The Man Booker is announced

The judge chair announced that the choice of a winner was simple: it won because it was the best.
However, 3 out of 5 judges voted for it, which means that 2 judges do not think it is the best! Spot the contradiction?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/12/howard-jacobson-the-finkler-question-booker

Afghan Star question

The documentary, "Afghan Star" uses the prize narrative (Street, 2005, p.832) to explore what defines "Afghan identity". How is this identity represented?

The Ig Nobels

The silly, but serious, alternatives to the Nobels: http://chronicle.com/article/A-Whale-of-a-Time-at-the-Ig/124759/?sid=at

classical music prizes

Some fodder here for Macdonald. The writer, Tom Service, contemplates the lack of classical music awards to equal the Mercury or Turner in terms of "media impact and artistic seriousness". Do look out for concert etiquette in the mid-1820s. Those were the days ...


Tom Service: The Mercury music prize combines star power and industry credibility – isn't it time that classical music had something similar?

I return to the blogosphere to find there's another debate on concert etiquette going on, triggered by the nation's favourite grey-haired electronica maestro, Jonathan Harvey – I agree with commenter MVMountwood, who said he wished that Harvey's music "routinely attracted as much media attention" as his comments on classical music culture – and to see that Mark-Anthony Turnage has ripped off Beyoncé at the Proms. And also to find that minimalist indie band the xx have walked away with this year's Mercury music prize.

TD
These events prompted the following thoughts, in no particular order. Firstly, that classical music still lacks any award ceremony to match the combination of media impact and artistic seriousness of the Mercurys or the Turner prize (and no, the Classical Brits and their record-industry back-slapping don't count). The nearest we have are the venerable Royal Philharmonic Society awards and the PRS new music award.

The PRS gong ought to be the real Turner equivalent. The winner, announced on the 16 September, gets £50,000 for a new piece of music – more than twice as much as the Mercury victors will get, and double the amount Britain's most prestigious art prize nets its winner. The difference with the PRS award is that the cash goes on producing the composers's ideas, not straight into their bank account in honour of work they've already done. In previous years, this has meant digging a big hole for Jem Finer's Score for a Hole in the Ground, and creating a nationwide virtual instrument for The Fragmented Orchestra.

Collectively, however, the vision of "new music" the PRS advocates on its shortlist is just plain weird: a range of inoffensive, mostly genreless sound-art and new-instrument ideas that will upset no one, that ticks boxes marked "politically correct" and "innovative", but that will sadly end up making as much difference to the media and musical culture as a wet sock on laundry day.

I hope I'm proved wrong, but is this really the best use of the nation's most generous financial award for new music? How about giving the money for a piece the PRS can actually collect royalties from: a new orchestral work that uses live electronics, or an album that puts a cutting-edge classical composer alongside a studio artist (to pick only two of many ideas that might stand a better chance of pricking the public consciousness)?

Thought number two, regarding concert etiquette. Here's Hector Berlioz writing about going to the opera in Paris in the mid-1820s:

As I was intimately acquainted with every note of the score, the performers, if they were wise, played it as it was written; I would have died rather than allow the slightest liberty with the old masters to pass unnoticed. I had not notion of biding my time and coldly protesting in writing against such a crime – oh dear, no! – I apostrophised the delinquents then and there in my loudest voice, and I can testify than no form of criticism goes so straight home as that ... Accordingly, when the Scythian ballet [in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride] began I lay in wait for my cymbals ... Boiling with anger ... I shouted out with all my might, "There are no cymbals there; who has dared to correct Gluck?" ... But it was worse in the third act, where the trombones in Orestes' monologue were suppressed, just as I feared they would be; and the same voice was heard shouting out, "Not a sign of a trombone; it is intolerable!"

I have long wanted to try this at concerts when a conductor, orchestra, or singer is up there massacring one of my favourite pieces, but have so far lacked the courage of my convictions. Until now. Let's bring back Berlioz's instant feedback system at concerts. Jonathan Harvey would surely agree with me.

And so to the final item on the agenda: the Turnage-Beyoncé stooshie. It would all surely have mattered more if the new piece weren't so unimaginative in what it did with its material, whatever its provenance. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2010

It's the Booker time of the year!

Read the gushing announcement and look out for the gossipy controversy at the beginning, the lashings of contradictory claims for the type of book that makes a Booker winner, and finally the marriage between art and commerce.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/07/booker-prize-shortlist-drops-frontrunners

A lament for one of the classic prize competitions: the beauty pageant

From a politically correct perspective I would never acknowledge caring about this outdated phenomenon: the beauty pageant. But this lament is for ripping the heart and sponteneity - albeit misguided - from the event, and sanitising it into a slick formula. It reflects what happens when in the entertainment vs economics tug-of-war, the latter totally dominates, and good ole fashioned show business goes out the window. Brains (the huge ego of Donald Trump) has comfortably beaten beauty, and the result is dead boring. http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/2010/08/24/miss_universe/index.html

A quirky Prize

Thanks to Justin for this delightful contribution to our collection of prizes: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/114989-crocheting-adventures-wins-diagram-2009.html
You are all helping to develop a sense of the prize as sublime, sacred, bizarre, pretentious, parodic, etc.

"Idol" machine cranks out a new star

Alessandra Stanley introduces her topic by describing the final results of “American Idol” Season 8 as a metaphor for American values. What follows is an extended metaphor in which “American Idol” as a franchise is compared to a product manufactured on an industrial line. There is a formula or basic prototype, and this is churned out for consumption by a satisfied audience. The entire article, from the title onward, is constructed using images that contribute toward this reading. The article is thus cleverly and coherently constructed. But, I find that ultimately it contains a contradiction: the economic context within which Stanley situates this analysis is of a country in which the production line is exactly NOT running smoothly, and seems, in fact to be grinding to a halt. As such, her metaphor: “American Idol” = “state of America” falls flat. However, if she means that America could learn from “American Idol” in terms of how it runs itself (internally), how it markets itself (America seems desperately in need of good international PR), and the nature of its international involvement (anything that does not involve invasion may be a good idea), then the comparison holds. The success of the article – for me - therefore lies in how one interprets the fourth paragraph.

Steven Tyler is Idol Judge

In the quest to remain fresh and watchable for a public with a short attention span, American Idol is doing a major overhaul of its judging panel. The article in The Straits Times of Friday, August 20 2010 (Life, page C14) justifies the selection of Steven Tyler by emphasising his entertainment value: he "lives to be in front of an audience... can be counted on to deliver - maybe even sing - witty, Little Richard-style verdicts on the performances" etc. So, judging is about .... entertaining? There is mention of the hard rock element that he will introduce as opposed to an Idol history of soft ballads: a suggestion that the next winner may look and sound different from the previous ones? It depends on the choice of the other two judges. Any predictions or suggestions?

"Imam Muda": A Reality Show where Islam is the Biggest Star

Thanks to Joshua for drawing my attention to "Imam Muda", the religious-themed reality show that gradually eliminates contestants by setting them tasks testing their knowledge of and commitment to Islamic principles in a modern world. This is a very interesting addition to our study of prizes within specific cultural contexts. Go and read the article in Joshua's blog, and have a look at the New York Times article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/world/asia/29imam.html?_r=1

Why "The Biggest Loser" is the most American show

Why "The Biggest Loser" is the most American show

Vote for the Worst

An anti-prize prize voting site: http://www.votefortheworst.com/page/1/about-us
This counter-American Idol website joins the Razzies, the K Foundation and the Not-the-Booker Awards as subversive comment on the original Award. Is this a symbiotic or parasitic relationship?

Building a course around the Man Booker

Here is proof that winning the Man Booker is guaranteed canonization. But, what a great idea for a course: critiquing ten years of Booker winners. See http://www.themanbookerprize.com/perspective/articles/1300

Cannes Film Festival

The Cannes Film Festival was announced on the back page of the Life section of The Straits Times (Friday 14 May 2010) in an overwhelmingly visual display. This celebration of the visionary (literally) and creative directors of celluloid seems to be reduced, like so many prizes, to a display of beautiful dresses. This article is one quarter text, and three quarters photos.
The very first paragraph informs us that the films up for scrutiny are "leaner and less star-studded than usual", but that the opening ceremony was glamorous. What does "Agence France-Presse" mean by this quote?
We then get a list of beautiful actresses who were seen on the red carpet, the title of the premiere (Robin Hood), a paragraph describing two glamorous gowns and one dress designer, and then some elaboration on that "leaner and less star-studded" bit in the beginning: fewer movies and fewer Hollywood stars. Finally, there is at least some mention of the festival jury, and a political comment on the absence of Iranian director, Jafar Panahi, in jail for subversive movie-making. I suppose the assumption is that we know all about the Cannes Film Festival and don't need much elaboration. But, there is a laughable contradiction in the claim of a festival pared down to something more minimalist, and all this frivolous detail on stars, dresses and designers.
A quick glance at the website http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/about.html reveals a cornucopia of information. You can really lose yourself in video footage, synopses, links to other relevant sites, all in a carnivalesque celebration of the potential of cinema. There is an hourly update of events that gives the site an edginess that is balanced with a comfortable sense of history (that stark black background announces solidity and character). Cinema is alive and vibrant, but the list of advertisements prominently displayed along the top right of the site is a not-so-subtle hint at the money that is needed to keep this industry going. The fairytale dresses and the nonchalant pseudo-hoodlum look of the men reinforce the sense of a virtual world. It takes lots of money to sustain our dreams and fantasies. For those outside of Cannes who cannot access the cinemas, we will have to make do with the fantasy lives of those who inhabit the films: actors, actresses and directors with their aura of a life of privilege. The dominant visuals in the Life article are a sad substitute for the magical world of film that Cannes celebrates. But, it is the closest most of us will get to seeing most of the films advertised, or the exquisite setting for this prestigious Award.

Finding a good book: scandal, talk shows and judging

I was digging around in some old articles on awards and found this delightful intro to Salon's Book Awards for 2007 (http://www.salon.com/books/awards/2007/12/12/best_books/index2.html.) It is written by one of my favourite book reviewers, Laura Miller.

Look out for the acknowledgment of the stock role of scandal in the book trade, the anxiety at the bleak statistics for the reading habits of Americans, and the sparsity of book reviews. Miller concludes her little summary of the factors that are at play in the book culture with a clearly formulated set of criteria that shaped the decisions when choosing the 10 best books of 2007. The subjectivity of the process is acknowledged, but with a sincere attempt to pin it down to a process that most can relate to.

It's been a tranquil year in the book industry: no big fabrication or plagiarism scandals, à la James Frey or Kaavya Viswanathan, and consequently no dramatic denunciations on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." O.J. Simpson's bizarre "hypothetical" confession, "If I Did It," was finally published after the copyright had been transferred to the family of Ronald Goldman; in the end, it achieved little more than the destruction of the career of one of publishing's premier carnival barkers, editor Judith Regan. (She's now suing her former employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.)

But if the book world provided relatively little tabloid fodder in 2007, that doesn't mean that graver problems aren't afoot. The National Endowment for the Arts just released another of its depressing surveys of American reading habits, revealing that one in four of our fellow citizens had not read a single book in the preceding year. Meanwhile, the National Book Critics Circle's Campaign to Save Book Reviews has been tirelessly documenting -- and protesting -- the withering away of book coverage in our magazines and newspapers.

What fragments can we shore up against this ruin? Well, there's the single, powerful fact that in 2007, books remained the most consistently refreshing, illuminating, diverting, original and enriching sources of entertainment in our lives. This is Salon's 11th best-books list, and it was as hard to whittle our short list of hundreds of titles down to just 10 as it has been every year for the past decade. And that's after conflicts of interest obliged us to eliminate two terrific new books from former Salon editors -- "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years" by Salon founder David Talbot and Scott Rosenberg's "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software."

Our criteria for this list have always been a little idiosyncratic. We leave it to other critics to try to suss out which titles will wind up on college syllabuses or cited in footnotes by future generations. To make our list, a book has to keep us up late and be the first thing we reach for when we open our eyes in the morning. These are the books we thought about on the way to work and rushed through our dinner dates to get back to at night, the books we blocked out whole weekends to read and propped up next to our bowls of breakfast cereal. However beautiful an author's prose or important his or her subject matter, it doesn't go on our list unless we sigh every time we close the cover and just can't wait to open it again. We hope you'll agree that these titles fit the bill.

Reality show with big reward: running the UK

The UK elections are all but over, and there will be lots of assessments, evaluations and in-depth analyses of the events. A week ago Jonathan Eyal was describing Nick Clegg's meteoric rise to become a real player in what had appeared to be a two-man show-down. Eyal's showbiz discourse draws explicit links between politics and the prize culture. He describes Clegg as having "sprang out of nowhere", as being assumed to be little more than "a studio prop" who has become "the star of the show". And, most significantly, he refers to this support for Clegg ("Cleggmania") as being "no different from that of Ms Susan Boyle, a British middle-aged singer who rose from obscurity to instant stardom after being 'discovered' on a TV show". However, he notes that not all are convinced by this similarity: "Politics, the argument went, is more than just a fleeting Britain's Got Talent performance" (The Straits Times, Wednesday, April 28 2010, pg A2) What follows is an analysis of voting trends, set against a long history of democracy in the UK.
There are many influences on the way the vote goes, and that politics and entertainment have a lot in common is reinforced by the whole prize culture. Who is learning from whom, I wonder?

the prize and "high" vs "popular" culture

Two prizes are covered in short informative articles on the back page of the Life section of The Straits Times of 6 May. The one is a shortlist - with accompanying description - of the Turner prize candidates. The other is a brief summary of some of the better known actors who are in line for Tony awards. In the “high vs popular culture” debate, these two awards represent what would today be regarded as high culture: visual arts and the theatre. The visual arts, viewed in a museum or gallery, with their aura of muted splendour, and more recently, obscurism and inaccessibility, are per definition elitist. The theatre is arguably elitist because it demands harder work from the audience than do telly and movies in general. Of course, this is a debatable claim, because there are some very sophisticated films out there; films that challenge the viewer and draw him/her out of a comfort zone. However, the camera takes over some of the choices that a person in a theatre needs to make about interpreting events, and there is a visual sumptuousness about film that is very difficult to fully replicate on a stage. The Turner has managed for a long time now to be both elitist and populist. This year’s “conventional by comparison” [to other years’] finalists include paintings depicting notorious murder and suicide sites; folk tunes recorded by the artist, and played at bus stations, cemeteries, museums and churches; and a painter who “mangles her canvasses”. Two consequences of such controversial choices are a continued debate about what exactly constitutes art, and people actually going to view that, and hopefully, other examples of "art". The Tony awards are mentioned in terms of the A-list Hollywood actors who are up for awards in respected plays and musicals. Is the implication that the movies help to keep theatre alive? One could ask whether the visual arts and the theatre have been severely compromised? Does it matter? The theatre and the gallery will be fuller, and that is surely important. But, does this reduce art to yet another consumer product that needs to be sold?

Following a prize once-removed

You hardly need to spend hours in front of the telly to conjure up the narrative of the prize as it unfolds every week. Choose an entertaining journalist's blog and the job is done for you. The boring bits are filtered out by the wit and elegance of the writer's style, and you are spared the many many ads. But, you're probably missing the point of the whole endeavour, because prizes are not just about who wins, they're about the drama! The entertainment! It's like reading only summaries of novels. You don't get the feel for the different styles.
Still, there are some delightful blogs out there. Here is one on the finale of Project Runway. Spot some of classical elements of the prize: the scripted squabble, the moments of intimate confession, the celebrity judging.
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/2010/04/23/project_runway_final_recap_open2010/index.html

It's not the result (of the latest American Idol show - see the post below) that fascinates me as much as the two comments that follow: admonishments that the two girls should "tidy themselves up a bit". Why? I would have thought that a quirky individualism is a good thing in such a competitive environment. Crystal should brush her hair? How representative is this of the criteria of the voters?

American Idol April 28 results: Siobhan Magnus kicked off - Breaking News - Ledger-Enquirer.com

American Idol April 28 results: Siobhan Magnus kicked off - Breaking News - Ledger-Enquirer.com

Day1

I was amused last night by the extent to which the American Idol judges conformed to Ben Elton's parody of the show in his novel, Chart Throb. There were disconcertingly regular gushes of "You took ownership of that song" and "you own that music", or something to that effect. The support for "having taken advice on board and grown with it" was also a regular of the script. The judges seemed to have their personae down pretty pat too. And the contestants are introduced in unashamedly stereotyped terms: the mother! the builder! the father! Not very original, but easy to remember. I watched for the first time last night, scoffed away at the predictability of it all, but actually rather enjoyed it! The contestants are all so nice: so fresh-faced, even in a dreadlogged, facially-pierced kind of way. And their voices are all good. This is a celebration of beauty, talent, and is maybe a little self-congratulatory about how we're (Americans, today's youth, whatever ....???) looking good.