“Not the agony of painting but the far greater torture of writing about paintings, in order to attract people to see them. Art for art’s sake? Forget it. What you need is artspeak for artspeak’s sake.”
Tag: 02.05.10
We Miss Books
“And he’s not alone. Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest–including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books.”
SFMoMA Raises $250 Million For New Wing
“The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced Thursday that it had raised more than $250 million to expand the museum and double its endowment. The museum is building a new wing to show the collection of Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher.”
Does This Mean Giacometti Is The Best?
“The sale prompts many questions, not least: is Giacometti the most important artist of the modern era? Is he really better than Picasso? Comparisons between different artists are vexed and horribly subjective.”
Possible Strike At Shaw Festival
“Contract negotiations had been proceeding between both sides for over a year but ran into rough water late last fall over the festival’s desire to cut health benefits for workers without compensation, the union said.”
Buried Under The Online Avalanche
“Falling behind is the permanent state of being online. There’s too much stuff. No one can see it all. (Or should — becoming a pop culture connoisseur in the age of a bazillion memes would require such relentless viewing that you couldn’t be a connoisseur of anything else. Like bathing.)”
Animalit. Really? I Mean, Really?
“Sales of celebrity memoirs might be down, says the Bookseller, while the misery memoir bubble has burst, but what it dubs “animalit” helped to save the biography genre last year.”
What’s The Point Of Music?
“Unwilling to believe that music was altogether useless, Darwin concluded that it may have made man’s ancestors more successful at mating. Yet if that were so, you might expect one gender to be musically more gifted than the other, and there is no evidence of that. So what is the point of music?”
Indignity: Other Cities Sub For Los Angeles In Hollywood Movies
“Movie location shoots around Los Angeles fell to 4,976 days last year, down 29.9 percent from 2008 and off 64.4 percent from a peak of 13,980 days in 1996, according to FilmL.A., which monitors film permits in the area.”
Los Angeles City Council Saves Arts Funding
“The Los Angeles City Council unanimously shot down a proposal Wednesday that would have eliminated guaranteed city funding for the arts, after listening to often-impassioned pleas during a public hearing on cutting government services and jobs in the face of a municipal budget crisis.”