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Friday 26 November 2010
Damien Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets
Among the most iconic pieces in artist Damien Hirst’s controversial body of work — a bizarre mix that includes dissected animals, a pickled shark, dot paintings, spin paintings, butterfly assemblages, a rotting cow’s head, and diamond-encrusted skulls — are the Medicine Cabinets.
The first two cabinets, which were made in 1988 by the then 23-year-old Hirst in his London kitchen, contained pharmaceutical packaging from his recently deceased grandmother’s medicine cabinet. He followed these sculptures, Sinner and Enemy, with a suite of twelve cabinets that were titled after the tracks on the Sex Pistols debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Four of the medicine cabinets from the series were exhibited in Hirst’s degree show at Goldsmiths College of Art in 1989, but the whole group has never been shown together — that is, until now.
New York’s L & M Arts has assembled the artist’s Sex Pistols medicine cabinets, along with Sinner and Enemy; a monumental four-part cabinet, titled The Sex Pistols, from 1996-97; and a cache of actual Sex Pistols’ memorabilia into a comprehensive overview of this important chapter in Hirst’s dynamic career. The gallery also collaborated with the artist’s publishing company, Other Criteria, to produce a catalogue that includes an essay by art scholar Arthur Danto, some punk prose by the notorious James Frey, a catalogue raisonné of the complete medicine cabinets, and a hilarious conversation between Hirst and former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, who’s an outspoken radio disc jockey in Los Angeles.
Damien-Hirst: Medicine Cabinets is on view at L & M Arts through December 11.
Paul Laster @'Flavorwire'
The graphic language of Peter Christopherson
RIP Peter Christopherson
I learned today of the passing of one of my creative heroes.Peter Christopherson.
I wouldn't call him a household name but his design work as part of Hipgnosis is sure to be found in many households.
These classic album covers for Pink Floyd and the early solo albums of Peter Gabriel are some of his best know works as a graphic designer.
Christopherson was also a key member of the highly influential Throbbing Gristle.Again not every body's cup of tea.
But without TG there would be no Nine Inch Nails or Depeche Mode for a start.
Peter also made his mark as a director.He directed several commercials and music videos for the likes of Silverchair, Robert Plant, Paul McCartney, Van Halen and more.
A true creative renaissance man. He will be sorely missed.
Stan Lee @'BrandDNA'
(A sad day indeed Stan!)
NaomiAKlein UK students R showing us all how it's done. Don't want 2 get robbed blind? Make your country ungovernable. #thanksgiving
♪♫ NIN - Gave Up (Broken)
trent_reznor I awake to sad news. RIP Peter Christopherson - friend and huge inspiration. http://bit.ly/fAwO6G http://bit.ly/dIvd3V
Wikileaks documents show Turkey helped al-Qaida
...Other documents show that the US has supported the PKK, which has been waging a separatist war against Turkey since 1984 and has been classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization since 1979. The US military documents call the PKK "warriors for freedom and Turkish citizens," and say that the US set free arrested PKK members in Iraq. The documents also point out that US forces in Iraq have given weapons to the PKK and ignored the organization's operations inside Turkey...
Primal Scream to work with Kevin Shields on Screamadelica 20th Anniversay reissue
Primal Scream have just announced that they will we releasing a remastered version of their seminal 1991 album Screamadelica in March next year to mark the 20th Anniversary of the album’s release. Exciting as this is, turns out that not only have they remastered the album, but they got legendary My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields to help out in the process along with original producer Andy Weatherall.
Speaking to NME, singer Bobby Gillespie said that Shields was an obvious choice for the project. “He’s just really good with sound and frequencies, we thought it was a fun thing to do. Kevin, Andrew [Innes,Primal Scream guitarist] and myself went down to the mastering room. Kevin’s the one person in the world that all remastering engineers would hate to see walking into the studio, when we walked in the guy nearly had a fucking heart attack!”
Shields has worked with the group before, playing with them live from 99 to 06 as well as working on their album Xtrmntr and Evil Heart.
The reissue that will see see the album repacked with bonus material, falls in line with the band’s Screamadelica live shows, that will see the band play the album in it’s entirety for the first time, the show landing on our shows in January as part of this year’s epic Big Day Out festival.
Michael Carr @'Musicfeeds'
Thursday 25 November 2010
A simple change in the law could open up online access to the BBC's archives
In the melee of the last days of the Labour government, among the casualties were clauses in the digital economy bill that would have solved the intractable problems that stand in the way of giving public access to this country's great archives of radio and television programmes.
Think of George Orwell and W H Auden, of Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft, of any British artist or musician you can name. The BBC's archives are a treasure trove of their work, of interviews with them and discussions and documentaries about them.
But the BBC can't make them available to us, as it would like to, because of the prohibitive administrative costs of clearing the rights.
All this was set out in the Digital Britain reports that prompted the inclusion of those clauses in the bill. After running a pilot project to clear the rights for 1,000 hours of archive programming for online use, the BBC calculated it would take 800 people three years of full-time work to clear the rights to its archive, assuming that all rights owners could be found and that every one was prepared to grant the rights.
At a time when the BBC has just had hundreds of millions of pounds removed from its annual income for the next six years, its archive project is not going to be given the kind of money it would need to spend on administrative work of that scale.
But nor should it need to when there is a simple, fair and equitable solution at hand.
The government should move now to reintroduce the orphan works and extended collective licensing provisions, which the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were instrumental in removing from the digital economy bill when they were in opposition.
They sided with a lobby campaign mounted by photographers against these provisions, effectively sealing up archives in which photographs either form no part (radio), or in which they are of relatively small importance (television).
Reintroducing those provisions now would give us legitimate access through online on-demand services to that wealth of dramas, documentaries, histories, debates and interviews that can tell us so much about the society and world of which we are the inheritors.
We can read about it in books, but radio and television tell it and show it in ways that the written word cannot match. Rights owners have nothing to fear: the statutory scheme was designed to safeguard their interests, to ensure they would receive fair remuneration and that the integrity of their rights would be respected. Few of them would prefer their work to be made available on illegal services instead, but where there's a vacuum, that's how it will be filled.
Buried in the depths of David Cameron's plans to create a silicon valley in London's Olympic park was a statement that all digital media content providers should welcome, and the importance of which deserves more recognition than it has been given. The accompanying review of the UK 's intellectual property regime is to look at "barriers to new internet-based business models, including the cost of obtaining permissions from existing rights holders".
Creating a silicon valley in London's East End, however, will not be an easy task. By contrast, what a simple thing it would be to steer a short enabling bill through parliament to remove the barrier that rights-clearance administrative costs pose to opening up the broadcasters' archives.
Stephen Edwards @'The Guardian'
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