I contributed last week to an event in London which was designed to imagine how the notion of the museum might change. The current model, which is about 150 years old, basically consists of a building with some stuff in it, arranged according to some organising principle. It is changing already in the face of [...]
Doing some electronic filing today, I came across a keynote speech on creativity and its sources which I gave while working on interactive television in the 1990s. It seems to stand up pretty well a decade on, so I have posted it to my selected articles page (scroll to the bottom of the page).
The [...]
There was a moment in the recent Robert Plant and Alison Krauss concert when Krauss sang part of the traditional English song Matty Groves. The band, led by T-Bone Burnett, was from the American South, and it was a reminder of the connections between the English folk song and the musical traditions of the [...]
Fifteen years ago, or more I was on the board of the physical theatre company the David Glass Ensemble. At the time, physical theatre was still emerging from the shadow of mime. But going to two rather different productions recently, it’s clear that physical theatre is now right in the mainstream.
Guthrie, not Allen. I was listening to his song “Talking Columbia Blues” today, and heard this verse - a future vision from the 1940s of how hydro-electricity would transform America.
I was at a play last night in which the fact that a character smokes cigars is important to the characterisation, if not essential to the plot. Now, since July 2007 in England it has been illegal to smoke in a public place, but it turns out that there’s clause in the Act which allows [...]
Art has, conventionally, been about disturbing convention. Traditionally, I think, this has been about challenging ideological conventions. The news that health and safety may possibly require the Doris Salcedo “Shibboleth” installation at the Tate to be covered over suggests that the convention is shifting. As does the work of Kendell Greers, currently on display at [...]
I am probably the last person in the blogosphere to write about Amazon’s launch of its e-book device, the Kindle. It’s described as “a wireless reading device” and in the initial wave of publicity Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has taken care to position it as complementary to the book. But even with Amazon’s strengths [...]
I blogged a few months ago about a long essay reflecting on Brave New World on its 75th anniversary. Now the novelist Margaret Atwood, not a stranger to future-oriented fiction*, has her reflections on the novel in today’s Guardian Review. Comparing it with 1984, she asks:
Would it be possible for both of these futures [...]
I blogged a few weeks ago about the slow death of hard format music, and suggested that the music industry was reverting to an earlier model in which the song was the unit of currency. Radiohead has offered a twist on this by announcing that its new record, In Rainbows, will initially only be available [...]
