Artist Tracey Emin has patched up things with the class of eight-year-olds she’s been battling with the past week. “After demanding the return of an artwork she made with a group of eight-year-old pupils, Ms Emin has now told the school it can keep it – and has offered to pay the cost of a frame.”
Tag: 04.02.04
Architect Renzo Piano On The Artists Who Have Influenced Him:
“I’ve been a very close friend to people like Luciano Berio, John Cage, Pierre Boulez. This is what is great about art: there are no frontiers. You are friends among writers, and you steal from writers, the next day you steal from musicians, the next day you steal from a sculptor or a painter. It is always like that. It’s a continuous robbery one from the other. But it’s a robbery without a mask.”
Getty, World Monuments Fund, Team Up To Help Iraq’s Cultural Heritage
“The World Monuments Fund and the Getty Conservation Institute are to collaborate with Iraq’s Ministry of Culture and State Board of Antiquities and Heritage to repair the damage sustained as a result of the 2003 war. The initiative will not deal with the restoration or protection of Iraq’s museums, but with endangered buildings and archaeological sites. The goal is to mobilise international resources to help repair Iraq’s cultural heritage and to help build the infrastructure and expertise that are required in the country’s conservation and heritage management sectors.”
Get Your Red Hot Music Here…
Recording companies are trying all sorts of new ways to deliver their product to consumers. “Offerings for consumers that are already available or in the works range from free song downloads (awarded after buying a bottle of soda or a cheeseburger) to the ability to walk into a Starbucks and choose from thousands of songs to make a CD.”
Inconsistent Border Regs To Blame For McEwan Border Snafu?
It took writer Ian McEwan 24 hours to get across the border into the United States this week. Now he has a stamp in his passport that says he was denied entry, which could cause problems the next time he travels to the US. Inconsistent border procedures are being blamed on his delay. “What happened to Ian McEwan illustrates the inconsistencies in the process to enter this country, and this happens more often than most people think. The only reason that we are even aware of this incident is because Mr. McEwan is famous.”
Celebrating Boredom
“We’re terrified of boredom and simultaneously sunk up to our knees in it, a post-“Seinfeld” generation running as hard and frantically as we can to avoid a condition we increasingly regard as inevitable. Not so fast. As more and more people seem to recognize, the universal experience of being bored — unengaged, detached, afloat in some private torpor — may be far more precious, fruitful and even profound than a surface apprehension might suggest. As ordinary as gray skies and equally pervasive, boredom deserves its own sun-splashed attention and celebration.”
Canada Dance Fest Almost Shut For Lack Of $100,000
The Canada Dance Festival, the country’s largest dance event, was almost canceled this year because of a $100,000 funding shortfall. But the biennial festival will go on in June, reduced to 14 performances, “less than half its previous scope. The festival had budgeted receiving about $100,000 in private sector sponsorships and support, but its requests were turned down.”
To Share Or Not To Share, That Is The Question
Recording execs are blasting a Canadian judge’s decision that allows music file-sharing. “But ask anyone else connected in some way with music — from artists and small record company managers to listeners and file sharers themselves — and you’ll get myriad views on the matter, pro and con. The decision Wednesday in a Toronto Federal Court against the Canadian Recording Industry Association’s attempt to sue file sharers in Canada doesn’t seem to have changed opinions much.”
Minimalism – Maximum Impact
Minimalism seems to be everywhere these days, including a new retrospective show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “Someone might surmise from all this that Minimalism’s time has come, but it has always been around in architecture, music, dance, theater, literature, the ascetic impulse hard-wired in us. That is an implicit message of “A Minimal Future?,” which includes Dan Graham’s 1966 photographs of postwar tract housing, all of it identical except differently colored, illustrating how the Minimalist aesthetic of serial form is just out there, waiting to be noticed.”
Age Of The Producer
We are living in the age of the producer. That’s the guy who takes the music and wrestles it around until it comes out a hit. Producers are now stars in their own right, and their status is only increasing now that anyone with a laptop computer can do what formerly took a roomful of mixing boards. Four producers talk about how their business has changed.