Arts Blog
Reviews and news from the world of the arts
Doris Lessing’s blogger bashing
- Posted by Ben Coren
- 14 December 2007
Doris Lessing has a pop at the world wide web, Stephen Fry does panto and the Beijing Eunuch Museum is set to reopen in time for the '08 Olympics (phew).
Oh, the irony. Just weeks after this blog praised Doris Lessing for her strong web presence, she’s gone and slated the internet in her Noble Prize acceptance speech. She argued that the net “has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.”
Cue much uncomfortable shuffling at NS Arts Blog HQ. But, Lessing’s comments, which seem to view blogging as an activity roughly akin to opium addiction, are part of a broader debate that’s been going on all year.
On the one hand, at the end of 2006 Time Magazine celebrated the arrival of the interactive age by whacking a reflective(ish) panel on their cover and naming “you” (yes, that means you) as their Person of the Year, and Salman Rushdie has also been making complimentary noises about the growth of new media. Conversely, the rise of user-generated content was lambasted by Andrew Keen in his book “The Cult of the Amateur” (which he somewhat ironically blogs about here), and Jeremy Paxman announced that Newsnight was open to viewer submissions in a tone which made it sound like you’d have to be an incorrigible moron to take him up on the offer. So is the blogging community usefully democratising the media or just offering so much ill-informed blather?
At the risk of being accused of vested interests, surely “user-generated” content on the net is diverse and interesting enough to resist any glib generalisations or totalising theories. Moreover, on the literary side of things, the internet has the capacity to make great writing more readily accessible then ever before. Even if some of us spend more time on sites like this than browsing the complete works of Shakespeare, you can now, provided you have web access, view both from anywhere in the world.
It might also be worth noting that you get many more hits Googling “Doris Lessing” than you do Googling “inanities” but, of course, that’s a fairly inane point in itself.
Related:
A handy blog directory
An article on Google’s plans to digitise 32 million books
Online alternative news sources from around the world
Christmas Arts Round-Up
Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat, the billboards are crammed with tinselly exhortations to prop up the flagging economy in a frenzy of consumerist excess and, of course, the theatres are wheeling out their big festive shows.
Stephen Fry’s “Cinderella” leads a crowded, star-studded field of pantomimes, while writer-director Anthony Neilson offers an alternative Christmas show with his “Gods In Ruins”. Our bumper Christmas issue includes all the tips you need on the best theatre to catch this yuletide.
However, if you’re a crotchety Scrooge looking to rise above the seasonal cheer, the Guardian was keeping things intellectual with a Freudian reading of Jack and the Beanstalk and Wired offered a decidedly sarcastic list of “10 Christmas Movies You’ll Never See.”
Meanwhile, a series of outdoor light installations reflecting the lives of families living on an estate in Oxford promises to be one of the most interesting displays of festive art on offer.
Of Pogues and Eunuchs
In other news this week, Lily Allen was announced as one of the judges for the Orange Prize, Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane Oscar failed to sell at auction and 37 African musicians have recorded a UN sponsored record to boost awareness of HIV/AIDS across the continent.
Meanwhile, the Russian government instructed the British Council to close its two offices outside Moscow (you can read our take on a BC sponsored project in the country here) and the erstwhile Pogues musician and NS diarist Jem Finer won the British Composer Awards 2007 with his “Score for a Hole in the Ground”, an acclaimed installation paid for by the PRS New Music Award.
Happily, the Beijing Eunuch Museum looks set to reopen in time for the 2008 Olympics, but there was bad news for the Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg as they discovered that the terracotta warriors they have been exhibiting are apparently faked.
Equally bizarrely the British Press picked up on the story of Barry Cox, a Merseyside shelf-stacker turned Chinese Pop Sensation. There’s hope for us all…even the bloggers.
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