I come home from a few days in the rainylands to the north to discover that it’s been pouring in Portland — not just rain, but bad news.
Portland Center Stage, the city’s flagship theater company, has laid off five people, including literary manager Mead Hunter, one of the most popular and respected people in the [...]
As many of you know by now, Mead Hunter has been let go by Portland Center Stage as part of another round of budget cuts at the company. We wish him the very best, and we’ll be getting back to this at a later date. Frankly, we’re confident that Mead will negotiate this turn [...]
So, Art Scatter had an interesting weekend, with the odd charm’s of BodyVox and Holcombe Waller taking center stage. We’ve posted about this on Portland Arts Watch, and we’ll just take a moment to emphasize a point or two from that post.
BodyVox’s “The Foot Opera Files” was very close to something special thanks to [...]
Art Scatter has followed with more than passing interest the ongoing debates over the future of journalism in the U.S. I started to type “newspapers,” because the rapid decline of the large corporations that own most of the larger daily newspapers in the country has already wiped out thousands of journalist positions in the [...]
What is craft? What is art? What is folk art? Outsider art? Contemporary art?
Are the distinctions real? Do they matter, or are they intellectual games people play, rococo road blocks in the path of direct emotional response to aesthetic objects?
Oh — and what’s a museum supposed to be, anyway?
Dumb questions, maybe. Or, as I [...]
So, lots of things bubbling about with Scatter implications, of a Monday evening.
First, a tip from regular TdR, who posts at Portland Spaces’ Burnside Blog — and got to the whole gag reflex to the idea of a Rose Quarter “entertainment district” (mentioned below) WAY before Scatter did. I confess, all I can [...]
So, yes, it’s taken some time for me to figure out how to occupy space at both Art Scatter and Portland Arts Watch, not that you were holding your breath or anything.
Here’s what I’ve come up with. My straight-ahead arts stuff will land at Portland Arts Watch, which is more or less business [...]
“What do you think of semiotics?” an owlish interrogator asked me.
This was deep in the drifts of a previous century, shortly after I’d been named movie critic for a now-dead daily newspaper, and my questioner’s tone made it clear that he needed to know whether I was a serious fellow worth paying attention to [...]
Today is St. Patrick’s Day, that great American bacchanal on a boisterous Irish theme, and here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we trust our stockholders are out on the streets whooping and hollering and downing tankards of green beer and generally celebrating the corning of the beef. Or not.
My own plans are slightly different. I [...]
Here at Art Scatter we just love a heavenly chorus. Harmony’s our thing, and we’re fond of kittens, too.
So why do we find ourselves hesitating to lend our voice to the call for a new song of reconciliation with the Oregon Legislature over its co-option of $1.8 million from the Oregon Cultural Trust? Maybe [...]