“There seems to be no critical culture in America today. A critical culture is one that struggles actively over how human beings should live and what our life means. Most of us can remember living in the critical culture of the sixties-a few of us can even remember the critical culture of the thirties-and we can feel the difference. When a critical culture breaks down or wears out or fades away, sources of joy dry up. What makes this happen? Why has it happened now?” – Dissent
Tag: 03.00
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO HOLLYWOOD
“Art takes its inspiration from two sources, religion and entertainment–the heavenly and the festive. But today, everything is conflated with entertainment as Hollywood conceives it. In 1999, U.S. movies earned about $29.8 billion out of a total global take of $33.4 billion. And that figure does not include income from video sales, merchandising, licensing, concessions, and other tie-ins.” Is Hollywood’s view of the world so compelling that it has to crush everything in its path? – Civilization 03/00
CRITIC-PROOF
- After studying the life of critic Clement Greenberg, an amateur artist declares his manifesto: “In my private universe the act of creativity is always just in its beginning, formative, emergent stages, before it becomes crystallized into the known, predictable, and dismissible. Art has not yet been hijacked by anyone to be critiqued, theorized, and deconstructed; subverted into something unintended, opposite and unforeseen; used against itself in the cause of one tyranny after another.” – *spark-online
RETURN TO OWNERS
Germany and Russia finally come to terms on returning some of the art they looted from one another during the Second World War. – ARTNews
NEW LOOK AT HIP HOP
Christiane Crawford belongs to the first generation that grew up on hip-hop and saw its progression from urban freestyle to suburban entertainment, and she is offering successive generations an outlet she never had. Last summer, Crawford and DJ Jessie Singer developed Body, a semi-monthly event merging urban, social, and performance dance into a kind of live update on the TV dance show “Soul Train.” – Dance Magazine
PROTECT THIS
“There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you’ve written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision.” – Reason
NOT QUITE YET
Every American composer seems to be writing opera these days. But despite some high-profile conservative efforts (“Gatsby,” “A View from The Bridge”) American opera hasn’t yet come into its own. Don’t despair though – “Prior to World War II, it was widely felt that British work was dead beyond hope of revival; the last opera by an English-born composer to enter the standard repertoire had been Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, composed in 1689.” Then in 1945, Benjamin Britten wrote “Peter Grimes” and a new era in British opera commenced. – Commentary
THOROUGHLY THOREAU
In the years following the publication of his proto-ecological gospel “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau began a series of essays that looked much more like a biologist’s field notebooks – filled with taxonomical lists and seasonal charts on flowerings and seed dispersal – than a philosophical treatise. New scholarship shows Thoreau’s genius is ever-present in the notebooks, which reflect the “great American prose stylist’s tart wit, flinty clarity, and aphoristic bite.” – The Atlantic
LORD OF THE RIP-OFF
“Somehow in the post-World War era of popular literature, Generic Fantasy became the be-all and end-all escape device. It was so easy to write. No bothering with grounding your book in reality, with all its annoying demands. Just assume that everything in your book takes place in a “Secondary World”, and you can write anything you want. – *spark-online
BAD DHARMA
Critics have accused Indian writers who write in English of peppering their works with Sanskrit to “exoticize the Indian landscape to signal their Indianness to the West.” But does inclusion of these exoticizing elements disqualify their Indian authenticness? “Believe in your mashooq and you will be Indian, a good artist or an adequate one, local and global, soft as a rose petal, and as hard as thunder, not this, not that, and everything you need to be. You will be free.” – Boston Review