Critically Realist?
So post-modernism is dead. And what's to succeed it? Perhaps a period of critical realism? "Clearly, critical realism is by now a diffuse and interdisciplinary movement, covering a wide spectrum of opinions. The question is: how broad a church can critical realism be if it is to remain both critical and realist?"
Philosophy Now
10/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:43 pm
"Power 100" List Demotes Saatchi, Promotes Dentist
ArtReview Magazine's new "Power 100" list of the most influential collectors of art contains a few surprises this year. Charles Saatchi will be knocked from first place to sixth. But perhaps just as surprising is the man who ranks No. 100: the dentist who fixed the teeth of the Young British Artist set. Artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin gave their dentist work in trade for his tooth care. "Emin has regularly sung his praises, telling interviewers: 'My dentist is the best in Britain!' She said last night: 'He's a really good and kind dentist who took my teeth on when no one else would go near them with a barge pole'."
The Observer (UK)
10/26/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:44 pm
The Turner's New Outrage...(Really?)
"This week, art's most respected competition, the Turner Prize, invites its biggest controversy with a display of a graphic and sexually explicit sculpture by two of Britain's foremost artists."
The Observer (UK)
10/26/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:42 pm
Germany's Crisis In Architecture
German architects have little to do. "There is certainly no future in the inner cities, where all museums, government buildings, company headquarters and shopping streets have already been completed. The crisis in German architecture is not just an economic problem, but also an issue of ideology."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
10/24/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:30 pm
Is Art Gallery Of Ontario Cynically Keeping Visitors In The Dark?
The Art Gallery of Ontario has a Degas show that is deeply suspect. Rather than explain some of the complications to the public, the AGO says nothing. "Following the Royal Ontario Museum's 2001 display of Auguste Rodin plaster casts that were repudiated by the Musée Rodin in Paris, the show reveals a depressing willingness from leading Canadian museums to abandon their educational role and fudge ethical standards to move bodies through the turnstile."
The Globe & Mail (Canada)
10/25/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:22 pm
Beethoven In China
Western European orchestral music has a big following in China. But until this month, Beethoven's string quartets had never been performed as a complete set before. "The fact that it has taken this long for Beethoven's quartets to be given this kind of hearing in a country where western orchestral music has built up an established, if still relatively small, audience may seem surprising. Why should the popularity of western chamber music lag that of western orchestral music?"
Financial Times
10/24/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:49 am
Pavarotti - High C's At 68?
At 68, Luciano Pavarotti doesn't always sound so good, writes Richard Dyer. "But he sounds amazingly steady and solid on the new album - it is hard to think of any previous tenor who could sound this good at Pavarotti's age. Most of the songs are appealing, and Pavarotti lavishes his incomparable diction and emotional generosity on them, and his high C is still in working order."
Boston Globe
10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:26 am
The Man Who Saved The National Arts Center
Peter Herrndorf is an arts turn-around artist. His latest triumph is revitalizing Ottawa's national Arts Center. And he didn't do it by playing safe. "The trouble was that as money got tighter through the nineties, people [within the NAC] became risk-averse, and this is an organization where you want the sensibility to be exactly the opposite. We're going through a fascinating experiment. We're trying to take an organization and say it will play an important national role, not in rhetorical terms, but in its ability to support arts organizations in different regions and to build communities and have this organization raise funding across the country."
The Globe & Mail (Canada)
10/25/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:29 pm
Another Melbourne Fest Hits the Books
This year's Melbourne Festival comes to a close. "Festival-goers could take their pick of about 70 offerings this year, but it seemed that most wanted to talk about just two of them: the public program Dancing In The Streets and the controversial Belgian production I Am Blood. The former was roundly judged a success, having attracted nightly crowds averaging about 1000 to dance classes at Federation Square, many of them people who had never attended a festival event. But Jan Fabre's bloody meditation upon humanity's inhumanity won few fans."
The Age (Melbourne)
10/26/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 8:05 pm
The Fictional Rorem
Hard to believe composer Ned Rorem is 80. "His masterpiece is his artistic personality. He's an extremely acute observer and a master of paradox, which is very French. He was able to import French culture while remaining a thoroughly American figure. In an era of dumbing-down and slipping standards, he really does stand for something."
The New York Times
10/26/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:59 pm
George Orwell Named Names
Orwell outed those he believed were communists to the government. His list is contained in a notebook that is about to be released. "The final list contained 38 names of journalists, scholars and actors, including film comic Charlie Chaplin, actor Michael Redgrave, historian E.H. Carr and left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg. Its discovery earlier this year was proof that Orwell, after conscientious second thoughts and deletions, had sent the Foreign Office some names from his notebook drafts."
The Observer (UK)
10/26/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:58 pm
What Bernstein Might Have Done To Theatre
In 1957, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim joined forces to write the music and lyrics for "West Side Story." Sondheim, of course, went on to a brilliant career in musical theatre. But Bernstein turned his attentions predominantly to a classical music career. What might Bernstein's influence have been if instead he had pursued theatre?
Boston Globe
10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 9:12 am
The Royal's Hold On Europe
London's Royal Court has an outsized influence on European theatre. "Instead of engaging in the difficult process of cultivating new local writing, directors from Warsaw to Lisbon appear to be simply scanning the forthcoming programme at the Royal Court and snapping up the rights. One major appeal of these plays is that they afford a progressive gloss without risking any kind of dangerous formal experimentation or tackling relevant issues that might challenge local audiences."
The Guardian (UK)
10/25/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:39 pm
The Atwood Express
Margaret Atwood is Canada's reigning literary institution, writes Philip Marchand. "Atwood's place on so many book prize short lists is indicative of her unique position in Canadian letters. Especially since the deaths of Robertson Davies and Mordecai Richler, she has no rival as premier Canadian novelist. Atwood's product clearly has wide appeal, and even those who have strong misgivings about her work, like me, must acknowledge that she has some powerful and exceptional gifts — literary gifts that are particularly suited to a writer of novels."
Toronto Star
10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 8:23 am
America As Author Magnet
"That Argentine, or Australian, or Iranian, or Afghan author you have bought a ticket to hear is probably flying in from his or her home in the United States — the world's most powerful author magnet. Not only does the place offer freedom to write, but it also offers an abundance of publishers, lots of creative writing programs where authors can find a day job, and a large literary marketplace."
Toronto Star
10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 8:06 am
Adding Up The Futility Of Writing
The economics of being a writer in Canada just don't add up. Out of that $32 book price, the author gets $3.20. "In Canada, a country of more than 30 million people, a novel is considered to have sold respectably if three thousand copies leave the shelf. You do the math: 3,000 x $3.20, minus 15 per cent, minus hundreds of dollars in expenses, minus your advance on these royalties, divided by four or five (depending on how many years the book took to write), equals, on a bad day, a fairly deep sense of futility."
The Globe & Mail (Canada)
10/25/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:17 pm
Chaucer Online - BM Puts Canterbury Tales Online
For the first time, the Britih Library has put the full 748-page text of the Canterbury Tales online. The book is believed to be the first book printed in England (in 1476). "The library's copies of the first and second editions - so rare that no visitor is allowed to touch them - are now expected to be read electronically by up to a million people in the next six months."
The Guardian (UK)
10/25/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:08 pm
Director's Cut To Profits
There's an epidemic of "director's cut" dvd's being issued. "It's hard not to detect a whiff of marketing ploy in all these bulked-up reissues. Far from rectifying the wrongs done to their work the first time round, it tends to look as if the directors just can't leave well enough alone. Forman's Amadeus feels 20 minutes longer without feeling noticeably different at all; Cameron's revamped Abyss adds lots more of what doesn't work in the film anyway and hardly any of what does; and the new stuff in Apocalypse Now Redux is at best a curiosity box, with the lengthy plantation sequence the obvious low point of the movie as it now stands." The Telegraph (UK)
10/25/03
Posted: 10/25/2003 10:51 pm
Remembering Anthony Tudor
Tudor was in the habit of questioning every move his dancers made. "You get people into a whole different mode of relating to the floor. It was quite grounded, his work. It's really ground-breaking, somewhere between modern dance and ballet. And it had its own very specific technique. You have to break the habit of either a modern-dance or a classical-ballet approach. No, it's this. And then you watch the dancers feel more and more and more constricted until they're about ready to explode. Then all of a sudden, within that framework, you can tell the moment when somebody gets it. They start to either be themselves or be the character they're trying to portray."
The New York Times
10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 7:13 am
Remembering Nikolais
Choreographer Alwin Nikolais was a multimedia pioneer. "He was a loner — he could not collaborate with anyone. He didn't have the patience to explain what he wanted. He saw dance as a total entity, which meant he regarded sound, light, choreography and costume as part of the whole. In the beginning he called his work "total theater." We now call it multimedia."
The New York Times
10/26/03
Posted: 10/26/2003 7:07 am
