Is Charles Saatchi struck in the 90s? Some think so, after seeing his new gallery in London. “Art has moved on, declared Philip Dodd, director of the Institute for Contemporary Art, to internet sites that allow angry Iraqis in Baghdad to virtually bomb Washington and London, moaning one-eyed mummies, and performance artists who sew balsawood soles to their feet. I think Saatchi was about a time and a place. His gallery is a monument to the 90s, and a museum in some ways to a time when he dominated the scene.”
Tag: 04.01.03
Defacing Goya Or “Rectifying” Him?
Artists known as the Chapman brothers have “drawn demonic clown and puppy heads on each of the victims” on a rare set of prints of Goya’s apocalyptic “Disasters of War”. “Some experts believe that what the brothers call their ‘rectification’ of the prints is a fresh spin for the Manga generation. Others do not. Robert Hughes: Goya “will obviously survive these twerps, whose names will be forgotten a few years from now … Maybe it’s time they put Mickey Mouse heads on the Sistine Chapel.”
Minnesota Losing Film Business
Minnesota, like many states, has a film office whose job it is to lure movie companies to film in the state. The office helps arrange permits, scout locations and generally make filmmakers’ lives easier. It also offers rebates – called “snowbates” here – to bribe production companies. But the state’s governor has cut the ofice’s budget, and it looks like much of the Minnesota film business will go away. “The board keeps a tally of money spent on filmmaking in the state and compares it to the amount it gets in state subsidies. Over the past 10 years, the ratio is 33 to 1.”
Are We Reading More Poetry Than We Used To?
“On almost any day these days, somewhere in Chicago and its suburbs, a poet is conducting a reading. A poet in residence is opening a world of words to a class of wide-eyed 5th graders. An editor in a cluttered, cramped home office is lovingly cobbling together a poetry journal that will be seen by a tiny audience appreciative of its presence, concerned for its survival. A boisterous bar crowd is giving encouraging applause or withering hisses to contestants in a poetry slam. “That sure wasn’t the case in the ’70s or ’80s. Every once in a while, there’d be a reading, but not all that often.”
Classical Chill? Throw It Back In The Deep Freeze
Rupert Christiansen ventures to a London club to sample the new phenomenon of “chill” music. “It sounded vile. I hasten to add that I write this without prejudice. I may be the paper’s opera critic, but I am not a musical purist. Some opera bores me rigid, and there’s plenty of rock and pop, from the Beach Boys to Coldplay, that I adore. But, as demonstrated by Anne Dudley and the BBC Concert Orchestra, classical chillout struck me as execrable. The Trades Description Act should be invoked: classical fallout would be a more appropriate and accurate title. Essentially, the two-hour performance consisted of nothing more than a medley of tunes mangled through samplers and synthesisers and then spewed out at a pitch of amplified volume associated with nuclear explosions.”