- Taking Aim At Norah - Critics Pile On Norah Jones Everyone's focusing on Norah Jones, who won big at the Grammys last week. "Sure, listeners worldwide love her, scooping up 6 million copies of her debut album, 'Come Away With Me.' Yes, the album has been on The Billboard 200 chart for 52 weeks. And fine, Grammy voters awarded her best new artist, best pop vocal album, album of the year, record of the year and song of the year honors." So why are critics taking pot shots at her? Chicago Tribune 03/02/03
- Why People Don't Read "Serious" Fiction Terry Teachout writes that "it's common to run across 'well-read' people who no longer read any new literary fiction at all, American or otherwise. I don't, and neither do many of the professional writers I know. Like most Americans, we go to the movies instead." So why is that, he wonders. "Our 'major' writers tend to be chronically verbose, stylistically ostentatious and agonizingly earnest (though the flippant Irony Lite of Generation X now appears to have replaced earnestness as the style du jour). Such books are unreadable, and so nobody reads them, save under academic duress." OpinionJournal.com 03/06/03
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That Arts Degree Will Earn You Less So you have that arts degree and feel you're not earning what you should? Turns out the statistics are against you. Researchers have concluded that university graduates with arts degrees - including history, English and sociology - "should expect to make between 2% and 10% less than those who quit education at 18." BBC 03/06/03
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How These Things Start - Did Picasso Hate Matisse? Did Matisse Dislike Picasso? A competition is an odd aesthetic for an art show. So how did the Matisse–Picasso opposition come about? It "was invented almost a hundred years ago by a handful of avant-garde poets and painters who had an appetite for grand pronouncements. The rivalry was also fostered by Gertrude and Leo Stein, who, in their salon, liked to put other people's neuroses in a pot and let them simmer till they boiled over. Early on, Leo Stein made a point of telling Matisse and Picasso, then freshly aware of one another, that an important Parisian art dealer had spent the large sum of 2,000 francs on new paintings by Picasso and the very slightly larger sum of 2,200 francs on new paintings by Matisse. Then came a press release by the poet Apollinaire, and the duel was officially on..." Slate 03/04/03
- Just Blow The Damn Thing Up "The cumulative force of years of negative posturing, while successful in increasing musicians' pay scales, in my opinion has weakened the Symphony's prospects and credibility." So speaks Roy Nolen, a former Houston Symphony board member who says that the orchestra's problems do not stem from a lack of management competence, but from the inability of the musicians to accept the reality that the residents of the nation's fourth-largest city simply do not care about orchestral music. "It may be time for the Houston Symphony Society to consider whether a single-city symphony orchestra of high quality is viable in Houston." Houston Chronicle 03/06/03
