Category: ideas

“The United Nations says that by 2010, some 18 of the world’s 30 largest cities will be in Asia (compared to only three from Europe and North America). In the region’s new megacities, height is might, speed is wealth, density is power, and the skyscraper — that American symbol of modernity — grows on steroids and is colonizing the sky.” Trying to define these supermetropolises as good or bad, dangerous or progressive, is useless, and misses the point in any case. Any organism as huge and complex as a city cannot be reduced to such platitudes, and the startlingly fast growth going on in Asian cities provides plenty for urbanists of all stripes to marvel and shudder at.

Cultural diversity in the UK is mainstream policy for arts organizations. “The pursuit of aesthetic or historical understanding, of attempting to distinguish good paintings from bad or correct interpretations from false ones, is deemed impossible. Instead, all cultural institutions can do is to revel in ‘diversity’, by promoting different kinds of art and competing judgements. Today’s cultural policy rejects the ways of the traditional cultural elite, and presents itself as far more enlightened. However, if we examine the legacy that cultural diversity policy has rejected, we find that some valuable principles have been lost by the wayside.”

The latest attacks on multiculturalism in Britain have been coming from the left. “An elite that is unwilling to make judgements about why any one cultural practice is better than another, to set universal standards about what role individuals should be expected to play across society, and to promote a distinct set of values that a society should agree upon, finds a useful tool in multiculturalism. This is why it has been so well-suited to Western societies in the past few decades, increasingly disorientated by the erosion of cultural and political certainties. Clearly, the official promotion of multicultural policy has not provided any solution to this disorientation – indeed, by actively encouraging expressions of difference and divisions between communities, it may well have fuelled the process of fragmentation.”

“Chess has long served as a touchstone for the progress of artificial intelligence. For years, the best human players retained a clear edge over chess-playing computers. Computers appeared to gain the advantage with the 1997 defeat of the reigning world champion, Gary Kasparov, by IBM’s Deep Blue. But since then, the top ranks of chess have settled into an unexpected equilibrium between humans and computers. The computers and grandmasters are both getting better (and the grandmasters are getting better at playing computers). This is a disappointing state of affairs for enthusiasts of artificial intelligence.”

We seem to be more and more fascinated by images of gore and mutilation. The raw aftermath of violence and death is increasingly captured in images that many people find both repelling and compelling. “The contemporary iconography of carnage is unprecedented and unique in its visceral force.”

Europe’s population is getting older, more secular and smaller. It’s a model that cannot sustain its current level of social services such as retirement and health care. Where to get a flush of new blood? Neighboring Arab countries have rising propulations…

“We’re terrified of boredom and simultaneously sunk up to our knees in it, a post-“Seinfeld” generation running as hard and frantically as we can to avoid a condition we increasingly regard as inevitable. Not so fast. As more and more people seem to recognize, the universal experience of being bored — unengaged, detached, afloat in some private torpor — may be far more precious, fruitful and even profound than a surface apprehension might suggest. As ordinary as gray skies and equally pervasive, boredom deserves its own sun-splashed attention and celebration.”

Norman Lebracht doesn’t think much of American arts journalism. “The failure to challenge is a fundamental flaw in US arts journalism. The tone in US arts coverage is uniformly respectful, uninquiring, inherently supportive.” And how did this happen? Because there are few cities with multiple critical voices. “This monopoly places an unhealthy burden on critics. If theirs is to be the only voice to pronounce on a new show or the fate of an institution, they are obliged to wear a mantle of responsibility that is antithetical to good journalism. A critic is licensed to get it wrong from time to time. Restrict that license and the reviews grow safe and solemn. An era of incorporation fostered a pontifical tone in American arts criticism.”

“With the emergence of the Internet and the growth of global commerce, many assume English is on its way toward becoming the dominant global language, wiping out its competitors as it spreads around the world. Actually, the number of people who speak English exclusively is declining worldwide, while people who speak two or more languages are becoming more common.” Arabic and Spanish are on the rise, and Chinese (which, let’s not forget, is spoken by three times as many people as its nearest competitor) isn’t going away anytime soon. Nonetheless, researchers predict that English will remain the language of international business and commerce for the foreseeable future.