So Tony Blair’s government is mounting a clumsy attack on graffiti. “The natural liberal response to this is to defend the richness and wildness of graffiti, the layers of rotting posters, scrawled secret language and spray-can calligraphy that makes dull walls speak hidden dreams in fat lurid lettering. To deny any connection between graffiti and art is not tenable, given the fascination it has exerted on serious painters since the second world war. In the 1980s the intellectualism of Twombly and Dubuffet spawned a far coarser appropriation of street painting by art dealers who fell over themselves to represent the graffitists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And that’s when it all went wrong for graffiti.”
Tag: 08.07.04
Is The Fringe Edinburgh’s Main Festival?
The direcctor of one of Edinburgh’s most high-profile venues says that the city’s Fringe Festival should be designated the main Edinburgh Festival. This is “the latest round in a lengthy pitched battle between the fringe and the official festival; the relationship between the two seems marked by mutual incomprehension and a distinct lack of cross-festival collaboration or cooperative programming. And whereas the international festival receives £2.5m in public money, the fact that the fringe gets just £65,000 has always rankled.”
Scottish Opera Chorus Wins (Partial) Reprieve
The plan to fire the entire 34-member chorus of Scottish Opera has been revised after the chorus members’ union struck a deal with the company under which twenty singers will be able to keep their positions for at least nine months. The cost-cutting plan imposed on the company by the Scottish Executive has faced fierce opposition from all sides, but the new labor agreement represents the first direct backpedaling by those in charge.
When A Critic Is Also The Playwright…
Ontario’s Stratford Festival is due to announce its new season soon. One of the plays under strong consideration was written by the theatre critic at Canada’s National Post newspaper. So what will this mean for critic/playwright Robert Cushman? “It’s an answered prayer for any dramatist, of course. Lights! Attention! Semi-fame! But if so, will the National Post ask Cushman to step aside as the newspaper’s Stratford critic for the 2005 season? That’s an onerous demand for a freelance writer with family to support and whose income comes story by story, but it’s one the Post and its scribe likely will have to consider.”
Carnegie Hall’s New Boss
Clive Gillinson is a “singular” arts administrator who turned around the fortunes of the London Symphony Orchestra. “He persuaded a bunch of perfectly understandably cynical musicians that what they went to musical college to study, and the art form that they pursue, is central and worthy and necessary and should be performed at the highest level for the sake of itself.”
The Publishing Exec And The Great White Way
Jonathan Karp is “a baby-faced 40-year-old” who became editor-in-chief at Random House in May. He has a glittery list of authors, and Variety has also called him “one of the more visible book publishers in town.” “Still. For years and years and years, like scads of lesser-known schleps who wait tables or answer telephones, Mr. Karp dreamed of writing a musical comedy, a dream he has nourished through playwriting workshops, amateur readings and weekends and vacations devoted to lyrics and plot lines.” So he did…
Why National Anthems Suck
Why are so many national anthems so horrendous from a musical standpoint. More importantly, why do so many sound the same (stilted and overly formal) and so few reflect the cultural heritage of the country they celebrate? “Even the recent anthems of the post-colonial nations are mostly pompous dirges. Ironically, a 19th-century European flavour was seen as having the correct seriousness for a new country. Like other symbols of state, such as uniforms and titles, the main idea seemed to be to boost the mystique and authority of the state. Creativity and enjoyment took a back seat.”
What To Do With The Spiral?
Robert Smithson’s legendary “Spiral Jetty” is once again visible just off the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. As the world’s most prominent example of the Earth Art movement, the piece is attracting visitors from around the world. “It is, however, strangely changed. Three decades of immersion have coated the dark rock with sparkling salt crystals, so the Jetty and its surroundings now resemble a landscape from the frozen north. The rich, rusty waters coloured by moulting shrimp and algae have now turned pale pink. All of this poses a neat conservation dilemma for the Dia Centre for the Arts, to which the Spiral Jetty was donated in 1999.”
German Publishers Abandon New Spellings
Some of Germany’s biggest news publishers are abandoning state sanctions that “reformed” the spelling of German several years ago. The publishers say that the spelling reforms were a “public disaster”, saying their introduction had confused Germans so much that “parents write differently from their children, children write differently from the authors whose works they read at school and authors write differently from the newspapers and magazines in which they are printed.”
A Free Speech Maven Censors Her Biographer
Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who became an internationally celebrated activist while fighting South Africa’s apartheid government, is facing accusations of censorship and hypocrisy after pulling the plug on a seven-year collaboration with the man who was to be her biographer.