Our story here yesterday that the art section in Metro, the weekly entertainment lift out that appears in the SMH on Fridays, was about to be cut is apparently incorrect. The liftout is being redesigned. What that means we shall have to wait and see but Dominique Angeloro kindly wrote in to correct our story: “The information you have on the Metro art’s writing situation is not correct. Metro is undergoing a redesign this week and the art’s format will change – but it won’t be axed altogether nor traded in for social page shenanigans…” We think the crucial word in that sentence is “altogether” but we excitedly anticipate the new ‘look’…
Update Friday, September 30: The new format Metro came out today and, guess what – Art has been cut by 75%! From two half pages to one half page, the word count in the section’s stories has also dropped to roughly 200 words per story. The accompanying listings are so short they’re almost haiku. The entire design rejig has moved Metro away from articles written by SMH staffers and freelancers towards material submitted by readers. In the guise of reader feedback, the section is asking people to send in listings and reviews, presumably cutting the costs of producing the content and restyling Metro along the lines of Radar. The economic imperative for doing so seems very clear – cut costs, increase free content, maximise advertising revenue. We had been told that Metro would replace Art with social pages pictures of drunken 20-somethings in nightclubs. We were wrong – those pictures on the back page.
Coming up: Ian Haig, Flesh Coloured Plastic.
Phatspace are gearing up for their big international video festival exhibition thing in late October and have announced the artists for International Ate Video Show.
That’s right folks, out of over 150 submissions 8 have been selected to be shown in Phatspace, opening October 27th and running for 3 weeks. It will be a positive video art extravaganza! So go now to the website and check out who has been chosen, is it you? Is it your friend? Is it your hairdresser? Is there anyone from Sydney? The suspense is just too much! Quick check it out!
For those too excited to click on the link, we can tell you that the artists are: Fabien Giraud (France), Julie Lequin (USA), James Hancock (Australia), Galina Myznikova & Sergey Provorov (Russia), Jean-Gabriel Periot (France), Christine de la Garenne (Germany), Hakeem b (France), George Tillianakis (Australia).
We have received a number of emails and comments lately about the nature and quality of the Comments attached to this blog. The complaint seems to be that the majority of the people leaving comments are negative creeps, violent sociopaths or people with no sense of decorum, politeness or appropriateness. Good law abiding citizens are being roughed up and abused in print. We certainly feel for you and spend many hours a day wondering what we should do about it – if indeed we should do anything at all. Somehow the current state of play is alienating a lot of readers who feel that the whole positive vibe of The Art Life is spoiled by commenters being rude and uncouth.
As we have stated here and elsewhere, some suggestions of how to fix the problem are impractical and would either entail a huge effort on our part to police the comments or alternatively get rid of comments completely. The first suggestion is crazy – we’re already spending a lot of time on the blog and the second suggestion is too drastic and draconian. We have decided to place the whole situation under review and welcome any realistic and workable suggestions in the usual place. In the meantime, gentlefolk are advised to stay away from Comments and to not read them.
Above: Emergency Art Life Management meeting to discuss counter-revolutionary, pro- US bias in recent postings.
On another issue that is causing us quite a lot of vexatious worry has been the need to repeatedly restate the same things over and over. We’re starting to realise that when people leave abusive comments they’re probably just dropped in for the first time or are causal visitors who have missed certain statements in the past. For example, we have said before that what we need to do is print ironic statements in red so that you can tell that we’re joking. That whole story last week about us apologising for offering MP3s to our readers for free should have been awash in blood red irony, but incredibly, certain readers took it seriously and then proceeded to lecture us about our manners. So, sorry about that people, we were joking.
To return briefly to another issue, we have been accused of being “American” – the exact definition of that particular insult is still unclear to us but the evidence for this claim is in our use of the word “pissed”. It does seem from first glance that the word “pissed” in the context of “he was really pissed [mad, upset etc]” is American in its derivation, but it’s also a word that is now widely used in Australia as evidenced by its inclusion in the Macquarie Australian Dictionary Book of Slang. According to MADBS, ‘pissed’ is a word in wide spread Australian usage which became prevelant‘during the 1990s and is gaining ground, amongst teenagers and young adults’. We’re not so young, nor American, but at least young at heart.
