The UCLA art student who last year faked his suicide with a gun he had carved out of wood has come forward to tell his story. “Deutch, now 26, also knew that gunplay could upset fellow students and get him in trouble with campus authorities. But in his first comments on the incident, he says he never dreamed, as he got up to perform in UCLA’s graduate art annex in Culver City, that his phantom gunshot would ricochet and cause the departure of two UCLA professors, roiling the campus for several months.”
Tag: 07.12.05
Death To The Biennale?
A trip through this summer’s Venice Biennale makes you dispair of the whole idea, writes Jerry Saltz. “After a show like this it’s tempting to say that biennial culture is over, that these fetes are too big, baggy, and bureaucratic to reflect the state of art. By now it’s unclear who they’re for: The several hundred thousand who come to see them or the several thousand from the art world. Yet, just when they seem dead, a new age of biennials looms. In roughly 700 days, starting early June 2007, a kind of Harmonic Convergence of super exhibitions is slated to take place when the Venice Biennale, Documenta XII, and the Munster Sculpture Project will open one after the other.”
Company Sues Internet History Keeper Over Copyright (Huh?)
“The Internet Archive was created in 1996 as the institutional memory of the online world, storing snapshots of ever-changing Web sites and collecting other multimedia artifacts.” It’s a great historical record and archive for future historians produced as a non-profit service. But now a company is suing the Internet Archive, saying “the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive’s database, was unauthorized and illegal.”
Why Perform The Complete Shakespeare?
“Why Shakespeare now more than ever? There’s no end of blah-blah about eternal values, which remains as eternally true as it is eternally dull. There is also the less-banged-on-about simple pleasure of watching his plays. If we are on an island we would prefer to be deserted with the complete Beethoven than the collected John Barry. This is yet more dramatically the case with Shakespeare, who is not just head and shoulders above the playwriting competition, he’s floating around in a hot air balloon waving benignly at everyone from Aeschylus to Caryl Churchill. But beyond the eternal blah-blahs and the sheer devilry of it, there is a sense now that Shakespeare is moving into his moment.”
Do-It-Yourselfers Reinvent Gadgets
“In the digital era, every consumer-electronics product comes with microchips and software programming, and for a new generation of tech-savvy users, these are the raw materials needed to make a digital toy or appliance do tricks that its creators didn’t envision. Sometimes, tinkerers become a consumer electronics maker’s unofficial research-and-development team, with innovations winding up as built-in features down the line.”
PBS Chief Support Investigation Of CPB Boss
“PBS President Pat Mitchell said Tuesday she supports an investigation of what she called a “very troubling” use of federal money to track the political leaning of programming on public television…”
Box Office Blues? It’s Those Damn Liberal Media Elites!
Why is movie box office down? One actress has a theory: “Hollywood’s ruling liberal elites keep going out of their way to offend half their audience. Constant gibes about Republicans, Christians, conservatives and the military litter today’s movies and award show presentations like so many pieces of trash on theater floors. Did we really need to hear another anti-Bush diatribe from Chris Rock at the Oscars this year?”
CPB Ombudsmen Offer Ringing Endorsements Of Public TV
Now public broadcasting has four ombudsmen. And the two appointed by Kenneth Tomlinson to point out bias? They have been “positively glowing in their assessments of the journalism heard on NPR and seen on news shows distributed by PBS. So glowing, in fact, that [there] reports, which are posted on CPB’s Web site could easily be excerpted in the shorthand style of a movie ad quoting favorable reviews.”
Time To Scrap PBS?
“The Public Broadcasting Service is unfixable. Never mind the laughably utopian notion that member stations drive the bus. The real woe rests with the highly charged, artistically stifling politicizing that is destroying PBS. When PBS was founded in 1969, there was a brilliant idea to have an endowment that would fund it in perpetuity. PBS would be a trust fund raconteur, enlightening the masses on all kinds of topics. For a number of reasons — taxation, the power of the National Association of Broadcasters – – that went nowhere, and Big Bird, lo these 36 years, has been begging for scraps from Uncle Sam. Inaction led to chaos. It’s been a mess ever since.”
Philadelphia Theatre’s Boffo Year
This past season was a terrific one for Philadelphia theatre, with artistic success and strong box office. “Great,” “phenomenal,” “pretty fabulous” were among the adjectives employed by management of the Philadelphia Theatre Company, the Walnut Street Theatre and Arden Theatre Company respectively, the organizations that are finishing the season with grand slams.