Tag: 03.05.04

Transforming Chicago’s Urban Living Room

Chicago is transforming Grant Park, at the center of downtown, into what mayor Richard Daley calls “one of the finest recreational and cultural spaces of any city in the world.” When it opens next summer, the “re-christened Millennium Park will feature a 125-tonne steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor, a 220-foot-long video-fountain by Catalan artist Jaume Plensa, a gleaming metallic bandshell by Frank Gehry, and a garden by landscapist Kathryn Gustafson, who won the Princess Diana Memorial competition for Hyde Park.”

Call It The Christian Counterculture

“Rather than rejecting popular culture outright, a growing number of Christians are producing and consuming their own popular media on the fringes of the mainstream entertainment industry. Still others are gathering in church basements and living rooms to promote their own brand of media literacy—seeing commercial culture as a “window” into the culture of unbelievers. What we see here is consistent with what media scholars have found within other subcultural communities—a desire to make and distribute your own media and the desire to challenge and critique mainstream media.”

The Use Of Dr. Seuss

Great to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the creator of Dr. Seuss. “But exactly which Dr. Seuss is being celebrated? Is it the literary Seuss, creator of charmingly anarchic, oddball characters whose adventures are recounted in ingenious nonsense verse? Or is it the Seuss of Hollywood and myriad product tie-ins who has been “interpreted” and marketed and theme-parked within an inch–maybe beyond–of his reputation?”

Reconsidering the Big Box Approach

It’s been five years since the announcement of a new £22 million arts center for the city of Belfast, and very little progress seems to have been made. For one thing, not everyone in the arts community wants a big, unwieldy, centralized home for the city’s myriad groups, fearing that it will detract from neighborhood-based art. For another, the plans for the center seem as much about revitalizing a run-down section of the city as they do about promoting culture, and many prominent arts groups have already issued a polite “no, thank you” to the invitation.

Preservation Through Adulation

More than any other performing art, dance is dependent upon the memories of its practitioners to keep its history alive. There may be an extensive vocabulary used to define the basic positions and steps of classical ballet, but there is no perfect way to write down a dance in order that future generations might dance it again. “Even today, despite the advent of video, a choreographer without disciples is in constant danger of having his work fade away after his death. Video can capture the external form and movement, and notation the positions, but the philosophy and technique of the great choreographers is impossible to get down.”

Bourgeois Revival

Few artists could claim to be at their professional peak at the age of 93, but Louise Bourgeois is having a crack at it. “Bourgeois’ reputation is growing steadily, boosted by the fact that she regularly shows work alongside artists half her age. French-born, but now living in Manhattan, she represented the US in the Venice Biennale in 1993, and completed the inaugural commission for Tate Modern’s vast turbine hall in 2000.” Her work is unquestionably contemporary, which may account for some of her continued success, but more than merely seeming fresh, it comes across as intensely autobiographical, a trick which few visual artists have mastered without seeming trite.

Little Island, Big Hollywood Dreams

When the British government announced that it was closing a tax loophole long used to finance big-budget movies being shot in the UK, industry observers warned that it would spell the death of the nation’s film industry. And indeed, movie production has ground to a virtual halt since the loophole closed. But on the tiny Isle of Man (seen by countless American moviegoers when it stood in for Ireland in Waking Ned Devine), two films are ready to roll, thanks to new subsidies from the island’s own film commission. It may not be the saving grace of the entire UK industry, says David Gritten, but it’s a start.

Godzilla To Take A 10-Year Break

Many Americans are probably unaware of it, but Japanese movie studios have never actually stopped making Godzilla movies. In fact, the monster that stomped Tokyo has been the star of 28 full-length features over the last 50 years, including this year’s Godzilla: Final Wars, slated for a December release. But according to Japan’s Toho Studios, this really will be Godzilla’s final war, at least for quite a while. The studio plans to make no new Godzilla movies for at least ten years, regardless of how well the latest installment does at the box office.