Category: issues

It’s been 13 years since a conservative movement succeeded in getting warning labels afixed to recordings thought to be potentially offensive. And what’s happened to labels? “These days, if you mean business in the market, you’d better have a sticker.” The labels have come to signify edgier work and – not surprisingly – that’s the music kids want to listen to. So what, really, is the point of labels? – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/29/00

Whether it’s Jimi Hendrix’s guitar or Leonardo’s snuff box, we’ve always had a fascination for relics. “Russell Martin’s new book, “Beethoven’s Hair,” is a wonderful contemplation of how relics can become bridges between people separated by time, culture and death. “Beethoven’s Hair” also gives us a long, inspiring look at passion in several forms.” – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 10/29/00

New York’s Lincoln Center “is poised to name one of its own, Gordon J. Davis, the chairman of Jazz at Lincoln Center and a former New York City parks commissioner, to lead the organization through the nation’s biggest arts rebuilding project.” – New York Times 10/27/00 

Post-Modernism has got a bad name. “Mind you, most of them are never quite sure what postmodernism might be, but they know that it’s evil. Indeed, all of the contemporary world’s ills can be sheeted home to its pernicious influence.” And yet, ultimately, civilization will continue. – Sydney Morning Herald 10/27/00

• FINALLY, A PRACTICAL DEFINITION OF POST-MODERNISM: According to John Barth: “Postmodernism consists somehow of being able to tie your necktie in a perfect full-Windsor knot while telling somebody what the stages are in tying a necktie – and at the same time discoursing on the history of men’s neckwear from the court of Louis XIV to the present and still not screwing up the knot.” – Chicago Tribune 10/27/00

“There’s an interesting debate on the streets of Beijing. On one level it is about ripping down old neighbourhoods and replacing them with gleaming new developments. On another it is about Western ideas of what China is – or was – and what it ought to be. Beijing is changing so rapidly it is hard to keep track of the speed with which whole suburbs are transformed. Greed and speed are conspiring to obliterate the old before any evaluation of what might be worth preserving.” – Sydney Morning Herald 10/26/00

Massive public relations campaigns drive the visual arts industry in much the same way they do politics and advertising, so it might be worth asking just what the word “public” means in the art world today. “Broadly speaking, artists and curators have typically thought of the public (if at all) as an anonymous mass, ill-equipped and naive, that needs to be “educated,” while the public has tended to see artists as arrogant, self-regarding and even downright silly. There is some truth, I think, in both views.” – The Age (Melbourne) 10/25/00

UCLA has agreed to restore the name of its concert hall to Arnold Schoenberg Hall, in honor of the great composer who taught on campus in the ‘30s and ‘40s. When the university announced a new dedicatee last month, record industry exec Mo Ostin, a slew of public protests ensued. “The Schoenberg renaming is not the first of its kind. I am told that the cinema at UCLA’s film school was de-plaqued, dumping a pioneering faculty member for a recent donor. Evidence from other US campuses suggests that the practice is widespread. Not since Stalin revised the great Soviet encyclopedia have famous persons been erased with such zeal.” – The Telegraph (UK) 10/25/00

Some 2,500 indigenous artists from 26 countries across the world are on their way to to Noumea, New Caledonia for a festival. “But many of the local Kanak artists have decided actions speak louder than words, and have voted to boycott the international festival which begins today and includes a delegation of more than 100 Australian indigenous artists. New Caledonia’s paucity of copyright legislation is at the heart of the dispute.” – Sydney Morning Herald 10/24/00

London’s Guardian newspaper has hired an artist-in-residence. He is Michael Atavar, and “playing the role of idiot savant outsider, he may illuminate some aspect of our work, or he may add previously unimagined meaning to it. Then again, he may just shrug and wander off. It really doesn’t matter. In a giant shift of culture, we’re trying not to be prescriptive: so no deadlines, no brief, and no project as such.” – The Guardian 10/24/00

A new Canadian study is investigating whether arts education helps children do better in math, reading and writing. The study is also looking at race and socio-economic factors that may play a factor in a child’s involvement in the arts. – CBC 10/24/00