Category: ideas

The increasingly popular art-as-medicine movement is a revelation to some, and a deep concern to others. “Healing is… a serious business, driven by moral and ethical imperatives. Enlisting the arts in its service raises concerns about efficacy, appropriateness, false hopes and accountability. Who’s to say, finally, whether the arts figure substantially in healing or whether healing is pertinent to art?”

“Art opens people up and delves deep. Anyone who’s ever poured out his passion on a dance floor, sung John Mayer in the shower or felt rapture at Swan Lake knows it. But can that delving heal people, in both body and mind, as a veritable army of art therapists, drama therapists, dance therapists, cinema and photo therapists, expressive arts practitioners, patients, their families, hospice workers and holistic musicians believe?”

Terry Teachout is intrigued by a recent New York Times Magazine piece which referred to a new off-Broadway show as a “serious chamber musical.” That sounds an awful lot like a description of an opera, doesn’t it? While the distinction may be purely semantic, it’s important, nonetheless, says Teachout in his ArtsJournal blog, and composers are not well served when they try to pass off their serious work as typical Broadway ear candy.

Have you always wondered what the difference is between a violin and a viola? Or pondered exactly who it is that has to completely overhaul a museum’s galleries between exhibits? Or puzzled over how exactly that dancer is able to hold that other dancer in the air by her big toe without either of them sustaining serious injury? Well, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is here to help: from now until August 1, the paper’s arts section is accepting all the questions about the arts that you’ve never asked for fear of sounding stupid. And they promise to answer them, too. Go on – you know you’ve got one…

“Artistic expression has a special meaning for lexicographers at Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Every decade or so as they prepare an overhauled edition, they decide which new words from the world of culture, among other domains, are suitable for inclusion.” Among the words making the cut in this year’s revision: ‘burn,’ as in burning a song onto a CD; ‘gangsta,’ being the preferred hip-hop pronunciation of an already-common word; ‘zine,’ a homemade magazine; and ‘soukous,’ which you’ll just have to look up.

They’re often annoying, they’re frequently invasive, they’re more than occasionally misleading, and almost no one admits to liking them. But ads have come to define modern culture, and while it may be a stretch to brand naked salesmanship as art, it’s difficult to overlook a phenomenon that causes millions of people to watch a specific football game in which they have little interest, just to see how Pepsi will be trying to get us to buy their product this year. A new 3-volume encyclopedia sets out to chronicle the history and uncover the cultural meaning of the advertising explosion of the last century.

There was a time when science museums, children’s museums, and the like were thought of as teaching tools, as a chance to impart important details about the workings of the world into the minds of visitors, especially children. But no more. “Museums aren’t there to teach a systemic body of information in some prescribed manner, the current ideology goes. Nor, as studies show, are they very good at it — people retain very little data from their visits. Instead, museums offer a kind of neutral platform where visitors explore the drift and dimension of their own curiosity as much as they do the accumulated knowledge about a particular subject or field.”

Restoration of historic art treasures is in the news these days. The Guardian wonders how its readers might “restore” Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” providing a digital picture for readers to play around with and submit. The painting was itself the subject of a controversial 22-year “cleaning” completed in 1999

“If someone suggested to a room full of people that 100 years from now, half of all the world’s flora and fauna would no longer exist, it’s likely that at least a few of them would be worried enough to so do something. They might donate a few dollars to the World Wildlife Fund, or maybe go so far as to sit atop a redwood that was about to be cut down. But what would the reaction be if someone suggested that half the world’s cultures and languages would no longer exist?” Two someones are suggesting exactly that, and they’re convinced that they can do something about it, too.

Why do people seek out art? “We look at art in order to search for something — it gives us a particular place where we can search for something that we can’t see. There’s always something beyond the frame — not just what we see but what we don’t see — and it’s what we don’t see that we often desire. It’s quite mysterious. All art is a way of trapping something or freezing something about human desire.”