From The Economist…

How the bad boy of Brit-Art grew rich at the expense of his investors

In 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. The collapse in the Hirst market can partly be ascribed to the recession. But more important are the lingering effects of a two-day auction of new work by Mr Hirst that Sotheby’s launched in London on September 15th 2008.

The sale was memorable for many reasons, not least its name, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”. The first session took place the very evening that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. No one on Wall Street or in the City of London knew who might be next. Yet within the New Bond Street saleroom, collectors went on bidding, oblivious to the bloodletting without. More…

From Helen Taylor at Times Higher Education…

The glorious Glastonbury Festival has come and gone again, and the West Country says goodbye to its pilgrim backpackers. But while the big music jamborees make headlines, a quieter revolution has occurred around literature festivals.

There is no doubt that such festivals, mushrooming and drawing in large enthusiastic audiences everywhere, have become the cosmopolitan and internationalist debating societies, political hustings, Open University-style summer schools and adult education classes of our age. Despite the virtual worlds in which we are all said to be living, many people - admittedly mainly white, middle class and middle-aged or older - yearn for live intellectual stimulation and want to celebrate and interrogate new as well as celebrity writers.

Established festivals such as Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Oxford are being jostled by lively new ones in small towns and villages across the UK. The larger ones now have offshoots in other countries, while the major TED international thinkers’ forum, for two decades held in Long Beach, California, ran a smaller version last month in Oxford. More…

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From John Haldane at Times Higher Education…

Before I was a philosopher I was an artist, or at least before I studied philosophy I studied art for five years, and taught it for three more; and I have never lost that original interest. Sometimes I think of returning to the business of art-making, and occasionally I sketch out ideas for projects that I may one day pursue; but in the meantime I continue to follow art and write about it in the form of interviews with artists, and reviews of art books and exhibitions.

As a student I was lucky to join the company of a number of highly creative artists, two of whom (Tony Cragg and Richard Long) went on to be Turner Prize winners (in 1988 and 1989), while others, such as Bill Woodrow, were Turner finalists. The presiding spirit of the group was Roger Ackling, and like those named, and others including Hamish Fulton, several of his works are in the Tate collection. These bright spirits were inspiring figures, and people I continue to admire.

Art is no stranger to philosophy. They meet at one point in the subject of aesthetics, and at another in the more pretentious forms of conceptualism. My interest in art, however, is not that of a practitioner of philosophical aesthetics. Meanwhile, even at the age of 18 when I began fine-art studies, 10 years of Jesuit schooling had provided me with enough knowledge to see that the idea-artists’ efforts at philosophy were generally inflated and uncomprehending; and that remains true of later generations even to the present day. More…

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The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at The Museum of Modern Art

August 1 to November 1, 2010
11 West 53 Street, between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City, 212 708 9400

From David Cohen at Art Critical…

Art has its objects and MoMA has its mediums.

Considering how much energy artists of the last 120 years have put into subverting boundaries, testing conventions, inventing ostentatiously category-defying new techniques, and tapping emphatically non-fine art technologies it is supremely curious that modernism’s principal collecting and theorizing institution is so rigidly organized by medium-defined curatorial departments. Prints and Illustrated Books, Drawings, Film and Media, Photography: what a glutton for punishment MoMA is, to demarcate so unruly a period along the lines of the very disciplines it subverted.

Even stranger, having divvied up the century by medium, is that the two time-hallowed activities that witnessed most acutely the striving for medium specificity are actually thrust together.  Painting and Sculpture is the grand duchy among the fiefdoms—perhaps, indeed (along late Hapsburg lines) the dual monarchy. MoMA’s taxonomy spotlights a struggle at the heart of modernism between materialism and transcendence, essence and dissolution—the very codependency, perhaps, that keeps painting and sculpture together. More…

In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.

If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of the Arts in Society, please emailjournals@artsinsociety.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.

From James Barron at The New York Times…

The pianist Robert Taub was puttering around the house one afternoon in 2004 while his teen-age daughter was practicing for a violin lesson — a Schubert sonatina in A minor. His assessment of her playing was diplomatic: “She needed to be reminded about notes and rhythms.”

What followed was a brainstorm that explains why Mr. Taub — who made his reputation playing two distinctly different B’s, Beethoven and Milton Babbitt — has put his performing on hold, and why “software entrepreneur” now tops his résumé.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could take a photograph of her page of music and hear it instantaneously,” he recalled. “She’d know what the right notes are, and what the right rhythms are, and she could imitate what she heard.”

Soon he was dreaming of a device — or maybe just software running on a computer — that could do everything he had learned to do in music theory class: read and play a printed musical score, and listen to a passage of music and transcribe it, down to the key signature, the tempo and the time signature. He said that a quick check showed that nothing then on the market could do all that. More…

• Generating a Soundscape of a Virtual Dancing Duet by Marina Ismini Ioannatou and Christos Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos.
• The Effects of Modern Visualization Tools on Art and Art Education within the Context of Conceptual Art by Tu?ba ?enyava?.
• Meditative Dance: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Art Education: New Generation Body Mind Development Method by Ilkay Sevgi Temizalp.
• Composing Music Based on Batak Folklore: “VIO” Monologue Opera by Junita Batubara.
• From Allegory to Commodity: Graphic Lady Justice and Twenty-first Century Law by Susan H. Stephan.
• Yoga for Singers by Jeremy Hunt.
• A Wireless, Real-time, Distributed Music Composition and Performance System by Ian Gibson.

This book is a series of interviews with social theorists and scholars, philanthropists, scientists, theologians, artists, community development and community arts activists. Several recent books, including The Great Turning by David Korten, and A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, have made the argument that a new way of organizing our relationships to each other and to nature will be necessary in the coming years. The subjects, some 30 in all, were all asked to comment on this eventuality and to provide their perceptions of what role that artists and arts organizations should play in contributing to a more just and sustainable society.

Recently published papers in The International Journal of the Arts in Society include:

• Exploration of Artistic Experience and Multiliteracies in an Artist Workshop by Mi-Hyun Chung.
• “Zwischen der Hoffnung und dem, was man für sie tut”: Erich Fried’s Intrepid, Active and Intersubjective Hope by Billy Badger.
• Convergence: A Collaborative Course Linking Public Art and Education among Artists, Art Educators, and Students by Jan-Ru Wan.
• The Role of Photo-Surrealism in Print Advertisements by Raqee Sabah Najmuldeen and June Siok Kheng Ngo.
• The Art of Tax Reform: What Tax Reforms should be Introduced to Assist the Australian Arts Sector? by Brett Freudenberg.
• Art, Culture Industry and the Transformation of Songzhuang Artist Village by Meiqin Wang.
• Encouraging Thinking through the Arts by Jonelle Pool, Marta Robertson, Kenneth Pool and GailAnn Rickert.
• Rational Witness no More: Social Documentary and War in Northern Uganda by Lara Rosenoff.