Back in the 1980s, the ideas that scholars like the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick developed into “queer theory” caused quite the uproar and helped ignite the culture wars. “Now queer theory is as at home on many college campuses as men’s lacrosse and late-night lattes … [and it has] had more influence outside the academy than anyone might have imagined.”
Tag: 04.19.09
Frank Gehry Threatens To Quit His Miami Beach Project
Not to worry: work on the high-tech concert hall for the New World Symphony is proceeding on time and on budget. But, with the scheme well underway, the city of Miami Beach is now balking at the cost of the adjacent 2½-acre park – and at Gehry’s fee for it. So the architect has withdrawn from the park component and is threatening “to walk away from the [entire] project completely if city commissioners continue to harp on his fees, which he says they have exaggerated and misrepresented.”
Look! Up In The Sky! The Buildings That Never Got Built!
“An entire counterfactual history of New York could be written simply from the stories of buildings that never got built. … Only nine months ago, each of the buildings on the following pages stood a fighting chance of making the jump from architect’s drawings to glass, steel, concrete, and brick. Today, all are on indefinite, very costly hold. “
J.G. Ballard: An Appreciation
“If J.G. Ballard — the visionary British novelist who died this morning of prostate cancer at age 78 — ends up being remembered, it will likely be as a science fiction writer who aspired to use genre as a vehicle for art. That’s true enough, I suppose, in a certain small-bore manner, but it’s ultimately reductive, a way of categorizing Ballard that his entire career stood against.”
Overdue Library Book Returned 145 Years Late
“A book looted from a US library during the American civil war has finally been returned, almost 145 years overdue. The only stipulation of the Illinois handball coach who returned the title was that he didn’t have to pay the $52,858 (£36,000) fine.”
Artists Will Repaint Sections Of The Berlin Wall
“This summer the surviving 1,300 metres of the wall is to be scrubbed clean and then repainted by the same artists who turned it into a giant work of art in the heady weeks after Berliners flooded across border posts in November 1989, rendering the wall, built in 1961 as a “protective barrier against fascism”, redundant.”
Major Architects Attack Prince Charles
“The attack on the prince, who is known for his traditional views on architecture, comes in a letter to today’s Sunday Times. It is signed by, among others, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Lord Foster, Zaha Hadid, Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry, who are leading figures in their field. Among their works are the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics, the Gherkin and Tate Modern in London, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.”
Messing With The Classics
“Most artists, of course, are perfectly happy to leave well enough alone, secure in the knowledge that they got it right the first time (even if they didn’t). On the other hand, revised versions of well-known works of art are quite a bit more common than you might suppose, and it turns out that more than a few great artists were near-compulsive tinkerers.”
The Science Of Why We Don’t Plan Well
“We have many automatic biases — we’re more averse to losses than we are interested in gains, for instance — and we make repeated errors in judgment based on our tendency to use shorthand rules to solve problems. We can also be extremely susceptible to how questions are posed.”
The Dance Company That Created A Magazine Cover
The New York Times uses the dance company Momix to create its Sunday magazine cover