Tag: 05.00

ONLINE GUGGENHEIM

The Guggenheim World Empire becomes the WWW Empire. The museum “has pledged the equivalent of a real building’s budget to create the Guggenheim Virtual Museum (GVM), launched this month, on a laptop near you. Wagering that the New York-based architecture firm Asymptote can do for it in virtual space what Frank Gehry’s Bilbao did in the physical world, the Guggenheim’s commitment is not only costly but long-term: Its design and construction will be ongoing, given the fluid nature of the medium.” – Architecture Magazine

OK, JUDGE IT BY ITS COVER

Penguin Classics, those ubiquitous UK paperbacks with the orange covers, have received serious book jacket face-lifts, and sales are now soaring. Penguin UK art director John Hamilton hired England’s best young designers to “perk up 60 of Penguin’s warhorse titles, quadrupling the sales of 20th century greats like Fitzgerald, Forster, and Camus and bringing literature in close proximity to Backstreet Boy biographies.” – Metropolis

STATISTICS TO GIVE PAUSE

  • While Black actors are now more numerous in film, it’s an open question as to how well they’re being represented. In the top movies of 1996:
    • Black female movie characters shown using vulgar profanity: 89%.
    • White female movie characters shown using vulgar profanity: 17%.
    • Black female movie characters shown being physically violent: 56%.
    • White female movie characters shown being physically violent: 11%.
    • Black female movie characters shown being restrained: 55%.
    • White female movie characters shown being restrained: 6%. 
      – University of Chicago Press

THE RACE IS TO THE LUCKY

Ah yes, we all like to think that destiny, talent and hard work lead to artistic success. But these qualities aren’t the determining factor when it comes to literature. “What determines a work’s longevity is in many cases an accumulation of unliterary accidents in the lives of individuals years and sometimes even decades after the writer has gone unto the white creator. ‘The race is not to the swift,’ Ecclesiastes tell us, ‘nor the battle to the strong … but time and chance happen to them all.’ Nowhere is this truer than literary survival.” – Boston Review

SLASH AND BURN, BABY

One might not be able to (or want to) imagine Captain Kirk, Agent Fox Mulder, and Obi-Wan Kenobi as the fodder for red-hot gay erotica, but for the burgeoning groups of writers known as “slash” or “Fan-fict” writers (mostly heterosexual women) pop culture’s most famous male stars are the stuff fantasies are made of.  Largely published in print fanzines and on the web, slash writers have “elaborated the worlds they felt were ignored by the shows’ producers, ‘repairing or dismissing unsatisfying aspects.'” – Brill’s Content

FOR ALL THE WORLD TO SEE

An impressive number of Japanese homeowners have hired avant-garde architects to design inventive homes with no exterior walls or made entirely from glass. “These houses are not the work of oddball individualists, but creative attempts by cutting-edge architects to redefine the management of space, light, privacy and nature in the Japanese home.” – Smithsonian Magazine

THE POLITICS OF ARTIFACTS

Honolulu’s Bishop Museum used to have an excellent reputation for the study of Polynesian culture. But times have changed. Recently, the museum allowed 83 ancient Hawaiian artifacts worth millions of dollars to be turned over to a Native Hawaiian organization as provided for by the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. But a dispute has erupted over whether the artifacts will be cared for properly and if the group that now has possession is actually entitled to the work. – Archaeology Magazine