Category: ideas

“Why, you might ask, now that empire has become an irrelevant historical fact, are pundits, intellectuals and sundry other commentators debating whether America is an empire or should be an empire, or whether the United States has what it takes to succeed
as an empire? By using the word “empire” as if it were a living possibility, even people opposed to the idea of an American imperialism make it easier for the pro-empire crowd to make their fantastical case. But a country doesn’t decide to be an empire the way a person decides to wear black rather than brown shoes to a party.

The new phenomenon of the ‘flash mob’ – a planned gathering of random individuals who proceed to do something bizarre but harmless in a public place – is certainly a sign of the times. But is it art? Certainly, the activities of most flash mobs are no stranger than the work of some performance artists. Or maybe it’s the most basic form of political organizing – after all, the mobs are organized by e-mail, and bring together like-minded people from disparate walks of life. Or, is the flash mob nothing more than this era’s obnoxious public fad, like streaking, or running onto a baseball field during the game?

Few students are studying history these days. And those that do seem to have an aversion to history books. “Instead, there is a preference for more bite-sized, experiential media, like TV history programmes or websites. Apparently, TV provides a model for what students expect from their university courses, as something involving ‘colour, action, biography and narrative’. There are complaints that students see history as ‘basically a narrative, descriptive subject’, and ‘expect to be told stories rather than acquire the skills of the historian’. A number of reasons have been offered to explain these trends.”

The study of the human brain is one of the most fascinating and frustrating branches of science. Brains are as diverse as snowflakes, which makes it exceedingly difficult for scientists to assign a categorization to the ‘average’ brain. “Researchers are now trying to better understand what constitutes a ‘normal’ brain by studying a newly compiled atlas that contains digitally mapped images of 7,000 of the organs. A decade in the making, the brain mapping project quietly debuted this summer.”

“There is a cynicism in the heart of much that passes for art today, which sits oddly with its claim to be art. After all, art has to be positive, even when it deals with the most depressing aspects of experience, because if it isn’t what is the point of making it? But far from seeking a positive response to its work, the establishment art of today actually stimulates a negative reaction…”

“Blast Theory” is an amalgam of theatre performers and scientists creating interactive “performances” that mix reality with virtual situations. “The laboratory provides the technical and theoretical underpinning for their fascination with computer and communications technology, and its ability to create ‘virtual’ situations that blur distinctions between the real and the imaginary. Verbal and visual ambiguity is very much the stuff of artistic endeavour. But with the development of three- dimensional imaging and ‘intelligent’ and ubiquitous computing devices, a number of scientific laboratories worldwide are attempting to understand how humans will interact with all this smart machinery.”

Back in 1974, when the U.S. was captivated by the televised Watergate hearings and the downfall of a president, viewers probably just assumed that they were watching the news. But in retrospect, wasn’t Watergate the moment when America’s news media stopped being merely a cold, hard reading of the facts, and became a videocentric free-for-all, a neverending race for the perfect shot, the ideal angle, and the subtle manipulation of content for narrative purpose? In other words, was the decline and fall of Richard Nixon actually the first recorded instance of video art?

Greg Sandow likes classical music. But he acknowledges that this is not a wholly compelling reason for it to survive as an art form. “I don’t think classical music makes us smarter, or makes us better people. I don’t think it’s ‘better’ than other kinds of music… I don’t think classical music has any special claim to be considered art. In fact — as it’s practiced currently in America — I think it fails dramatically on one of the most important things that art ought to be about.” And yet, there are a few positive aspects of classical music left to cling to, and Greg would love to hear from anyone knows of more.