Harry Potter author JK Rowling and her publisher are suing the New York Daily News for $100 million for printing details of the new Harry Potter story before it hits stores. Simon Houpt writes that other media outlets have been intimidated into not publishing plot details, and then Houpt throws in some plot details of his own to illustrate. Is it not a first amendment issue, he asks?
Tag: 06.20.03
Toon Town: Is Superman The New Apollo?
Cartoons are more and more showing up in “serious” art. ” ‘Making art from cartoon figures today ‘is like painting a Madonna in the Renaissance’. With cultural literacy at a low ebb, a riff on Superman communicates more universally than Bible stories, mythology, or fairy tales. Archie and Veronica have become our Aries and Venus.”
A Small-Town Museum Grows Almost As Large As Boston’s MFA
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts has a new home designed by Moshe Safdie, writes Robert Campbell, and it’s a winner. The old museum “was a hodgepodge of buildings and additions that accreted over more than a century and a half. With the new addition – and the dozen or more historic houses in Salem owned by the museum – PEM now has, according to its director, Dan Monroe, 88 percent as much floor area as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A local provincial museum has morphed into a potential national icon. It’s not easy to fit so big a museum into the modest surroundings of historic Salem. On the whole, Safdie pulls it off.
Potter – Underneath The Hype, Something Truly Worth Celebrating
The clamor over the Harry Potter books may be a little (ok, a lot) over the top. But Norman Lebrecht says that it’s important to celebrate a publishing phenomenon that flies in the face of what the conventional wisdom about books – and children’s books particularly – insisted was true. “While it is futile to predict the thought processes that will prevail a century hence, when books may have been supplanted by chips and authors by robotic processors, one certainty can be safely asserted. A hundred years from now, millions of people will still be reading Charles Dickens, and they will still be reading Harry Potter, the written word triumphant.”
Linda Lovelace, The Musical
A musical about porn star Linda Lovelace is being workshopped in Los Angeles. Producers hope to stage a full production in LA or New York. “It’s the idea of finding ourselves in a bad situation and surviving that audiences will relate to.”
FCC Overturn Is Victory For America
The Senate Commerce Committee’s overturning of new FCC media ownership rules might not hold up in the full Senate. So what does the committee vote mean? “It is no overstatement to say that the committee’s vote was a victory, or at least a step on the road to victory, for the American people. To put it another way: If Frank Capra’s idealistic Sen. Jefferson Smith, from the film ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ really existed, he would be jumping for joy right now.”
The Cleaning-David Ordeal
How do you clean an icon such as Michelangelo’s David? Carefully, of course. But it turns out that the restorer hired to do the job was maybe too careful. When her bosses insisted on a more invasive cleaning process, she quit. “I hated to do that, because the David is the best job a restorer could have. But I simply could not be party to diminishing Michelangelo’s masterpiece.” Will the alternative method destroy David? “Unlikely. Short of taking a hammer to it like Piero Cannata, or blowing it up, it is, as Ms Parronchi insists, pretty hard to do that.”
Critic’s Hell – The Venice Biennale
One critic laments the crowded Venice Biennale: “I don’t mean to be philistine, but art in quantity – black box, video, car-boot-sale installation art – is not a pretty sight. Nor, come to that, are we in such numbers. Too much of now about us, too much dogma of the hour. And too much perspiration. We don’t sweat well in the art world. Here we all are, anyway, come for the vernissage, which literally means varnishing but now denotes the two or three days set aside for professionals to make their judgments while the paint dries. Since there is precious little in contemporary art that needs varnishing, a better translation of vernissage might be The Shining – every critic and curator on the planet, and not a few artists to boot, thrown together in a confined space and left to go berserk.”
Fans Flocking To Big Music Festivals Again
A couple of years ago tickets to some of the biggest English music festivals went begging. Critics said there were too many festivals chasing too few fans. And (depending on who you talked to)the music wasn’t strong enough to excite people. Well, this summer has stilled such talk. Major festivals are selling out at a record pace. Could it be that good music sells?
What Happened To The “Better” Music Festival?
A music festival at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium that was “supposed to be a weekend to redefine the music festival – replacing Coca-Cola banners with fan art and teen idols with musicians who actually write their own music – collapsed into 12 hours of ‘put up with it or leave.’ What happened to the celebration of art and nature, to the notion that exposure to new music could carry a show? Why had Field Day, with events and a lineup that had the world talking, dwindled to an audience of 20-somethings just kicking around until Radiohead came out to play?” Says one fan: “Our modern bureaucratic society makes it impossible to have large gatherings of any type. With the current required logistics, anything that even gets off the ground is immediately tainted with falsehood because of the built-in compromise.”