Category: ideas

Handing out diplomas is big business these days, and not just for the colleges and universities that actually expect you to go to class to earn one. “Diploma mills,” online companies which churn out fake diplomas, either purporting to be from real, prestigious schools, or from obscure schools which aren’t actually schools at all, have become a major problem for employers seeking to verify the credentials of job applicants. Now, two members of the US Congress have “asked the [Government Accounting Office] to investigate the matter after reports surfaced last summer that a high-level employee in the Homeland Security Department claimed to have three degrees from a suspected diploma mill.”

“In an entertainment culture suffused with spectacle, the desire to be dazed, dazzled, carried away and left speechless has never seemed more compelling. In movie houses and theaters, rock concert arenas and horse-filled tents, visual amazement abounds and overwhelms. Language, lyrics, character and narrative make way for sensory superabundance. Buffeted by world events too menacing to fathom, we’ve become eager, wide- eyed witnesses, our faces longingly pressed to ever larger windows. We want to be enveloped and transported by intensity now, not merely diverted. Consider some of our current fixations.”

“More and more people are consuming their popular culture on the internet, particularly as faster connections become more widely available.” In the process, the business and creative sides of our creative industries are being transformed.

Fifties icons of cool such as Miles Davis, James Dean and Jack Kerouac are being used in commercials to promote various products. “Sure, nothing’s sacred. And certainly there’s more to the enduring appeal of ‘cool’ – an attitude that says, ‘I know who I am, whether you know it or not, and I really don’t care if you do’ – than the marketing strategies that threaten to cheapen its legacy. But there’s a bitter irony in the fact that Davis, Dean and Kerouac were anything but unquestioning, lock-step consumers.”

International politics over the past few years have magnified the cultural differences between Europe and the United States. “These growing divisions — over war, peace, religion, sex, life and death — amount to a philosophical dispute about the common origins of European and American civilization. Both children of the Enlightenment, the United States and Europe clearly differ about the nature of this inheritance and about who is its better custodian.”

Do we get the culture we deserve? William Osborne takes a look at the way America and Europe promote their cultures. There is, he reports, an obvious reason why Europe has more orchestras, operas, and dance companies and why the citizenry seem more culturally literate.

“Although there has been plenty of debate about the legalities of downloading, one important question has so far gone unasked: will downloading affect how pop music sounds in the future? In other words, will the way that people access music have an effect on the content of that music?”

“Not only did we come to regard political speech as manipulative, but we started to see formality in general as old-fashioned and insincere. The culture that bred casual Fridays and microwave dinners came to value ‘doing your own thing’ over older standards of propriety, and this attitude has shaped our language.”

So you missed last week’s ArtsJournal Live at the Landmark Tavern in New York? Here’s New York Sun columnist Gary Shapiro’s take on the evening…