Category: ideas

“Today colleges and universities are seen principally as providing tickets to financial security and economic status. Few people worry about higher-education institutions leading young people astray. If anything, the lament is that they have, in their pursuit of market advantage, become dispensers of degrees and certificates rather than vibrant communities of educators who originate, debate, and promulgate important ideas. What happened? In part, colleges and universities are what they are today because the 1970s began so badly. The result is likely to be equally clear: a set of colleges and universities that have come to believe their futures are best served by satisfying the interests of their customers, even if that ultimately means becoming increasingly self-interested and detached from broader public goals.”

“Clearly Britain is in a bad way. A watered-down conceptual art is the current orthodoxy. Much of what looked new and radical when it first emerged in the 1960s is now being run past us again, and it’s limping badly. And so much of it is the same. It really looks as if art students were issued with a pattern book of how to come up with a show — six ideas on the back of an envelope: good tried-and-tested old concepts that won’t cause anyone too much trouble. How has this come to pass? The decline of one of our greatest glories — the art schools — has much to answer for.”

For years critics have been observing the growing sophistication and power of the entertainment/marketing complex and marveling at its effectiveness in selling its messages to the public. But “the media giants that wield such clout don’t always put it to such frivolous use. We are not just plugged into their matrix to be sold movies and other entertainment products. These companies can also plug the nation into news narratives as ubiquitous and lightweight as ‘The Matrix Reloaded,’ but with more damaging side effects.”

“Nearly all politicians care about branding — just as Procter & Gamble fixates on creating positive ‘brand awareness’ about Crest, Cheer, Pampers and Pepto-Bismol. But [Secretary of Homeland Security Tom] Ridge is the rare public official who uses the term. He is attuned to small details of his department’s ‘visual brand.’ These include the creation of DHS logos, patches and signs.” The fact is, Homeland Security’s mission is as much about selling itself to the public as it is about preventing terrorist attacks. The idea is to find new and innovative ways to convince an increasingly cynical public to take the department’s pronouncements seriously.

With genetic research opening up new worlds of medical intervention at a stunning rate, there is still much virulent opposition to even the smallest suggestion of genetic manipulation in humans, especially when it comes to notions of changing not just who we are, but what we can do. But, says Slavoj Zizek, too many objections are based on our own outdated notions of humanity and what constitutes it. “The point is that both hard work and natural talent are considered ‘part of me’, while using a drug is ‘artificial’ enhancement because it is a form of external manipulation. Which brings us back to the… problem: once we know that my ‘natural talent’ depends on the levels of certain chemicals in my brain, does it matter, morally, whether I acquired it from outside or have possessed it from birth?”

A new website explores the mind and world of Albert Einstein. “In addition to the voluminous collection of Einstein’s writings, some never before published and none previously available online, the website will house an extensive database of 40,000 documents, images and research on Einstein’s life and work, as well as digitized copies of Einstein’s professional and personal correspondence and pages from his notebooks and travel diaries.”

In the most recent past, critics have returned to studying art in historical social context. The art theory years of the 60s and 70s seem like a distant past. “As we look back at the theory years today, now that the fierce polemical passions have waned, the transformation of literary studies through several phases in a single generation seems astonishing. Where did it come from? Are its sources to be found in the 1960s, the tumultuous decade in which it emerged? In the poststructuralist phase, scholarship and criticism that had been focused on individual writers gave way to a skeptical approach to all interpretation.”

“It is almost too perfect that Las Vegas, the city where Tupac Shakur was murdered in 1996, would be the undoing of William Bennett. In 1995, Mr. Bennett, serving as America’s self-appointed cultural commissar, made a target of Tupac, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and other practitioners of gangsta rap. They were public enemy No. 1 in his relentless battle against what he was fond of calling ‘the filth, sewage and mindless bloodletting of the popular entertainment industry.’ Mr. Bennett was above such vulgarity. He had been secretary of education. He had attacked the National Endowment for the Arts for perpetrating junk. He had anthologized Plato and Aesop in The Book of Virtues. But the guy just couldn’t keep away from Vegas.”

Dave Barry is America’s preeminent humor columnist, and for some time now, he has been fascinated by the predilection of British art museums for “paying large sums of money for works of art that can only be described as extremely innovative (I am using ‘innovative’ in the sense of ‘stupid’).” Having previously questioned the legitimacy of Martin Creed’s flickering lights, Barry is now doubled over by the news that artist Ceal Floyer has won a major award for a bag of trash. “To judge from the photograph in the Times, it is a standard black plastic garbage bag, just like the ones you put your garbage in, except of course that you have to pay people to haul your garbage bags away, whereas Ms. Floyer got $47,000 for hers.”