Category: ideas

What’s all this about trying to get the masses interested in art? They only spoil it for those who actually care… “The row in front of me was occupied by a family — let’s call them the Odious-Halfwits — who spent the entire evening smooching, snogging, conducting and, literally, jumping up and down in their seats in time with the music. They behaved exactly as they would have done in their own home, making not the slightest concession to the fact that, as part of an audience, they were surrounded by thousands of people trying to concentrate on a masterpiece. The truth is that art, by its very nature, is not for the masses. The attempt to prove otherwise is self-destructive.”

Weblogs have been touted as the loosing of democratic speech – anyone can publish, anyone can read. But as there are more weblogs, natural powerlaws are kicking in and predictably some blogs are rising above the rest. “For much of the last century, investigators have been finding power law distributions in human systems. The economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that wealth follows a ‘predictable imbalance’, with 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth. The linguist George Zipf observed that word frequency falls in a power law pattern, with a small number of high frequency words (I, of, the), a moderate number of common words (book, cat cup), and a huge number of low frequency words (peripatetic, hypognathous).” Thus too, it appears with the success of weblogs…

“How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior? As simply as it can be asked, this is one of the most fundamental and pervasive questions in all of science. A human brain, for example, is in one sense a trillion neurons connected in a big electrochemical lump. But to each of us who has one, a brain is clearly much more, exhibiting properties like consciousness, memory, and personality, whose nature cannot be explained simply in terms of aggregations of neurons. What makes the problem hard, and what makes complex systems complex, is that the parts making up the whole don’t sum up in any simple fashion. Rather, they interact with each other, and in interacting, even quite simple components can generate bewildering behavior.”

For years, fast food – particularly of the McDonald’s variety – has been the poster child for globalization and the unrelenting blandization of world culture. But scholars are increasingly disputing “the idea that mass production threatens the existence of particular cultural identities, either abroad or at home. After all, regional cuisines are displaying an unexpected vitality in this age of chain restaurants and global brand-names. Why? Many people, it seems, are content to preserve their local cultures through food that is as processed and mass-produced as a Happy Meal.”

Is Post-Modernism dead? No – it’s deeply embedded in popular culture. “The increasing influence of postmodernism on pop culture is born of our overfamiliarity with the tricks of conventional storytelling, according to Poe. We now have generations growing from infancy bombarded by TV and film that employ narrative conventions. What used to be necessary storytelling devices – a recognizable chronology, character development, emotional identification with characters and situations – are becoming clichés. Fans of postmodernism think of themselves as too educated and too smart to fall for those clichés. Postmodernism is ironic; it’s always winking at the audience and making them part of the game, enlisting them as co-conspirators.”

The idea of erecting monuments has seemed so old-fashioned for a long time. “The view that memory is an impediment to modernity has been widely shared by architects, artists, and theorists. The obsolescence of the monument became almost an axiom of the modernist creed. But sometimes aesthetic theory and artistic fashion must yield before the harshness of lived history. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial began to change the prevailing opinion that the monument is dead, not least because it availed itself of a modernist vocabulary to accomplish its commemoration.”

Back in 1999, Malcolm Rogers made himself rather unpopular with his staff at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, when he consolidated several departments, and even let a few long-tenured employees go. “The radical restructuring made international news in the art world as Rogers dismantled curatorial fiefdoms and folded decorative arts into American and European painting departments. Rogers’ rallying cry was ‘One Museum,’ where curators would work together to display artworks in different media and incorporate work from other cultures and historical periods that served as influences. Paintings, sculpture and decorative arts would be displayed together so that objects could ‘speak’ to each other. Now Rogers’ revolution is starting to evolve in the galleries.”