“Many of the assumptions of the world a century ago have been so overturned that you would think the paintings Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, produced between 1907 and the first world war, would make perfect sense today, and even appear a little naive. Yet their difficulty is not of a type that recedes with familiarity. Cubism is like a maths exam at the gateway to modern art. The paintings are uniquely unyielding… Art today is made from the building blocks of ordinary life. Cubism took these building blocks, or working premises, apart. Most art confirms our sense of who we are and how we live. Cubism suggests that our real existence eludes the images and stories we constantly make of it.”
Tag: 05.22.04
The BBC’s New Head Man
The BBC hopes to heal the rifts caused by the scandal surrounding the Hutton report and the suicide of Dr. David Kelley with the appointment of Mark Thompson as the corporation’s new director general. Thompson, who worked at the BBC for 23 years before leaving to head up the UK’s Channel 4 two years ago, succeeds the popular Greg Dyke, who was forced out of the top BBC post following the scandal over journalist Andrew Gilligan’s report claiming that the government had “sexed up” a dossier concerning intelligence information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Michael Moore’s America
It seems almost absurd now to recall that, only a few years back, documentary films were considered box office poison, and were treated like the bastard stepchild of the industry. Then came Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine “turned the tables on the conventional wisdom that America was full of Bible-thumping, gun-toting conservatives: in fact, it was full of people who wanted to see their private stirrings of dissent put out there by someone who had a few facts at his disposal and dared to poke fun at the powerful.” Moore’s humorous but stinging criticism of conservative America, and of its current president in particular, is defining a new generation of documentary film, and helping to throw the polarization of the U.S. into stark relief.
Performing Music Remotely Over Internet2
Classical music organizations are finding ways to use Internet2, the next generation of internet, “with enough broadband capacity to transmit huge quantities of data, including CD-quality sound and DVD-quality images, at as much as 250 megabytes per second (more than 4,000 times the rate of a standard dial-up modem; more than 800 times that of a cable modem). The New World Symphony is using it a lot, setting up coaching sessions, lessons and other interactions with top-flight professionals around the country.”
Dealer Charged With Trying To Sell Fake Picassos, Chagalls
An art dealer was “charged Friday with fraud in Milwaukee, accused of trying to sell fake artwork as originals by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse.Some were of such poor quality that an art expert described them as ‘a joke’ and ‘an insult,’ according to a complaint filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.”