The “Alternative Turner Prize” is a plea “for a wider and more generous choice of art and artists” than is recognized by the Turner Prize. This year’s shortlist of eight has three painters, two internet artists, a sculptor, a photographer and a graffiti artist. It will be judged by a panel of critics drawn from conceptualist and traditional schools. Organizers “insist it is not an anti-Turner event, and is at great pains to distance itself from the Stuckists, who protest outside the Turner Prize ceremony every year.”
Tag: 11.30.02
Defending Kinsley (And Book Prize Judges Everywhere)
“If you do the maths, it’s obviously impossible to read them all,” says a judge of the 1999 Booker Prize. “The convention is to lie, but no one puts it that way because they are too genteel. There’s a certain kind of phoniness, but everyone’s too good-mannered to point out the obvious.”
Atlanta Arts Cuts
Fulton County, which is Atlanta’s biggest arts funder, has proposed a $1 million cut in the arts budget next year. “The arts council’s annual budget is $5.7 million; $3.4 million of that is granted to about 100 arts groups through the county’s contracts for services program. The rest of the money goes to operate the county’s school programs and five neighborhood arts centers.”
Buying Local
There’s local programming, and then there’s local programming. A station in Raleigh North Carolina has started an all-local all-the-time format, playing only music by local bands. “WBZB went on the air July 15. Its signal is so weak the station can be picked up in the car only in a small area because power lines interfere with it. It can only be heard in parts of Raleigh, and it broadcasts on the Web.”
Learning To Play The Game
“For countless authors, movies have proved a fatal temptation, savaging great novels from The Naked and the Dead to Portnoy’s Complaint, and corrupting F. Scott Fitzgerald and others who lived out their Hollywood years in drunken decline.” But in recent years, prominent writers have been finding success on the screen, “both by carefully choosing those who would adapt their books and by participating in the filmmaking process themselves.”
Why Mies Stayed
When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus School in the 1930s, Mies van der Rohe chose to stay. He believed, he said, in “something more noble than politics, the ruthless pursuit of the perfect modern building, the true heir, he thought, to Greek temples and gothic cathedrals – buildings constructed on earth in order to escape it. These were cathedrals for the new religion, commerce and industry – factories, office blocks, skyscrapers and apartment towers, the modern urban landscape, whose architecture had yet to be invented. The form lay out there for him to discover.”
The Sexualization Of Britten
Is it necessary that we know a composer’s sexual orientation to really appreciate his music? “The public sexualization of Benjamin Britten by scholars represents a nightmare come true for those who have spent decades grooming the composer’s image as an Everyman sort of genius. It has also shredded the genteel tissue of euphemism that allowed even the frankly homoerotic lust of Death in Venice to be described in asexual (“Dionysian”) terms only.”
Reimagining Buffy
“Fan fiction” is “a potent underground genre” where fans of fictional pop culture figures weave new stories from their own imaginations. “Cult TV series such as Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Star Trek inspire wild tangents of fancy and fornication” and the internet has given the genre a serious following.
Learning To Play The Game
“For countless authors, movies have proved a fatal temptation, savaging great novels from The Naked and the Dead to Portnoy’s Complaint, and corrupting F. Scott Fitzgerald and others who lived out their Hollywood years in drunken decline.” But in recent years, prominent writers have been finding success on the screen, “both by carefully choosing those who would adapt their books and by participating in the filmmaking process themselves.”