Category: ideas

The notion that art is about more than objects, and that artists and their ideas are as significant as the works they create for public display, developed in the 1960s and ’70s, and a new exhibit in Baltimore aims to deconstruct the movement which would eventually become known as ‘conceptual art.’ “Forty years ago, a small group of artists challenged the idea that works of art were about showing off the genius of a maker’s hand — a notion that had lasted right from Raphael and Rembrandt through to Jackson Pollock. The works they used to make that challenge still feel powerful and exciting, sometimes even radical and unsettling, all this while later. Sometimes they look gorgeous, too.”

“Middlebrowism, which dominated mid-century culture in the Anglo-American world, can be a complex subject beset by issues of status and social power, but at its heart lay the duty of all educated persons to become “well-rounded” citizens, especially by exposing themselves to great ideas, great art, and great literature. The precipitous decline in middlebrow culture is in large measure a function of technological innovation, which has had the effect of redrawing culture’s sociological map. ‘Cable, VCRs, satellites, and the multidimensional changes wrought by the home computer have not only opened a vast array of new cultural choices to people, they are achieving something much larger: They are moving the consumption of culture out of the city and into the home.

“Around the country, copyright concerns are fueling a grassroots movement that brings together artists frustrated by the corporate lock on popular-culture icons, musicians pondering the distribution of their work in the era of sampling and Napster, and technophiles worried about the ways that new digital copyright-protection technology is fencing in the formerly wide open electronic frontier. More than protecting those who create, this growing chorus of critics says, the current copyright system serves to enrich big corporations, stifle innovation, silence social criticism, and impoverish the culture.”

Why is it that “a nation with one of the world’s highest literacy rates would become so obsessed with cartoons” Men and women of all ages can be seen on the subway, in coffee shops, or at racks in convenience stores, poring over thick, bound comic books. And Japanese TV is filled with anime shows. Can’t get enough of ’em. And it’s not just the shows and books. Animation pervades the entire society.”

A recent survey suggested Britons know next to nothing about fine art. But how can this be true, really? “If half the population can’t remember who painted the ‘Mona Lisa’ — or never knew in the first place — the other half seem anxious to travel to Paris and stand in front of it. In fact it is an excellent example of a work of art so popular that no one has had a chance to see it properly for decades. There is a constant, jostling throng in front of the picture, so only the staff of the Louvre and those lucky enough to be let in after hours ever get a chance to look at it as a painting should be looked at, slowly and tranquilly. “

Is Academia liberal? Is there a liberal bias in higher education? “The state of the job market these days makes things especially hard to pin down. Ayn Randian, liberal, Marxist, conservative: In most fields, there aren’t jobs for anyone.”

When Arnold Schwarzenegger took the stage to give his first speech as governor-elect of California, he was introduced by none other than talk show host Jay Leno. Leno was careful to avoid making any overt statements of political support for Schwarzenegger, but his very presence at the event raises now-familiar questions about the nature of our increasingly entertainment-dominated society. With the line between “hard news” and softball entertainment programming all but gone from many American minds, the candidacy – and success – of Schwarzenegger is triggering alarm bells for many cultural observers.

“Traditionally, logicians have made a stark distinction between truthhood and falsity. A statement was considered to be either true (given a truth value of one) or false (a value of zero). In the 1960s, Lotfi Zadeh of the University of California at Berkeley came up with the catchy innovation of ‘fuzzy logic’. In this system, things could be sort-of true, or only partially false. A ‘truth value’ of 0.5 meant that a statement was half-true, and so forth.