Marc Quinn’s statue of the disabled artist Alison Lapper naked and eight months pregnant, was installed in Trafalgar Square in September 2005. It exemplifies what’s wrong in modern Britain, writes Brendan O’Neill. “It shows that we value people for what they are rather than what they achieve. In our era of the politics of identity we seem more interested in celebrating individuals’ fixed and quite accidental attributes – their ethnicity, cultural heritage or in Lapper’s case, her disability – rather than what they have discovered or done in the world outside of their bodies. We prefer victims to heroes.”
Tag: 05.17.07
Tomorrow’s Web Of Creativity
“Look at video responses to YouTube videos; these are signs that people want to create. Perhaps a more nuanced point is that most of us are not creative because the world doesn’t make it easy for us to be creative. In this next phase of the web we are going to use technology to make creativity easier and I think we are going to see everybody wanting to be creative. This means that people better rethink the nature of media.”
UK To Extend Copyright To 70 Years?
Some British MPs are calling for copyright protection to be extended to 70 years. “The issue is pressing because some of the most popular acts from the late 1950s and early 1960s will start to fall out of the copyright in the next few years, just as the music industry is looking to its digital archives to make up for falling CD sales.”
25 UK Writers Pegged To Be 21st Century Stars
Waterstone’s made the list. “In contrast to the more familiar forecasts for star literary novelists – from Kazuo Ishiguro to Zadie Smith – produced by Granta for each decade since the 1980s, the new compilation is far more varied and down to earth.” More important, perhaps – the booksller is in a position to promote its future stars.
How Do You Rank Research Universities?
“Of course, it is not easy to characterize the wide range of America’s more than 3,500 colleges and universities. Even among the more limited number of research universities, institutional diversity is so broad that every approach to rank or even classify institutions has been rightly criticized. Most research rankings use only input measures, such as amount of federal funding or total expenditures for research, when funding agencies would be served better by information about outcomes — the research performance of universities.”
Documenta’s Parlor Game
Documenta tries to keep the list of artists being shown this year a secret until the fair opens. “We want to direct as much attention as possible from the list to the artworks themselves.” But “how can there be artworks to talk about without artists? The attempt has turned this Documenta into an art-world parlor game, with some dealers and critics trading guesses — and others dismissing artistic director Roger Buergel’s decision as merely an effort to create buzz.”
Is China’s Art Dragon Made Of Paper?
The West seems gaga over Chinese art. With such a huge population, will China swamp the contemporary art world? Ana Somers Cocks thinks not. “In fact, within China, 2006 was a bad year for the art market as the wave of speculation in art, which followed the property boom, peaked in 2005.”
America’s Modernist Carnage
“Modernist buildings across the United States are now facing demolition. The main threat comes from skyrocketing land prices; these landmark buildings are prized more for their land than their architecture, say design curators and preservation experts nationwide.”
UK Museums’ Trustee Problem
There is “a deepening malaise within the National museum and gallery sector in the UK. This stems from two related factors–a decline in the quality of many trustee appointments and a growing tendency on the part of boards, especially chairs of boards, to meddle in matters that should be solely within the executive remit of the director. These factors can be traced back to the decision of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), newly formed by the Labour Government in 1997, to democratise and popularise the operation of existing boards of trustees.”
Bo Diddley Suffers Stroke During Concert
“The 78-year-old appeared disorientated during a gig in Iowa. The musician has a history of hypertension and diabetes. Tests indicated that the stroke affected the left side of his brain, impairing his speech and speech recognition, a spokeswoman said.”