Category: ideas

Umberto Eco is a fierce defender of the printed page: “In the course of many interviews I have been obliged to answer questions of this sort: ‘Will the new electronic media make books obsolete? Will the Web make literature obsolete? Will the new hypertextual civilisation eliminate the very idea of authorship?’ As you can see, if you have a well-balanced normal mind, these are different questions and, considering the apprehensive mode in which they are asked, one might think that the interviewer would feel reassured when your answer is, “No, keep cool, everything is OK”. Mistake. If you tell such people that books, literature, authorship will not disappear, they look desperate. Where, then, is the scoop?”

A new scientific study concludes that there are about 1000 times too many humans on the planet for us to be sustainable as a species. “Our study found that when we compare ourselves to otherwise similar species, usually other mammals of our same body size, for example, we are abnormal and the situation is unsustainable.”

“Between them the Guardian and the Observer now employ about 60 critics backed by a similar number of editors and subeditors. The Guardian arts desk has about a dozen commissioning editors and subeditors to call upon (about twice the number of 10 years ago). The largely literary Saturday Review, which did not exist 10 years ago, has a similar number. There are good reasons for the high level of commitment to the arts.”

More books are being published than ever before. But. “The book has become a product like any other – that is the price of the marketization of culture. Unwilling or unable to put time and effort into educating ourselves about the options, we end up buying what everybody else buys. Worse, we start enjoying the books we are manipulated into buying – even defending them against pretentious jerks who dare criticize them. In exactly the same way that we slowly become Ikea-people, we also become Booker Prize-people, Harry Potter-people, Stephen King-people.”

“Had the assassination of John F. Kennedy not happened 40 years ago today, it’s hard to imagine the writing of Six Degrees of Separation, the making of Bonnie and Clyde, the career of novelist Don DeLillo, the apocalyptic music of the Doors or the popularity of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and other violent interactive games… After Kennedy’s death, the world became bleaker, stranger somehow. The culture — the arts it produced and the audiences that absorbed them — turned suspicious, became less respectful of government, more prone to what some would call ‘paranoiac flights of fancy,’ flights that were alternately sinister and playful.”

“Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’ in 1989. The triumph of the western idea of markets and democracy would bring about a boring kind of bliss for all. Somewhat in parallel grew the concept of globalisation. Economic interdependence and the internet were creating a single world community. Some looked forward to a new law – or rule-based international society. Common to all three was the thought that we had entered a historically unprecedented era in which peace, prosperity and justice might be sustained without the old power relations, which as often as not had brought war and impoverishment.” But it hasn’t quite worked out that way…

Why do museums/orchestras/theatres feel like they have to try so hard to explain their art, asks Rupert Christiansen. “In an era when television, radio and recorded music function as a constant hum in the hinterland of our daily activities, we have become increasingly unable to concentrate on only one of our senses. This restlessness takes several forms. Popular culture relies on masturbatory stimulation of a combination of eye and ear: action movies are accompanied by deafening soundtracks, the rock song has been transcended by the rock video – and the more weirdly extreme the imagery, the more headbangingly hard the beat, the better. Higher culture, on the other hand, is always anxiously explaining itself, with the help of another medium.”

At one time it was said that “the most innovative scientists are almost always artists, musicians or poets. But is it still true today, in the first decade of the 21st century? There are some distinguished scientists who are very appreciative and knowledgeable about the arts. But where have all the artists who are also scientists gone – are the likes of Da Vinci just one offs? There has been a rupture between science and the arts in modern times, indeed between the arts and many aspects of society, and all the video installations in the world cannot repair it.”