January 19, 2009 @ 6:25 pm | Category: art, community, media
With so much music available on line for free or cheap one wonders if there will be a place for musicians to thrive. The ubiquity of recorded and airbrushed music I believe will make live music more valuable and available beyond large stadiums. Here is an article in the New York Times about one group seeking to make live music accessible. The demise of big music labels doesn’t have to mean the death of musicians. It just might be what we need for a truly close to the people renaissance.
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August 7, 2007 @ 10:15 pm | Category: art, spirituality/religion
Read this article in the Arion journal by the always provocative cultural critic Camille Paglia. It’s long, but worth it. I think she does a good job of showing the interdependent and mutual relationship of art and religion. In order for art and religion to flourish in a free society, conservatives and liberals will have to rethink how they view both.
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February 14, 2007 @ 7:41 am | Category: art, body
Since I was a teen I’ve had an interest in fashion. I don’t mean the mass produced stuff most of us wear or what you find at bebe. I mean fashion as runway high art, a fluid moving adornment of the body. It’s the fabrics, impeccable workmanship and artistic imagination, that create the art. More often than not it’s impractical to wear or financially out of reach. That’s o.k., because as art, you don’t have to own it to enjoy it.
The dark side of fashion is that it can assimilate the transgressive in society for its own purposes. You have seen the ads for haute couture with models that look like heroin addicts or youth adopting gangster garb. Addicts and gangsters become the hero – the authentic person. What could be more transgressive to western women’s sense of who they are than the burqa. Now we have the burqa, the head-to-toe Islamic enclosure, as a new and transgressive fashion on the runways of London no less. This isn’t the first time that western designers have incorporated this look. It’s transgressive because it blurs the categories of freedom and oppression. It’s negative because many women in the world don’t find wearing a burqa a way to show off one’s power. It never ceases to amaze me that we can take some one’s prison and create an art statement. It may be Ms. Goldin, the designer, is attempting to help us identify with burqa clad women. Somehow that strikes me as arrogant and patronizing. Or maybe it’s just art.
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January 26, 2007 @ 7:47 am | Category: art, body
We have the Whopper, the Venti and Big Gulp. We also have large screen tvs, huge SUVs, and looming McMansions. Everything is bigger including women but not models or the sizing of women’s clothing. Mall window displays feature child-size mannequins making it hard to take the clothes seriously since I gave up playing with dolls a while back. On store racks hangs size 8 which is the former size 10. Or a 2 which is the old 4. I am flattered that I can now wear a smaller size in virtually every store. Women may feel better about themselves but there is an underside to undersizing. How many size 0 women (not girls) are there? Banana Republic even has a double 0. Is this sizing number really necessary? If you think about it zero equals nothing,zip, nada and its significance is in enhancing the value of another number. 1 becomes a 10 when partnered with a 0. Are we really to strive to be a zero? The social plagues of creative sizing has become so pervasive that the government of Spain has decided to intervene and promote a healthier image. Here is the story.
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January 14, 2007 @ 9:24 am | Category: art
See this story from NPR Weekend Edition Sunday about who really designed the famous Tiffany lamps. This is the kind of story that always gets a rise out of me and another example why uncovering women’s history is so important for us. See New York Historical Society for information about new exhibition of Driscoll’s work. Very interesting history.
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August 17, 2006 @ 7:18 pm | Category: Pop Culture, art, theology/church
Religion professor Donna Freitas has a giddy NPR commentary about Madonna’s recent performance of staging her own mock crucifixion. Drawing the attention of the Vatican, Madonna’s latest stunt has been all over the news so it’s hard to miss. Is Madonna’s performance blasphemy or good art helping us identify with Jesus in our own and diverse ways? Which brings up a deeper question. Is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ a unique historical and spiritual event or merely a metaphor or symbol we created, and therefore, whose meaning we can change at will? If Christianity and its metaphors are created by us then Madonna is a superb social critic. If the cross is a unique act of God then Madonna’s act quickly becomes unintelligable and profoundly irrelevant. Maybe the definition of blasphemy is to take something profoundly true and make it irrelevant.
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August 9, 2006 @ 5:18 pm | Category: Pop Culture, art, body
I finally went to see the The Devil Wears Prada. The chic lit novel on which the movie was based was one of the few I have read. A light read in the tradition of the genre, the movie manages to be more than eye candy delivering a sweet message about integrity, ambition, and envy. Merrill Streep as the evil, yet human, Miranda Priestly is fabulous. A combo of middle age power, finese, and glamour. A rare female image in hollywood movies and an improvement over the book’s two dimensional character. The movie generally improves on the book, except for I wish the screen writers hadn’t done away with the Indian roommates and the inner city teacher for a boyfriend I enjoyed in the book.
Otherwise, the movie contains both what I hate and love about high fashion. Fashion is the most personal form of art, close to the body and communicating a great deal about the wearer. It’s an art form hard for any of us to completely avoid. Who would want to escape the possibility of beautiful adornment? On the other hand, fashion can illicit envy in those of us who are fashion or economically challenged, take itself too seriously and produce the copycatness of mass culture we see at Club Monaco……all points the movie makes.
Among avantguard fashions and cosmopolitan settings, The Devil Wears Prada is able to get beyond the pretences of fashion. If you don’t expect a great epic saga loaded with spiritual meaning the movie delivers its own simple message in a glitzy package.
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