“Conrad Black, is suing for almost £5m in libel damages over a critical biography that depicts the fallen press baron as an overweight teenager from a loveless home who grows up to be a ‘criminal sociopath’.”
Tag: 02.22.07
This Year’s Booker Judges
“The director of the London School of Economics, Howard Davies, will chair the judges of the 39th Man Booker prize. He will be joined on the panel for the 2007 award by the poet Wendy Cope, the journalist and novelist Giles Foden, the biographer Ruth Scurr and the actor Imogen Stubbs.”
Does Good Writing = Good Person?
“Think of the great moral dilemmas of the age – terrorism, global warming, multiculturalism. The ethical climate is not set until the novelists have spoken. If someone writes brilliant prose, they must be an unimpeachable human being.” Or not…
Louvre In The Desert? Not A Good Idea
So the Louvre is going to Abu Dhabi? The Louvre is “acting like a company with a clearly defined strategy called profit maximization, It is to be feared that fast financial gain will transform museums into free-floating goods dependent on the laws of the market, with no relation to cultural context.”
La Scala’s First Encore Since 1933
“Though Riccardo Muti did allow the chorus to repeat ‘Va, pensiero’ from Verdi’s Nabucco (which is virtually a second national anthem in Italy) once in 1986 and once in 1996, no soloist has sung an encore at La Scala since the legendary bass Fyodor Chaliapin did it once in 1933 (while Toscanini was out of town). Until the night before last, that is.”
Storm-Damaged Sculpture Banished
Since a storm 15 months ago, a sculptue that sat outside Miami Beach’s City Hall has been gone. It’s not likely to be back. “Artist Barbara Neijna, who created the sculpture in collaboration with City Hall architects Bouterse, Perez & Fabrigas, said that’s no way to treat a sculpture appraised at $500,000 before the storm. The city commissioned Red Sea Road for $78,000 in 1976.”
A Utopia Online? (Not Quite)
Can a virtual community online create a utopia? Second Life tried. “In the last year, the number of people who had visited Second Life skyrocketed from 100,000 to 2 million. As the population grows, early denizens are learning the truth of Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation ‘Hell is other people.’ The website is facing the problem that many would-be utopias faced before it: When building the ideal world, it’s impossible to change while remaining perfect in everyone’s eyes.”
Remaking The Bolshoi Inside And Out
“Once the world’s pre-eminent classical dance company, the Bolshoi was in steep artistic decline when, in January 2004, Alexei Ratmansky was chosen, at age 35, to bring the troupe back from the brink of irrelevance and remake it into a cultural force befitting its heritage. It’s a strategy that’s risky yet necessary if the company is to reclaim its place not just as a custodian of the classics but also as an innovative producer of superlative new ballet.”
Radio’s New Competition – Everyone
“As the record industry struggles to change into an increasingly digitally-based business, satellite radio providers are asserting the explosion of portable music players, Internet-delivered music and cell phone-based content services is hurting their efforts to turn profitable. Indeed, XM and Sirius have said they should be allowed to merge as they now compete with every audio device consumers use, from typical car radios to digital music players.”
Merce Cunningham Before Computers
”The model of the kind of world we now inhabit was there in Cunningham’s world long before the Internet or computer existed. The space is decentralized, exits and entrances are very unpredictable. It’s not unlike the way you establish multiple windows on the computer. If I were looking for an early model in a time-based art like dance that anticipates what our life is like in cyberspace I’d say it’s there in Cunningham’s work.”