The kingdom of Bhutan is considering removing certain TV shows from the air five years after TV came to the country. What shows? Wrestling, for one. It’s because of “a wave of children performing copycat wrestling moves. The students are becoming more and more violent when they are at school. The elder boys are trying to imitate the wrestling styles on the younger ones, so that is creating a lot of problems in schools.”
Tag: 06.20.04
Are Arts Groups Losing The Financial Puzzle?
The strain of trying to keep arts organizations afloat financially is beginning to show. “While theaters, ballets, museums and operas perpetually live hand to mouth, as do most nonprofit groups, fundamental changes in the nature of arts financing suggest that they will continue to struggle even as the economy and capital markets recover.”
Art’s Rebirth In Haiti
“In early March, a few days after armed rebels forced Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office, vandals ransacked a Port-au-Prince art museum and burned dozens of paintings along with 86 rare vodou dolls that were part of an exhibit marking the country’s 200th anniversary of independence.” But elsewhere in Haiti, new art is being created…
The Top 100 Albums Of All Time (Sure!)
The Observer polls critics to compile a list of the 100 greatest English albums of all time. The Beatles came out No. 2. And No. 1? The honour goes to the Stone Roses.
A Case For Returning Marbles To Greece
It’s time for the Elgin Marbles to go home. For Britain’s sake. “The marbles in the British Museum are performers, trained as actors in a ceremony. But this is not the Panathenaic Procession. It is a Great British ceremony, about an imperial splendour which thought of itself as universal rather than merely national. In the Duveen Gallery, within the British Museum, these figures no longer deliver Athens any more than the bagpipers who tramp round banquets at Windsor Castle deliver Scotland. They are guests from Greece who became so well known during the 19th century that they were adopted into the family.”
Pissing Off Peck
Literary critic Dale Peck is “not just out to piss people off. He’s on a one-man crusade to save fiction writers from their worst tendencies, and to save readers from believing the lionized postmodern likes of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon are worth the paper they’re printed on, either.”
FBI Investigation Of Artist Accused Of Bioterror Widens
FBI investigations of Buffalo artist Steve Kurtz for “bioterrorism” have stretched from Seattle to Pittsburgh, and involve anyone who has worked with the artist. What the feds don’t seem to realize is that artists working in biological material is becoming popular. “All these artists are doing is investigating biology using the same parameters as pure science, It’s a niche at the moment, and it’s very, very alive and it’s going to grow more so.”