“Anti-fraud investigators swooped on a number of markets and car boot sales in the UK last weekend, netting over half a million pounds worth of DVDs and CDs. Fifty-seven people were arrested for piracy. The joint investigation found people selling films such as Troy, Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2.”
Tag: 08.04.04
Barenboim: UK Government Is Failing The Arts
Daniel Barenboim speaks out against the level of the UK government’s support of the arts. “Music has become a specialised commodity for both performers and audiences. Young people do come to concerts – that is not the problem. The problem is that we have lost the intellectuals. And when that happens its role in society diminishes.” He ascribed this decline to the reduction of music education. “Music is a strange animal, in that you cannot explain a Beethoven symphony in words. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have content, but if you reduce music education you not only get fewer musicians and audiences but also you take away the sense of content.”
Defending Diana’s Fountain
The London memorial fountain for Diana has collected huge criticism. “The design was denounced as unworkable. Experts were found to say that algae would make the fountain green and slippery, that bacteria would make it unsafe. It was described as a storm drain, a cattle trough that thinks it’s a toddler’s waterchute, a hole in search of a meaning.” Gustafson defends her work: “The fountain is a victim of its own success. We need to make some minor modifications to cope with that success, with the sheer number of people.”
NEA: Writing In A Time Of War
The National Endowment for the Arts’ new writing program for soldiers “seeks to address a seeming cultural paradox. War stories, after all, occupy one of literature’s longest, weightiest shelves, and American fighting men, from Ulysses S. Grant to Anthony Swofford, have set down their battle-forged memoirs, but these days the military and literary worlds barely overlap. The program, called ‘Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,’ is aimed at preserving stories from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The endowment expects to hold 20 or so workshops at American military installations between now and next spring.”
Deciphering The Da Vinci Code Success
The Da Vinci Code is a worldwide publishing phenomenon. “Around the world it has sold in excess of 10m, nearly 8m of those in hard covers, making it the best-selling hardback novel ever. Why is this book such a smash? I suspect the triumph of the Code tells a larger story. First, it confirms that people are prepared to believe the worst of the church – even in America, the most “churched” society in the world…”
Libeskind: Architecture Is About The Long Haul
Architect Daniel Libeskind would seem to be having a bad year. He’s battling with the developer of the WTC site. And his “Spiral” addition to the Victoria & Albert Museum is likely not going to happen. But he’s philosophical: “When you’re a kid with artistic yearnings brought up in the Bronx, you don’t get fed up too easily. It took 10 years to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin [his first building; overall, a critical success]. Nearly everybody said it would never happen. It was too crazy, too unrealistic. But it did happen.”
Turning Paintings To The Wall (Psssst – It’s Conceptual)
The Michaelis Collection at Cape Town’s Old Town House is renowned for its collection of Dutch and Flemish masters such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen and Anthony van Dyck, and “is seen as one of the best of its kind outside the Netherlands.” Next month the museum is opening a show that will flip these paintings with the faces to the wall. The exhibition “Flip” is “a conceptual art intervention” on one of the country’s premier art collections.