The art of painting seems to be refreshed, renewed, popular again… Or maybe it never really went away. Matthew Rose and Sabine Folie discuss the painting impulse. “The popularity of painting has neither to do with a market-oriented impulse nor with a retro-attitude of the artists. Painting was, and still is, a vehicle to think about the means of art. It is entirely conceived conceptually, and is in no way just a hedonistic, affirmative retro-academic salon activity. Painting may have been for a short time somehow denied by an overexposure of video-computer-art or photography, but in the end, its methods of representation and transformation were enriched by all those media and not diminished.”
Tag: 07.03
The Bad Reviews Are In (Aren’t They?)
When Greg Sandow wrote about the declining fortunes of classical music in last month’s NewMusicBox, he sparked a furious debate on the website. This month he’s back to address some of his readers’ comments. “When I talked about the decline and possible death of classical music, I was talking above all about classical music institutions. Classical radio stations are disappearing, classical record companies are in major trouble, media coverage of classical music is getting scarce (compared even to where it was 10 or 20 years ago). Will orchestras be next, along with opera companies, string quartets, and music schools?”
Classic Rethink (In Context, Please)
“There’s a subdivision of feminist thinking that condemns the beloved storybook ballets of the nineteenth century for their ostensible political incorrectness. All those sylphs and Wilis, it maintains, all those maidens suspended in states of enchantment represent women as frail, vulnerable creatures, deprived of power over their own destinies, the victims—often in the name of love—of dominant men. I think it’s absurd to apply sociological convictions and agendas to aesthetic creations—particularly when it comes to the sociology of one era and the art of another.”
Creativity W/O Skills?
In his new book, Julian Spalding writes that art students are “under great pressure to be ‘creative’ and to ‘express themselves’, but they have not been taught the skills with which to do so, as it is no longer thought necessary to learn to draw, paint, carve or model. The divorce between art and craft is complete. No wonder there is so much angst and misery at these places…”
More Books, Fewer Reviews
“This is an interesting time for books. While there are three times as many books being published now compared to 25 years ago, many magazine and newspapers that publish reviews have faced page cutbacks. A few have increased coverage—both the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have fattened their review sections recently. And there are new arrivals to the scene. Last year Speakeasy, affiliated with the Loft literary center in Minneapolis, and Readerville, the print version of the Web site of the same name, were launched. In March of this year McSweeney’s introduced the Believer, a four-color monthly with long reviews (of poetry as well as fiction) and interviews. The overall trend, though, has been toward what one New York Times editor recently referred to as ‘the incredible shrinking book review,’ the result of a weakened economy and an accompanying decrease in advertising for the media industry.”