Category: ideas

American artist John Currin doesn’t think much of American art. He’s also tough on the ideas-over-technique crowd. “Progressive ideas are just a machine for ruining art. I believe in the old idea of technique. I believe you need it if you’re going to have magic and genius and masterpieces. No one would question the value of technique in any other field. No one would say that a tennis player would be better if only he could stop hitting the ball.”

“JR Tolkien’s staying power is unprecedented. That a spotlight-shunning Oxford professor, dead for three decades, who specialized in the rather mundane field of philology still casts such an enchanting spell over contemporary culture is a remarkable achievement. But amid this unharmonious convergence of forces clambering for some acreage of the Tolkien empire, there is also a literary reputation at stake. Can the words of Tolkien, the serious author, be heard above the din of Middle-earth’s ravenous strip development? Should Tolkien’s heirs safeguard the family name? Will the movies bring critical acclaim to the books, or will the combination of fan devotion and marketing savvy prove lethal and taint Rings as mere ‘adolescent fantasy’ forever?”

“Audiences and institutions have long believed that anything that unsettles is intended to provoke. The provocation hardly needs to be sexual. It can be childlike (“My 5-year-old could do that!”) or primitive (Gauguin) or political (Grosz) or distorted (Cubism) or conceptually unsettling (Duchamp’s urinal; Cage’s “4′ 33′ ” of silence). For a long while, when people raged against such provocations, I would take the defiant position of assuming, unless authoritatively informed otherwise, that the artist had no intention to provoke. Of course, there are deliberate provocateurs, sometimes for overt careerist ends. But what counts is the art. Great art is always shocking.”

The virtual gaming community gathers to discuss the laws of cyberspace. “A host of questions are on everyone’s minds: Are virtual worlds the new Wild West or a legitimate province of the courts? Is game play equivalent to speech as defined in the First Amendment? Is there such a thing as fraud in a metaverse? As the game universe becomes intricate, as transactions start to cross the boundary between the game world and the real world, it becomes more complicated as to what you’re going to call defamation.”

We’ve all heard about the way Apple’s iTunes music download service is revolutionizing the industry. But could it revolutionize our social interactions as well? “Thanks to the ability of Apple’s iTunes to share music collections over local networks, it is now possible to judge someone’s taste in music — or lack of it — in a way that previously required a certain level of intimacy. The ability to examine the music collections of co-workers, neighbors or fellow students is akin to peering into their souls: Someone who appears cool and interesting from the outside is revealed as a cultural nincompoop through the poor sap’s terrible taste in music.”

A new book asserts that the company as an organizational model is indispensible to progress. “The most important organisation in the world is the company: the basis of the prosperity of the west and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world.”

John Rockwell goes to a concert and hates the performance. This despite the praise of a fellow music critic, who finds the musician’s playing intensely interesting. Is one critic right and the other wrong? No, writes Rockwell. There ought not to be an “objective” standard for art. Sure there are “norms” but critical taste is intensely personal and ought to be celebrated.

Why is music found in every culture? It has something to do with our relationship to the physical world, says new research. “Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular — which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. Says Schwartz, “The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se.”

A new study reports that allowing workers to play games at work might increase their productivity. “The results suggest that, instead of games being a waste of time at work, they might help personal productivity and make people feel better about their jobs. A round of Solitaire could be used as a strategy to break up the day and help people work more effectively because it gives their brain a break from complex work tasks.”