Media mergers and ownership consolidation aren’t just a recent phenomenon. Back “in the late 1960s, during a flurry of media-industry mergers, The Atlantic published several articles that pointedly asked, Who controls the media? and How big is too big?” Some of the questions the magazine explored then seem applicable once again.
Category: ideas
Art Or Cruel Exploitation?
Santiago Sierra creates “art” that uses people – exploits them, actually. They make powerful messages, but are they really art? He has “created pieces that involved workers from the local underclass being paid to do meaningless tasks: support a piece of Sheetrock at a 65-degree angle for an entire day; sit inside a cardboard box; or push around two-ton blocks of concrete. By designing such deliberately pointless ‘jobs,’ he highlighted the disjunction between such workers and their work, showing labor as an imposed condition rather than a choice one makes. ‘The remunerated worker doesn?t care if you tell him to clean the room or make it dirtier. As long as you pay him, it?s exactly the same. The relationship to work is based only upon money’.”
Creativity – An Overused And Abused Idea
Everyone seems to talk about creativity as if it were this force innate to every person, and that some sort of spigot is all that is required to cause it to gush forth. Barbican director John Tusa’s new book explores what it means to be creative. “Creative, creation, creativity, as Tusa says in his introduction, ‘are some of the most overused and ultimately debased words in the language’, which are liberally applied by everybody from bureaucrats to politicians to thinktanks…”
Whatever Happened To Art Reflecting Reality?
Russell Smith is tired of being overwhelmed by the surreal world of modern movies, books, and art. Events that should be spread over a year happen in a day, bullets slow to the speed of land tortoises, and the whole experience is simply exhausting. “I’m wondering if naturalism is well and truly dead in all the arts, in entertainment and academic art equally. Fantasy, surrealism and downright implausibility have been the 21st century’s dominant artistic modes so far.”
Where Science And Humanity Meet
“Scientists are working in the emerging field of biomimetics, in which machines are designed to function like biological systems. They have only the foggiest idea of how the human brain perceives and acts on information from the body’s sense organs, even though they’ve known the mechanics of those organs for many years.” It’s all part of the grander struggle for what is sometimes called Artificial Intelligence – the seemingly Quixotic quest to build a machine that can think, learn, and react like a human – and it’s as not as much about building robots as it is about understanding basic functions of humanity.
Higher (Blogger) Education
Blogging is catching on with academics. “In their skeptical moments, academic bloggers worry that the medium smells faddish, ephemeral. But they also make a strong case for blogging’s virtues, the foremost of which is freedom of tone. Blog entries can range from three-word bursts of sarcasm to carefully honed 5,000-word treatises. The sweet spot lies somewhere in between, where scholars tackle serious questions in a loose-limbed, vernacular mode. Blogging also offers speed; the opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe; and the freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally available to people with Ph.D.’s.”
The Limits Of Knowledge?
Are there limits to what it is possible for us to know? “The last century brought the first hints of fundamental, inherent limits on the knowable. Kurt Godel discovered, to everyone’s shock, that some statements in mathematics can be neither proved nor disproved. And physicists showed that the laws of quantum mechanics prevent us from knowing simultaneously both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle. Will the world continue to yield to man’s curiosity, or will we encounter evermore Godelian limits?”
How To Be A Critic
So what makes art good? How about music? Or movies, or books? Most anyone who reads a newspaper spends a fair amount of time being told what’s good and what isn’t by supposed experts in the field, but how do the critics draw their conclusions? What’s the frame of reference? The Denver Post’s critics get together to offer readers a look into their world, and the results are as diverse as the writers themselves. TV critic Joanne Ostrow sees occasional quality as a welcome relief from the broadcast wasteland. Art critic Kyle MacMillan says that all great art, even the topical kind, can withstand the test of time. And rock critic G. Brown thinks that, in an industry dominated by fakes and puffery, real quality is found by looking for the musicians who make you believe what they’re singing.
Amateur Poets Must Be Stopped!
Barney McLelland is sick to death of bad poetry being churned out by untrained hands in the misguided name of self-expression. “Numerous surveys, declining SAT scores, and classroom anecdotes have established that many… young Americans can barely read, cannot spell or do arithmetic, and know next to nothing of their own history; but they do not let mere ignorance get in the way of self-expression.” People are free to write whatever they like, of course, but just as we would not buy a handmade wood cabinet from an amateur, McLelland says we should stop encouraging every moron with a word processor to set his personal neuroses to verse.
Why Government Is Bailing Out Of The Arts
In America state governments are getting out of the arts business. State after state is slashing arts funding. Why now? ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan suggests that in trying to recover from the culture wars of the early 1990s, arts leaders may have unintentionally pursued an endgame strategy. “As the current arts-funding crisis suggests—the survival strategy might have topped itself out and ultimately killed public arts funding.”