“There is optimism and excitement in British art right now, despite its philosophical malaise. If a lot of the excitement is manufactured by editors, ad-men and PR personnel, it is also true that there is a hunger for art that amounts to something more than a trend. It’s a hunger that persists, even as the taste for art as fashion continues to be so generously indulged. If it were somehow possible to reinvest the present with a sense of duration, a historical sweep and stretch, we might be able to enjoy the shallows less guiltily, and find ourselves more frequently lost in the depths.”
Tag: 07.03
Three-Quarters Of Americans Participate In Arts
A National Endowment for the Arts Study measures arts participation in the US. “The study found that 76 percent of adults, or 157 million people, participated in the arts in some form during the one-year study period that ended in August 2002. Most adults participated by watching or listening to music, plays or dance on television, radio, audio recording or the Internet. Since the study was last conducted in 1992, there has been a drop in this kind of participation; however, rates still exceeded those of live attendance.”
Get The (Jazz) Label
“Ask a member of the general public what label their favorite musician records for, and they’re not likely to know. To many it seems an arcane detail, and in some sense it is. Labels are commonly viewed as a means to an end, as mere conduits rather than shapers of musical culture. We are aware of individual artists but often take for granted the aural and visual worlds that labels create through their catalogs.Today, many believe that the ‘golden age’ of jazz has passed. But there are probably more jazz labels than ever before. The vast majority are small, independent operations.”
Express Yourself
The Free Expression Policy Project has a comprehensive report on free expression in arts funding. “The report includes candid interviews with agency officials regarding funding disputes, political accountability, and most important, ways of reaching out to communities and opening up dialogue about challenging or provocative art. The report also contains extensive background on the “funding wars” of the 1990s, illustrations, and two appendices summarizing free expression statements and policies among all state arts agencies and a random sample of local agencies.”
A River Runs Through It
The Los Angeles River is something of a civic joke. Polluted, abused, ignored, and bound into a concrete channel, the river that once provided all of the city’s water has become a symbol of downtown L.A.’s shortsighted urban strategies. But a movement to remake the city’s core has been gaining steam in recent years, and a loose coalition of artists and local activists want to free the river from its concrete bonds and make it the centerpiece of a grand… well, a grand something. Neighborhoods want parks, activists want an environmentally protected area, and some people just want the river cleaned, by any means necessary. What everyone agrees upon is that the river must play a part in the long-overdue revitalization of downtown Los Angeles.
A Sweet Romance
We all know what Romantic music is. Even romantic music. But what does it mean to play it romantically? “The distinction is not trivial, for it is possible to play any kind of music—including the intensely subjective music of such romantic-era composers as Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt—in an infinite number of ways, some of which do not sound “romantic,” just as it is possible to “romanticize” the music of pre- and post-romantic composers. Yet the music itself remains unchanged, even when it is being performed in what we may perceive as an un-idiomatic way.”
War – An Excuse For Rampant Art Looting
The Iraq war has resulting in extensive plundering of archaeological sites, and there doesn’t seem to be much political will to stop the looting. Or to stop the worldwide sales of pillaged art. Unfortunately, the theft is business-as-usual. Everytime there’s a war, looting is rampant…
Recording Out Of The Mainstream
The digital music-copying phenomenon isn’t hurting music outside the big pop genres. Indeed, the ability of small do-it-yourselfers has been a blessing. “Now, a substantive majority of music that merits repeated listening—whether classical, jazz, or even alternative rock and so-called world music (another meaningless genre name), is being released only on independent labels. And, ironically, many important back-catalog items once issued by the majors are only available now on independent label imprints, which these labels have painstakingly licensed from the majors.”
Report From Iraq: What I Saw Of Museum Looting
How and why did the looting of the Iraq National Museum happen? ARTnews sent a reporter: “During a week in May in Baghdad, I interviewed about 30 people concerning the looting: Iraqi museum officials, the U.S. troops accused of failing to protect the museum, members of the U.S. team investigating the thefts, foreign archeologists who led international protests against the U.S. role, and more than a dozen people who lived in the neighborhood and who witnessed the looting and the combat that preceded it. The most striking fact to emerge from dicussions with those living or working around the museum is that, in the days before and during the looting, they saw the museum being turned into a major military defensive position by Iraqi forces. In plain violation of the Hague Convention of 1954…”
Berlin’s Cultural Bite
Berlin is famed for its lavish cultural riches. But “after decades of floating along on generous public handouts, Berlin’s famed cultural world has been feeling the chill wind of the fiscal austerity that has now descended on Germany, with the German capital saddled with debts totalling more than EUR 40 billion and a massive hole emerging in the city’s annual arts budget. ‘Den Guertel enger schnallen’ (belt tightening) has suddenly become the new chorus rising from the German capital’s army of arts bureaucrats, forcing them to seek funds in very unknown territory the private sector.”