One of the more entertaining artists at this year’s Venice Biennale is Lala, a 20-year-old chimpanzee. Not just any old ape, but a simian Sophia Loren, known for her “classic” Italian caper movie Bongo Bongo, and now the star of the biennale’s most bizarre happening, Spelling U-T-O-P-I-A. Her installation turns on assembling six-lettered dice to spell Utopia.”
Tag: 06.16.03
Monumental Decision
Proposals are being considered for a memorial on the site of the World Trade Center. Such competitions are necessarily good, writes Christopher Benfey. “In the end, we’re likely to get a celebrity sculptor who burnishes his or her reputation with an idiosyncratically designed?and inevitably ‘controversial’?monument. Or a sentimental and crowd-pleasing idea like the ‘soaring’ memorial envisaged by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. So, I have a simple proposal. My proposal is that we put nothing at all in that space?that it be left as a hollowed-out void.”
Who Makes Money From Music Sales
Even at 99 cents a song for online music downloads, there’s lots of money to be made selling music. So how big a cut do artists get at this rate? Try 12 percent, on average. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what cut when you buy recorded music.
The Making Of Helen Keller
“Fifty years ago, even twenty, nearly every ten-year-old knew who Helen Keller was. ‘The Story of My Life,’ her youthful autobiography, was on the reading lists of most schools, and its author was popularly understood to be a heroine of uncommon grace and courage, a sort of worldly saint. Much of that worshipfulness has receded. No one nowadays, without intending satire, would place her alongside Caesar and Napoleon; and, in an era of earnest disabilities legislation, who would think to charge a stone-blind, stone-deaf woman with faking her experience? Yet as a child she was accused of plagiarism, and in maturity of ?verbalism??substituting parroted words for firsthand perception. All this came about because she was at once liberated by language and in bondage to it, in a way few other human beings can fathom.”
Recording Industry Beginning To See Value Of Downloading
Apple’s iTunes has been a big success so far. “And because of the store’s early success – more than 3 million songs sold in the first month after it opened April 28 – other technology giants like Microsoft, America Online, Yahoo and Amazon.com are considering similar ventures. Record executives believe they are finally on the right track.”
Swiss Artists Win Top Prize At Venice Biennale
Peter Fischli and David Weiss won the Golden Lion for best work exhibited in the international exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale.
Hume Cronyn, 91
Veteran actor Hume Cronyn has died of prostate cancer. “He was known for his versatility as an actor, playing a wide variety of characters on stage. Mr. Cronyn, a compact, restless man who was once an amateur boxer and remained a featherweight 127 pounds all his life, was at home in everything from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Edward Albee and Beckett.
Hung Up On A Spike
“The folks at MTV Networks decided some months back to relaunch their TNN – once the Nashville Network and more recently the National Network – as Spike TV, the first channel build specifically for men. At least that was the plan. But before Spike could unveil its new lineup of shows today, the network was faced with a man-sized problem. On June 5, filmmaker Spike Lee filed an injunction against MTV’s owner, Viacom, saying the public associates the name ‘Spike’ with him.”
The Next Great Jazz Star?
In April, Universal Jazz beat Sony to sign Jamie Cullum for £1 million. The news sparked a media frenzy. Was the 5ft 5in, Wiltshire-raised 23-year-old worth the hype? When he sang, sighed and emoted his way through “You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You” on Michael Parkinson’s BBC1 show shortly afterwards, the answer appeared to be yes. Online superstore Amazon ran out of his second CD, Pointless Nostalgic (released on the independent Candid label), the next day.
Expressionism On The Outs
“In an environment of unprecedented artistic variety, where almost anything is permissible and worthy of encouragement, Expressionism stands out today as the one strand of art that is woefully unfashionable. Expressionism is not quite as dirty a word, mind you, as it was in the 1930s, when the Nazis labelled it ‘degenerate’ and when, adding insult to injury, Thomas Mann contributed the idea that German expressionism and Nazism sprang from the same root of emotional self-abandonment. Nevertheless, although there have been subsequent periods when forms of expressionism were revived, the word is now generally used pejoratively.”