Last week the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gave out a big award for online art. Did anyone care? A panel in SF talked about web art at the museum this weekend. “Asked whether artists working on the Net need or want the collaboration of traditional art institutions, Webby-winner Michael Samyn – prefacing his response by remarking he didn’t understand the question because he is ‘a designer, not an artist’ – said ‘No.'” – Wired
Tag: 05.15.00
STRONG START
Australian art sales have surged in the first part of this year. – Sydney Morning Herald
GUGGENHEIM AWARD
The Council of Europe has awarded Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum its Best Museum in Europe award. – BBC
BUT HOW TO PAY THE TAX?
Under a new Australian tax system, all small businesses (including artists) must have an Australian Business Number or face having 48.5 per cent withholding tax taken out of every payment they receive. But many aboriginal artists on the edge of the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory operate largely outside the formal economy. “Advocates for the Aboriginal arts industry claim it is unrealistic to expect most of the estimated 18,000 Aboriginal artists who derive an income from their creative work to comply with the details of the new tax system.” – Sydney Morning Herald
REEL REVOLUTION
“‘Quantum Project’ is the vanguard of the new internet movie business, and its makers believe it will change the Hollywood system for ever. The company bankrolling the project, sightsound.com, is keen to position itself at the centre of this new market of downloadable film. ‘I don’t want to overstate this, but there is no other way to say it: it’s absolute history. This is an historic endeavour.'” – New Statesman 05/15/00
CROCODILE APOLOGIES
Time Warner send a letter to the US Congress expressing its regret about the way a recent dispute with Disney/ABC was handled. TW blacked out ABC from its cable systems a few weeks ago. But now the company is undergoing government scrutiny over its merger with AOL, so apparently it’s time to make nice. – BBC 05/15/00
SCORE ONE FOR THE OUTSIDER
Director Mike Figgis has spent his career bucking the Hollywood studio system. Now he’s created a fresh kind of cinematic structure with his newest film. “For Figgis, who received remarkable acclaim for Leaving Las Vegas, Time Code is a culmination of a lifetime of varied pursuits: He has finally succeeded in combining his background as theater director, documentary and narrative filmmaker, composer, and musician into one beautifully complex piece of cinematic deviation.” – Feed 05/15/00
WAITING FOR BECKETT
A project to film all 19 of Samuel Beckett’s plays for TV and the cinema faces the predictable backlash from Beckett purists. Nonetheless, the project – which has enlisted directors such as Anthony Minghella, David Mamet, Neil Jordan, Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Richard Eyre and Karel Reisz – has some big promise. – Irish Times 05/15/00
SEARCHING FOR A BREAKOUT HIT
What’s hot at Cannes this year? Comedies have captured some attention. But “no breakout hits have emerged yet at this halfway mark in the festival, with audience members scratching their heads at the solid, though hardly sterling selection of competition films.” – Indiewire 05/15/00
LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM
If Harold Bloom’s new book “How to Read and Why” seems smug and condescending, that’s because it is. The book claims to be a practical guide to show us how to read great literature and provide the reason why. “But Professor Bloom’s own rhetoric is so poisonously alienating to the general reader – with its mandarin locutions and tireless self-congratulation – that he ends up sounding like a parody of the jargon-spouting Neo-post-whatever-ists he keeps complaining about.” – New York Magazine