“Do not believe overpaid actors who cry poor mouth. Overstuffed programs in Venice, Montreal and Toronto have recently proved there is no such thing as a faltering economy in the movie business. Hundreds of new films are upon us like carrion birds, but why do the ones nobody will ever see again (or want to) reliably turn up in the New York Film Festival, and why are they always so lousy?”
Tag: 10.02.03
Three More Architecture Stars For The WTC Project
The World Trade Center site project is becoming some kind of Hall of Fame for architects. Now Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki, and Jean Nouvel have been recruited to design towers ringing the memorial site planned for the southwest corner of the new World Trade Center. Already working on the project are Daniel Libeskind and Santiago Calatrava, who is working for the Port Authority to develop a transit hub on the site.
Moscow Film Fest Canceled – Is Censorship On The Rise?
A film festival in Moscow showing movies “highlighting massacres allegedly committed by Russian troops in Chechnya” is canceled just before it was to start, as cinema organizers say that films that were to be shown are too political. The cancelation feeds fears that censorship is on the rise in Russia. “With [former president Boris] Yeltsin, we didn’t have this. There was corruption and social disorder, the same as now, but at least nobody was afraid to tell the truth.”
Coetzee Awarded Nobel
“South African writer J.M. Coetzee, whose stories set against the backdrop of apartheid tell of innocents and outcasts dwarfed by history, won the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy said Thursday.”
Bellevue Art Museum Post Mortem
Seattle arts groups are struggling. But it was still a surprise when the Bellevue Art Museum abruptly closed the doors of its new buildin. “Last week, the Bellevue Art Museum made the stunning announcement that it was closing its doors through at least the end of this year, only two and a half years after opening a $23 million, 36,000-square-foot Steven Holl-designed facility intended to be downtown Bellevue’s cultural anchor.”
Koolhaas’ Cool New House
Rem Koolhaas’s new building for the the Illinois Institute of Technology is a winner, writes Herbert Muschamp. The “$48.2 million project is a bazaar of a building, a souk of sensations that stands in vibrant contrast to the immaculately modern desert around it. Situated on the main campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, this is the Dutch architect’s first completed building in the United States. If you want to know what all the fuss over Mr. Koolhaas has been about, this student center is an exemplary place to start. It’s Koolhaas à go-go, a masterwork for the young and curious.”
What’s A Monet Between Harrises?
Know your art? Most Britons, it seems, don’t. “In terms of knowing their masterpieces from their modern day art, most of the British public can’t, confusing works by Monet and Rolf Harris. An Encyclopaedia Britannica poll published today finds that 7% believe that Water Lilies was painted by the Australian with the wobble boards instead of by French Impressionist Claude Monet.”