
Tag: 01.25.04
Blaming The Audience
If classical music is really dying, or at least becoming a culturally irrelevant fringe entertainment, we have no one to blame but ourselves, writes Bernard Holland. “An implicit contract has been signed but is not necessarily being honored. It states that if I understand a piece of music, I’m likely to like it, too. This is not true. No amount of experience and analysis can by itself induce the stab of communication between art and its beholder… The consumer, it would seem, bears the fault. The product is rarely held accountable.”
The Best 95-Year-Old Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of
Unless you’re a real amateur film buff, the odds are that you’ve never hard of Sidney N. Laverents. But as filmmakers go, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more influential or prolific amateur. “Now 95, Mr. Laverents is a distinctively American artist: a rec-room tinkerer with the can-do optimism of someone who got through the Depression and found comfort in the suburbs. Following his own whims rather than any cultural movement, he turned himself from a one-man band into a one-man independent movie studio.” This week, 34 years after the release of his award-winning special-effects feature “Multiple SIDosis,” Laverents has earned an L.A. retrospective.
Why Not Anne?
The idea of a woman conducting an orchestra is no longer revolutionary by any stretch, but there still has never been a woman who has approached “major” status in the profession. Generally, the top candidates to bust through the glass ceiling are said to be those who promote themselves most skillfully, but the quiet competence and determination of Anne Manson makes her an attractive candidate as well. In fact, in a profession still plagued by sexist notions of women’s abilities, Manson is a calm and non-threatening rebuttal. Her unwillingness to be cutthroat may hurt her career in the short term, but in the long run, it may just be what vaults her to stardom.
Goodspeed’s Dilemma
Connecticut-based Goodspeed Musicals, which for years has made its home in the town of East Haddam, has been planning to build a new 700-seat theater across the street from its current stage. But last year, the nearby burg of Middletown came calling, offering a better site, a tax abatement, and loads of other perks if Goodspeed would move its base of operations. As yet, Goodspeed’s board has made no decision on where the new theatre will go, but the spectacle of two cities battling over a cultural jewel is a bit sickening, says Frank Rizzo. And besides, how exactly is Middletown planning to make back its investment in Goodspeed if it wins the battle?
Castro & The Librarians
“A bitter, months-long dispute within the American Library Association – the largest nation-based organization of librarians in the world – continues as to whether to demand that Fidel Castro release 10 imprisoned independent librarians found guilty of making available to Cubans copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.” The ALA had the chance, at its recent convention, to call for the release of their Cuban colleagues, but a motion to this effect was overwhelmingly defeated in favor of a tepid statement of “deep concern” over the imprisonments.
The Whitney’s New Direction
The Whitney Museum is undergoing a dramatic behind-the-scenes makeover, with new director Adam Weinberg restructuring the administration, creating a “council of wise persons” to advise him, and shaking up the curatorial designations put in place by his predecessor, Maxwell Anderson. Weinberg is still interested in looking at expansion options for the Whitney, which famously cancelled a recent planned expansion designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, but his short-term goals lie in the stabilization of an institution which has been perceived as chaotic and directionless for some time.
The Museum As Art: Have We Forgotten About the Art Inside?
As more and more architects gain celebrity status, the buildings they design are becoming decidedly larger than life, and the design of the exterior shell is beginning to overshadow whatever is supposed to be going on inside the walls. In Bellevue, Washington, a museum hailed as an architectural breakthrough closed its doors this past fall, and part of the reason was said to be that the interior was simply ill-suited to house art collections. The disconnect between form and function in Bellevue is being viewed with alarm throughout the industry, and many observers are rethinking the role of the architect in such projects.
The Next Harry Potter?
The series is called His Dark Materials, and many observers have it pegged as the next global phenomenon of children’s fantasy literature. But there is a more adult side to Philip Pullman’s tales of fantastic adventure, and it’s bound to make many adults uncomfortable: “The books make a breathtakingly subversive attack on organized religion and on the notion of an all-powerful god. The trilogy has already been criticized by church organizations alarmed at its preference for humanism and for its depiction of a cruel fictional church that is obsessed with what it regards as the sexual purity of children but blinded by its own lust for power.”
Seeking The Synaptic Structure Of Art
Scientists know that art has a profound impact on the activity of the human brain. Exactly what that activity signifies, and what it says about art or about humans, is an open question, however, and an entire field of study has developed to seek such answers. “Neuroaestheticians… imagine that, over time, these kinds of studies will become more and more precise: They hope to get ever-finer detail about what happens in the brain in an ever-growing range of aesthetic situations.”