“Artist Charles Clary says he wants his constructions to appear ever-expanding – overwhelming exhibition spaces like replicating viruses or reverberating sound waves. … [He] layers colored paper to build up the variegated textures and sinewy shapes of his room-sized installations.”
Tag: 01.25.10
The ‘Long Tail’ Reaches Manufacturing
Chris Anderson: “The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital – the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing – the long tail of things.”
Gay Pianists: Can You Spot Them Just By Listening?
Gay pianist Stephen Hough: “Horowitz once said that there were three types of pianist: Jewish, gay, and bad. Actually I’ve known some that were all three, and instantly a plethora of those who fulfill none of these categories springs to mind, but is there something which makes Horowitz, Richter and Cherkassky (to choose three completely contrasting artists) different from, say, Rubinstein, Gilels and Serkin?”
Napoleon Was A Lousy Lover (Poor Josephine)
“[In] a moment of candor, he confessed to an aide that he had done it all not for glory, patriotism, or ego, but for love: As the world’s most powerful man, he could sleep with any woman he desired.” Alas: “Just as he indifferently bolted down his food, paid no attention to his clothes, and could be self-absorbed and distracted in conversation, Napoleon’s romantic style, admits one otherwise admiring biographer, was ‘anything but endearing’.”
How Dancers Audition For The Oscars Telecast
Academy Awards producer and choreographer Adam Shankman “separates the dancers by gender, lines them up and asks each to perform a pair of ballet moves – a double pirouette and an arabesque that take just seconds to complete. Instantly, more than half of the would-be performers are eliminated.”
Paywalls For Newspaper Web Sites? Don’t Try It, Says Guardian Editor
In a lecture in London this week, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said that the move toward site-wide paywalls is based on a “hunch” and that it could lead newspapers on a “sleepwalk into oblivion.”
The Transformation Of Chris Ofili’s Art
Charlotte Higgins on the Ofili retrospective at the Tate Britain: “I got a jolt when I walked into the final pair of rooms, filled with his most recent work. In the first, the paintings are entirely blue – deep, midnight shades of indigo, ultramarine and bilberry. In the second, the paintings are screaming with acid colours: strident purple next to citrus orange; a tintinnabulating turquoise; egg-yolk yellow. And there is no elephant dung. And no glitter.”
Whatever Happened To Simplicity In Design?
“Inoperable cellphones. Impenetrable Web sites. Neurotically overstyled objects. Too much packaging. Digital versions of this, that and the other. … There’s no excuse for this, not least because qualities like ‘clarity’ and ‘simplicity’ loom large in almost every design doctrine.”
Naples Opera House Reopening After €67M Revamp
“Built by Naples’s Bourbon rulers in 1737 and described in 1817 by the French writer Stendhal as ‘dazzling the eyes and enrapturing the soul’, the San Carlo has staged premiers by Rossini and Verdi. But in 2007 government administrators had to be called in as debts of €20m threatened its survival.”
Los Angeles, Too, Wants Eli Broad’s Museum
“Downtown L.A. is officially making a play, courtesy of the Grand Avenue Authority, which today authorized negotiations with Broad toward a possible deal that would wrest the museum from Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, which are also in the running.”