Category: ideas

Classic movies aren’t what they used to be. That’s not a judgment – more of an observation. “The canon has been changing over the last decade, and what makes a classic of cinema is now drastically different to discerning young moviegoers than it has been to their teachers or to the critics or to Leonard Maltin. The implications of the new canon are vast, much bigger than the specific films themselves, and they speak to the ways in which a new generation perceives history, reality, and even perception itself.”

“Trying to be important is a zero-sum game for artists,” writes playwright Jon Robin Baitz. “To be a blocked artist is to have a disease: Almost blind, often numb, you don’t stop wanting to make art. And you don’t want to find yourself staring at others’, riven with rage like Rumpelstiltskin tearing himself asunder. I have seen that loss of direction and rage imprinted into the visages of so many artists I admire; this strange admixture of terror and bluster, the need to be loved, in combination with the need to dominate.”

Blake Gopnik has had it up to here with silly cliches about what art is or isn’t. In fact, he has a top ten list of the silliest pigeonholes critics and pundits try to force art into. Included are such gems as “Good Art Is The Mirror Of Its Times,” “Good Art Is Abstract,” and “Good Art Is Finely Crafted.” Says Gopnik of that last cliche, “a cuckoo clock is finely crafted.”

“Charles Dickens fought recurrent bouts of depression with hyperactivity. Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf took their own lives. Dylan Thomas drank himself into an early grave. Percy Bysshe Shelley suffered from recurring nightmares and hallucination and died at 30. William Blake heard voices. All artistic geniuses, definitely. All more or less mad.” A new Toronto festival examines the connection between madness and artistic genius, from both clinical and cultural perspectives.

With soldiers dying 6,000 miles away, it’s easy for those of us at home to descend into a spiral of ‘arts guilt.’ How dare we (pick one) read a novel/listen to a pop song/attend a play when matters of such import are afoot in the world? “Guilt isn’t really guilt; it’s recognition of ambiguity. It’s realizing that we don’t always know the right thing to do, that sometimes we’ll end up doing the wrong thing, but that our desire to have the arts in our lives – to keep before us the simple pleasure of appreciating the audacity of creativity – can’t be a bad thing, no matter how dark the skies grow in Baghdad, or, God forbid, Boise.”

“Virtually all of Iraq is an archaeological site. Some 10,000 sites have been identified in Iraq, and many more, perhaps half a million, await discovery. They range from the size of a small city to the size of your backyard. Each has its own stories, each is unique, each is irreplaceable, each is crucial. The sum of those stories is a fundamental part of who we are today. Our archaeological heritage is a nonrenewable resource, and when part of it is destroyed, that part of us is lost forever. The political turmoil of the last decade in Iraq has turned its archaeological emergencies into catastrophes.”

A new book examines the properties of human consciousness. “Scientists tend to concentrate on the locations, mechanisms and functions of consciousness. Philosophers, meanwhile, worry away at problems that used to be very old but, thanks to neuroscience, are now very new again. What has the mind to do with the brain? Is it true, as Descartes argued, that if I think, therefore I am? If so, what precisely does the thinking?”

“Most debates about what is good or bad in art, desirable or undesirable, significant or insignificant are debates about preference. Theories are evolved to vindicate that preference and, like ideologies, are stultifying. The best artists are driven by their experience to reflect that experience. Few artists worth their salt begin work with a theory of art. If they do, they end proving theory rather than reflecting perceptions about experience. Perceptions are everything.”

From the groundbreaking news organization that brought you such exclusive reports as “White House Pretty Sure Uzbekistan Diplomat Stole A Bunch Of Soap” comes stunning news concerning the U.S. Congress. It seems that the nation’s top legislative body has accidentally approved a large amount of money to be spent on the arts. Members of Congress are, quite naturally, horrified by the revelation, with the Senate majority leader quoted as barking, “We approved what?” A House member was aghast at the implications of the funding allocation: “This means some limp-wristed NEA member will decide what qualifies as art rather than Congress or the president. Remind me never to skim a bill again, no matter how long it is.”