Category: ideas

We’ve moved into a new era in the culture, writes Frank Rich. “In post-9/11 New York, it’s not those tired 20th-century battles about pornography and blasphemy that draw blood. The new culture wars often spring from 9/11 itself, starting with the future, aesthetic and otherwise, of ground zero.” So here’s “the leading front of the culture war: can architecture, commerce and artistic entrepreneurship (a new City Opera? a Museum of Freedom sponsored by American Express?) so quickly bind the gravest wound in New York’s modern memory? Officially, we keep being told, the answer is yes…”

Addictions can be good or bad, writes John Rockwell. But “certainly the presence of a Web site called ArtsJournal.com has added something important to cultural discourse…”

“The very idea of a canon of geniuses may be falling by the wayside; it makes more sense to talk about the flickering brilliance of a group, a place, or a people. In the future, it seems, everyone will be a genius for fifteen minutes. The past decade has seen the rise of pop-music studies, which is dedicated to the idea that Ellington, Hank Williams, and the Velvet Underground were created equal and deserve the same sort of scholarly scrutiny that used to be bestowed only on Bach and sons. Pop-music courses draw crowds of students on college campuses, and academic presses are putting out portentous titles…”

Is it possible to tell whether a writer is male or female? “Scholars have developed a computer algorithm that can examine an anonymous text and determine, with accuracy rates of better than 80 percent, whether the author is male or female. For centuries, linguists and cultural pundits have argued heatedly about whether men and women communicate differently. But the group is the first to create an actual prediction machine. A rather controversial one, too…”

What do you need to know to be considered culturally literate these days? Certainly a knowledge of current movies, an idea of what books are hot this season, maybe a passing interest in what’s wowing Broadway and an awareness of the latest blockbuster show to hit the local museum. But where once classical music was a core art, it is now no longer essential, one of those things educated people believe they ought to know something about in order to be considered educated.

“Where in the brain does artistic creativity reside? Can the “damaged” mind give rise to true art?” There appears to be a link between some kinds of dementia and creativity. “One of the tragic aspects of it is the beginning of creativity heralds the onset of disease. And as the disease progresses, we go through a period where someone perfects the artistic skill, so it steadily improves as the disease is progressing, and then the disease eventually overwhelms the process and eventually the creativity is gone.”

Flash mobs are performance art projects involving large groups of people. Mobilized by e-mail, a mob suddenly materializes in a public place, acts out according to some loose instructions, and then melts away as quickly as it formed. In New York, the city’s finest turned out in force to block the city’s third mob gathering last Wednesday evening. ‘There’s a real desire for something like this out there. Community has always been a big buzzword in the Web space, and I think the smart mob concept helps to bring the virtual community into real space. No matter how good our devices become at allowing us to communicate, I think we’re always going to need some real face time with folks’.”

After decades of talking about it, planning and construction, the giant dam on China’s Three Gorges section of the Yangtze River has finally been erected. “Once completed, the dam would be the largest in the world—as high as a sixty-story building and as wide as five Hoover Dams. The official price tag was more than twenty-one billion dollars, roughly half of which would be funded by a tax on electricity across China.” And after evacuating hundreds of thousands of residents who lived along the river, the river rose in early June, flooding villages and thousands of years of history…

Ever since 9/11, various social and political commentators have declared flatly that the only hope for global peace is for the Islamic world to undergo an “Enlightenment” of the type the West experienced a couple of centuries back. Such an Enlightenment would overturn religious misconceptions, dispel ethnic hatred, and bring the Islamic world into harmony with its neighbors and with itself. Sounds good, hmm? One problem: many highly intelligent people don’t see what was so great about the Western Enlightenment, and make a compelling argument that it caused at least as many problems as it solved.

“While more people are going to the movies than ever before, they’re talking about them less than ever before. It was not always so. Once upon a time, even popular movies were the subject of vigorous conversation. A generation ago, proto-blockbusters like The Exorcist, The Deer Hunter, Annie Hall and Dirty Harry were as hotly debated as they were repeatedly seen. Discussions of movies — their meaning, quality, morality — were the stuff of entire talk shows. Today, the only thing that passes more inconsequentially than the movie is the media gab it generates.”