Media critic Todd Gitlin says that rather than uplift and educate people, modern media conglomerates are a Band-aid. “Fortunes are to be made in offering ever-reliable analgesics to a public hungry for fast relief,” he says. The guys who run the networks, the newspapers, the studios, the magazine and music companies are getting richer while our civic life grows poorer. – Toronto Star
Tag: 03.09.00
DOES ART MATTER? CALL … :
Students at the Ottawa School of Art have put up statues all over town with cards attached to them reading: “Does Art Matter? Call this number to argue your case.” If people decide to call, they have three minutes to sound off. It’s part of a class project to find out how much the average person on the street cares about art. – CBC
THE NEW PUBLIC ARTISTS
“Unlike earlier artists – Dadists in the 1910s and twenties, feminists in the seventies – who have thrown grenades at the establishment from the hypothetical outside, these artists are relatively calm about their complicity with the ‘system’: museums, galleries, funding institutions, advertising. Call it ‘new genre public art’ as one 1995 book does; call it a return to the streets.” – Feed
HIGH STAKES ART
Van Gogh show opening this weekend is expected to attract 300,000 visitors and pump $30 million into Detroit’s economy. – Detroit News
HONG KONG CONSIDERS —
— building a Sydney-style opera house that would accommodate up to 60,000 spectators. – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
CAN PASSION BE TAUGHT?
Conductor Seiji Ozawa thinks so. He’s set up a school in Japan and hopes to teach students to express their passions by exploring and performing Mozart’s operas. “He hopes the undercurrents intended by the 18th century composer–be they romantic, melancholic or tragic–will stir the students enough to overcome their cultural reserve and play with more zeal.” – Los Angeles Times
LIKE MY WORK, LIKE ME?
Do you really have to like the artist behind a work of art? Approve of what he thought or how he lived? Certainly not. “We might have to face the fact that Shostakovich was a mediocre human being possessed of staggering musical ability.” – New York Times
IT’S AN iBLAST
New company signs up 143 television stations in 102 American markets to begin broadcasting high speed wireless signals to personal computers. Service to begin early next year. – Wired 03/09/00
KING OF THE NET
Stephen King publishes his latest book exclusively on the internet. – CBC
THAI BAN
Thai politicians are protesting the latest Leonardo DiCaprio movie “The Beach” and proposing to ban it from the country. They say the film is blasphemous and portrays their country as a drugs paradise. The movie’s opening earlier this week was also protested by angry environmentalists. – BBC 03/09/00