Category: ideas

Today’s art critics have been marginalized. “Ultimately, the critic seems trapped in an inherently reactive and ever-more marginalised position. After all, the function of critics has remained largely static while the art world metastasised, growing too big to allow them any real overview, charging too fast for their publication deadlines and developing a slew of new information channels that bypass critics altogether. Not so long ago, Europeans depended upon travelling critics to relate the latest developments in New York or London. Today, fairs and biennials function as seasonal trend updates, and anyone curious about a faraway show can simply hit the gallery’s website for JPGs and a press release.”

The city of Minneapolis is to go wireless. The city will be covered with a wireless internet connection available to anyone. “Consumers would be able to buy broadband access of 1 million to 3 million bits per second for $18 to $24 a month — a bit slower than wired cable modem service but about half the price. The network also is expected to create an economic incentive for businesses to locate in Minneapolis. If someone gets off a plane at the airport and signs up for Minneapolis Internet service, they can sign on with one password anywhere in the city.”

A big problem with the current copyright laws is that it’s difficult or impossible to trace the owners of the vast majority of older works protected by copyright. “Even if the risk of a copyright infringement claim is low, creators who build on another’s work do not want to take the risk of getting sued. Copyright owners can ask for up to $150,000 damages per work infringed.” Now the US copyright office is trying to address the problem, and asking for help.

Can art help us understand natural physical phenomena? A competition at the Massachusetts Institute of technology suggests it can. “The Weird Fields contest, part of the undergraduate course ‘Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism,’ — encourages students to use a special computer program that converts mathematical formulas into visual representations of electromagnetic fields. The resulting swirls, loops, circles and squares, while not necessarily corresponding exactly to those occurring in nature, offer a creative way to understand some of the most abstract concepts in physics.”

Pop culture is, by definition, fun. It’s fun to keep up with celebrities, fun to gossip with friends about the latest fashions, albums, movies, etc. But these days, there’s just so much pop culture to soak in that keeping oneself on the cutting edge is almost a full time job. “How [can] anyone find time to update their LiveJournals, finish reading the new Sheila Heti novel, or get tickets for the just announced M.I.A./LCD Soundsystem show in May? They had to stay up to the wee hours just to kill a few more soldiers in the new Splinter Cell or druggies in Narc. And who had time to wait for the perfect iPod Shuffle moment to magically appear?” Welcome to the phenomenon known as ‘hipster burnout.’

The “trained sensibility,” he says, is unavailable “unless you take certain masterpieces into yourself as if they were communion wafers…. If you don’t give literature a decisive part to play in your existence, then you haven’t got anything but a show of culture. It has no reality whatever. It’s an acceptable challenge to internalize all of these great things, all of this marvelous poetry. When you’ve done that, you’ve been shaped from within by these books and these writers.”

“As U.S. children are exposed to 8½ hours of TV, video games, computers and other media a day — often at once — are they losing the ability to concentrate? Are their developing brains becoming hard-wired to “multi-task lite” rather than learn the focused critical thinking needed for a democracy?”

“We live in a curious age of relettering (‘Hi! I’m Cyndee!’), reversals (Red Sox = world champions), and rejiggering. Paid flacks are the new journalists, fiction is the new truth, war is the new peace. The New York Times announced this week that Kiev is the new Prague. Does that mean we have to start drinking Ukrainian beer? I hope not. Osama bin Laden has famously declared that America is the new Rome… Perhaps you are familiar with the ladies’ apparel phenomenon known as vanity sizing. Here is all you need to know: Size 6 is the new 8.” And of course, absolutely everything is the new black. Whatever happened to the world just being itself?

“While universities continue to play an important role in intellectual culture, increasingly they are no longer the only game in town. With the rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of decentralizing technology, the academy is ceding authority and attention to businesses, nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and Internet communities. Even more significant, in my mind, the academy may be losing something else: its hold over many of its most promising young academics, who appear more and more willing to take their services elsewhere — and who may comprise an embryonic cohort of new “postacademic intellectuals” in the making.”