French TV has its first black news reader. “So are France’s mainstream channels becoming more, well, colourful? Up to a point. ‘It’s a step forward but there’s still a huge gap between the reality of French society and how it’s represented on television’.”
Tag: 03.27.06
Brain Game That Makes You Smarter
“Next month, Nintendo is releasing Brain Age, a DS game based on the research of the Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima. Kawashima found that if you measured the brain activity of someone who was concentrating on a single, complex task — like studying quantum theory — several parts of that person’s brain would light up. But if you asked them to answer a rapid-fire slew of tiny, simple problems — like basic math questions — her or his brain would light up everywhere.”
British Museum’s MIA List
The British Museum says that more than 2000 items are missing from its collection and that 28 items have been stolen in recent years. “While the thefts represent a tiny fraction of the 150 million items in the library’s possession, the stolen items are valued at £100,000, with a number of rare maps and illustrated plates ripped from antique books by international thieves. A single plate cut from a 1522 volume on Pompeii is worth £45,000.”
Will Digital Downloads Save Classical Music?
“Proportionately, classical sells better digitally than on CD. Whereas classical accounts for about 3%-4% of total sales of music in shops, on iTunes it accounts for 12% of sales…”
After The Eye (Then What?)
David Marks and Julia Barfield spent years getting the London Eye built. It’s become a modern landmark icon. So what do you do as a followup? There is that problem of being typecast…
British Museum’s New Global Role
“Until five or 10 years ago, almost all exhibitions took place in quite a small circuit of museums, in Europe and the US, and perhaps Japan and Korea. Now that has changed quite profoundly. We can take the collection to Africa, to China, and they can use it as they want, because in each case it has a different public to address, and a different story to tell.”
French Catch The Writing Bug
French publishers are drowning under a sea of unsolicited manuscripts. “With the short 35-hour working week in France and a fall in the average retirement, increasing numbers of French men and women are turning pen to paper to write ‘their book’. Most, some 75 percent, write novels loosely based on their own experiences, turning the editor into a kind of shrink, an often unwilling confidante party to the author’s deepest secrets, fears and desires.”
The Future: Third World Cities?
“The third-world metropolis is becoming the symbol of the ‘new’. If, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient, planned city has long since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and ambition have turned to anxiety and besiegement; its homogenising obsession has induced counter-fantasies of insubordination, excess and life forms in chaotic variety. Such desires find in the third-world metropolis a scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology.”
Maxwell Anderson To Indianapolis
Maxwell Anderson, former director of the Whitney Museum, has been named director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. “At the IMA, Anderson will lead a multifaceted institution with a $325 million endowment; a $20 million annual operating budget; 320 employees; a collection of more than 50,000 artworks; and $74 million worth of expanded facilities.”
The Right To Art – Where Is It?
“Try to think of a contemporary piece of art that made a right-wing point? Or a British film, or TV drama, or play? No bells ringing, yet. Nope, there’s no risk of tinnitus. So why are right-wingers in the arts as rare as Saudi snowballs?”