Posts by Russell Brown
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Just been doing my reading. Tomorrow's post should be quite fun.
The new paper doesn't (to my surprise, actually) conflict dreadfully with the speech a year ago in which Key announced the policy.
But pretty much everything else they said -- and campaigned on -- thereafter was kind of bullshit.
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It is, but it hasn't been given much publicity in comparison with the FTTx rollout.
I'm not entirely sure that National has actually said it will proceed.
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I'm working on a blog for tomorrow morning as we speak.
The thing that strikes me is that under the policy announced a year ago by Key and Williamson, 75% of New Zealand homes were to have "ultra-fast" fibre by 2014 -- less than six years from the government taking office.
On the estimate of this paper, the number of residential homes to get this new fibre in the first six years will be ... zero.
It'll all be schools, hospitals and the like.
It does look like the best version of the idea so far, but the costings are still bollocks, and, really, National spent all last year making claims for their plan that were, frankly, complete bullshit.
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But does he go see the art? Because I think that's the rub at the moment. Now that they've largely gone back to compartmentalising and separating the gallery from the cultural exhibits, I think they've made both a lot less interesting.
But, but ... you're hankering for a time when only a tiny fraction of the national art heritage was actually on display. It was awful.
There's plenty there for a kid to enjoy, but an entry point to the art of the nation it isn't.
And it's great that there's so much there for kids (Auckland's museum too, for that matter). But does the entire museum have to be designed for a nine year-old?
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But one of the goals of the project was also to popularise the museum, which is hardly achieved by sticking paintings on walls. You need to provide a cultural context, and that's a hard thing to do.
As a curated exhibition, sure. But as the permanent context in which works are displayed, it's just shouting the same thing at me every time I visit, when perhaps I'm capable of having my own thoughts.
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Compulsory reading for PA people, I reckon.
I like the way he identifies incidents of just-making-shit-up.
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I'm firmly on the Wedde camp. I think the top floor of Te Papa is awful in its design, just the wrong space to display art, and fosters no conversation at all.
Certainly, it's the left-over space, but at least there are, like, paintings in it.
The rest of the museum, in its watered down version of the original idea, is not as bold and interesting as it used to be and could have been. It wasn't perfect under Sotheran, but it had a lot more potential than it does have now.
I guess we'll have to differ on that then. I've had wonderful life-enhancing experiences with art: none of them with the Parade jumble sale. It's irritating, prescriptive and incoherent.
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I remember Auckland museum being very traditional, though the last time I was in there was 20 years ago. Everything in glass cases very boring, look don't touch. Hope it's changed since then.
It has, but it still feels like a museum rather than a post-modern jumble. I often feel dissatisfied by a visit to Te Papa -- although it's worth trekking up to Te Papa's top floors to see the art; and that's only there because of the review commissioned by Helen Clark in 2000. There's an absorbing essay on the review by Paul Williams here.
It includes this quote from Ian Wedde, the 'concept leader' of Parade , which is what Te Papa had for a gallery before the PM stepped in.
Experience has convinced me that most people are similarly content to channel-surf, and that a rich playground offers plenty of opportunity to stop and attend if the time and material seem right. Out of this subjectivity developed an intersubjectivity: a project on material culture that was eclectic, with unresolved shifts in value and meaning, broadly historiographic but with architectural and narrative sightlines that constantly took you off the track. An exhibition developed as a mall with chapters (Listener, 14 February 1998).
Arrggh. I'm sorry, but I don't want to "channel-surf", and I don't want to have to wade through someone else's "project on material culture"
I want to, as Hamish Keith always puts it, have my own "conversation" with a work of art . Either display the paintings or send them to Auckland with a covering cheque, and we'll slap a national art gallery on the waterfront here.
And yes, I am troubled about agreeing with Denis Dutton on anything ...
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From a link in the comments for the Ars story: Courtney Love's record industry j'accuse from 2000.
It's still pretty amazing.
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The way to support the arts in New Zealand is not to go about shitting on other cities. Those two Aucklanders deserve to be hounded for a wasted opportunity and a good attempt at killing the arts scene in a parts of the country they appear to disdain.
Aw, hardly, Don. I don't think a 10-minute panel discussion is going to kill the Wellington arts scene.
And people here do actually feel a bit miffed about the huge difference in per-capita funding for for major arts organisations cited by Simon Prast. Of the $68 million available each year to major arts organisations from the Ministry of Arts & Culture and Creatuve NZ, $9.5m makes it out of Wellington. He calculated a "per seat subsidy" of $135m for Wellington vs $7 for Auckland.
Well, yes. Our museum, with its magnificent Pacific collection, receives essentially no operational funding, even though it's more recognisably a museum than Te Papa.
But ...* the contention falls down a little when you look at the public funding attracted by the other sectors identified as being part f the creative industries by the 2005 Auckland City Council report -- TV production companies, for instance.
Anyway, Simon's point in writing the original story was more to gee up Auckland's own city council. Good luck with that.
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