What’s happened to literary criticism, asks James Wood. It’s been replaced by academic-speak. “For the first time in history, many poets and novelists are graduates of English studies, many of them put through the theory machine for good measure. Writers and academics teach together, attend conferences together, and sometimes almost speak the same language (Rushdie’s essays and academic post-colonialist discourse; DeLillo’s fiction and academic postmodern critique). But during the same period, literary criticism as a discourse available for, and even attractive to, the common reader has all but disappeared.”
Tag: 05.21.04
Concern For The Future Down Under
The Australian government is undertaking a national study of the country’s orchestras and opera companies, to determine whether the current funding formula is capable of supporting struggling arts scenes in cities and states across the continent. Of particular concern is the Melbourne music scene, where Opera Australia has steadily reduced the number of annual productions from 11 to 6 in the last decade. The last time such a review was conducted, the review team recommended that Melbourne’s two orchestras be merged, and only an outcry from the local arts community prevented the merger.
The Art Of Partying
“Art and parties are a familiar twosome, particularly in these times of a faltering economy and deep cuts in arts funding. More and more galleries and museums are renting out their spaces to help pay the bills and to draw new audiences to their exhibitions. But they wind up telling real horror stories about damaged and stolen art, broken electronic equipment and messes left for gallery directors to clean up the morning after.”
Where Are The Great New French Books And Films
“Where, it has been wondered — even before the coming together of the Coalition of the Willing — are the great French film directors and novelists of today? Where, in particular, given France’s reputation as the world headquarters of sexy romance, not to say plain old sex, are the great French erotic novels and films? Such questions have been reawakened recently by two events.”
SF Jewish, Mexican Museums Endangered
In San Francisco, “the proposed Jewish and Mexican museums, once seen as ideal ways to embody San Francisco’s racial and ethnic mosaic, are in such financial trouble that City Hall and museum backers worry they may never get built.”
One Ringy Dingy
Hate the sound of cell phones ringing? Music producers don’t. For them, ring tones are a huge and growing business. “In 2004, your average record company executive is more likely to stifle a cheer every time he hears a tinny version of a chart hit bleeping from a nearby Nokia. According to some sources, the mobile phone ringtone has come to save the music industry. Last year, mobile phone users spent $3 billion on them. They account for 10% of the world’s music market.”
Mamet: Movie Development Is Nonsense
David Mamet hits out at the development process in Hollywood, where supposedly movie projects are whipped into shape. “The young, warped by an educational system selling them perpetual adolescence, mistake the battleground for the struggle: they believe that make-work in that one-time area of strife and creation, Hollywood, somehow conveys to them the status of actually working in the Movie Business. It is as if a picnicker at the Gettysburg Memorial Park considered himself a soldier. Just as the Scholastic Aptitude Test measures the ability of the applicant to take that test, the bureaucratic rigours of the ‘development’ process probe the neophytes’ threshold for boredom, repetition, and nonsense.”
Raphael Drawing Discovered
A Raphael previously unknown drawing by Raphael has been discovered amidst a bundle of other drawings brought to Sotheby’s in London for valuation. “It had apparently spent most of the 20th century tucked in a cardboard folder with the other drawings in a drawer in a private house in London. The sketch is now believed to date from 1505, and to be Raphael’s first known drawing in red chalk, made soon after he arrived in Florence and fell under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci.”