Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project, soon to open in Seattle is one of a new generation of experiential museums “characterized by a sometimes brash and loopy mix of commercialism and high-tech exhibition space. These facilities often “celebrate not the past but the present of American popular culture: from Virginia’s Newseum to the Grateful Dead’s prospective Terrapin Station in San Francisco, from numerous science museums such as the Museum of Innovation in San Jose to the various halls of fame. The new museums are sometimes more akin to dazzling amusement arcades or electronic playgrounds than to the somber and solidly physical dignities of the Met. Visitors are called upon to play, participate, and buy, rather than contemplate. Some curators, indeed, question whether they are really museums at all and not entertainment complexes with a loose educational veneer. – Metropolis
Tag: 04.00
HISTORY IN THE MAKING
Plenty of historians have taken director Oliver Stone to task for mixing history with fiction. They scoffed at Kevin Costner’s accent in JFK and wrote off his depiction of Nixon as “a foulmouthed, pill-popping drunk guilty of trying to have Fidel Castro assassinated. None of these details are confirmed by the historical record.” Stone declares he is a filmmaker, not a historian. But where do you draw the line between accuracy and entertainment, evidence and imagination? “What do they want – footnotes? Do they want a closed caption that says ‘This is dubious’ or ‘Please see endnotes for that’?” – Lingua Franca 04/00
BETTER INMATES THROUGH DANCE
Dancer takes on the guys in juvenile detention and they go for it. “In here, we don’t get to jump around. Because we’ve got to get along with other people when we are dancing, it also helps us do that when we aren’t dancing. In class you see that not everyone can learn the same and so you get to know a little about them if you help them with the steps.” – Dance Magazine
CULT OF THE NEW
“Every year fresh new ranks of art-producers rise up almost fully-formed from the art schools, au fait with the current ways of art-knowingness, hard on the heels of their predecessors, intent on subverting the art world hierarchy and establishing their own rightful niches within it. They have to be seen to be doing something different from what was done before, or revamping the old in contemporary guise, to live up to and perpetuate the Western art tradition of continual innovation.” That we’re in a new millennium only accelerates the quest. – *spark-online
INSIDE OUT
A number of artists are experimenting with medical testing in their art. Scans, endoscopy, genetic testing – “to obtain images of their insides, artists are pushing the boundaries of self-exposure, subjecting themselves to painful scrutiny on many levels.” – ARTnews
WHO KNEW?
Georgia O’Keeffe was fond of secrets. But everyone thinks they know the artist’s work. Turns out not as well as people might think. In compiling the O’Keeffe catalogue raisonné its author “was stunned to find hundreds of carefully preserved sketchbooks, tiny line drawings, detailed renderings of landscapes, luminous floral pastels, and completely abstract late watercolors. The works on paper make up about half of the slightly more than 2,000 entries in the two-volume catalogue.” – ARTnews
OLD LOOT LAWS
Someone’s doing some work on your property. They find a cache of buried gold coins. They claim it for their own. Do they have a right to it? “Idaho Supreme Court will soon hear a dispute pitting media mogul Jann Wenner, the owner of Rolling Stone magazine, against a construction worker who discovered a cache of gold coins buried on Wenner’s land near the Sun Valley resort area. The worker made his claim based on the ancient common law rule of treasure trove, which awards title of an artifact to the finder, be he looter or archaeologist.” Is this fair? – Archaeology Magazine
HOW BAD IS BAD?
As though the word had a static meaning. Nonetheless, academic art has had a bad rep for a long time. But there are signs that is changing. – The Atlantic