Is England “an average nation with a fairly typically chaotic past?” You might think so given the lack of care with which modern-day Britons view their own history. But a new book and BBC series seek to take a fresh look at the country’s identity. – The Sunday Times (UK) 10/01/00
Tag: 10.01.00
CLICKS AND MORTAR ART
Online art auctions are making a play for a piece of lucrative business. “What’s for sale online? You can find everything from landscape paintings by little known contemporary artists for $1,000 or less, to a $50,000 Tiffany lamp or a $3.5 million oil painting by French painter Maurice De Vlaminck.” – MSNBC
BUT IT’S OUR MUSEUM
Daniel Terra’s jingoistic promotion of American art was difficult to take. And the reputation of his small museum of American art suffered in the museum world for his antics and boasts. But now that his widow wants to take the museum out of town (Chicagoans don’t appreciate it enough, she says) a feeling of community pride wells up in those who want it to stay. – Chicago Tribune
NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET
It’s fashion week in London. “Fashion, the cuckoo of popular culture, has been using an assortment of modern galleries and London museums as venues for the drunken wastages of resources that are known as fashion launches. A few artists have gone to some of these parties. This is all the evidence it takes for a shower of journalistic Sloane-brains to put one and one together, and arrive at three. But art and fashion are not growing closer together.” = The Sunday Times (UK)
WRITING BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Dissident writers in the old USSR had to be wary. Since their work could not be printed at home they memorized it “The two most important phenomena in dissident writing in the Eastern bloc surrounding Samizdat and Tamizdat were the underground press in the authors’ own country and the opportunities for publication abroad.” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung