“Humankind’s greatest creation has always been its cities. They represent the ultimate handiwork of our imagination as a species, compressing and unleashing the creative urges of humanity. From the earliest beginnings, when only a tiny fraction of humans lived in cities, they have been the places that generated most of mankind’s art, religion, culture, commerce, and technology.”
Tag: 04.05
What Defines A Modern Painting?
“It used to be so simple: a painting was the mediated result of an artist’s application of wet paint on a flat surface. No more. Having absorbed high culture and low, painting has turned itself out in mixed-media assemblages that include both organic and synthetic materials and occasionally involve photography and digital printing. It has borrowed from commercial illustration and architectural, tattoo, and textile design, and exhibited itself as sculpture or in various combinations of all the above, in both abstraction and representation. At this point, even those distinctions seem quaint.”
Lebrecht: Orchestras Need To Break With Stodgy Routine
Norman Lebrecht has been predicting the death of classical music for years, but lately, he has begun to wonder what, if anything, can be done to reverse the decline of orchestral popularity. The short attention-span thesis is popular, but doesn’t hold up when you consider the length of movies and rock concerts. Ticket prices, long thought to be a turnoff to potential concertgoers, are also not to blame, since price cuts at several major orchestras have failed to produce significant new audiences. Lebrecht’s latest theory is that the traditional formula of an evening concert beginning at 7 or 8pm and lasting two hours simply does nothing to attract modern youth. “In Madrid and Barcelona, concerts begin at 10 pm and are thronged by youngsters.”
Post-Classical (And How We Got Here)
Why has classical music been on the decline in America? Joseph Horowitz tells a history aimed at suggesting some reasons. “History with a moral is by definition suspect. But Horowitz, for all the enthusiasm with which he espouses his various musical causes, is for the most part an impressively fair-minded historian who takes care to avoid superimposing contemporary agendas on past events. One need not always agree with his interpretations of those events in order to profit from his account of how European classical music took hold in a new world with sharply different cultural priorities—as well as from his speculations regarding its prospects of survival in the 21st century.”
Knowledge – Of Art And Science
“In the modern world, we have seen scientific knowledge assume a status as the most valuable or authoritative kind of knowledge, while artistic knowledge and intelligence is relegated to a secondary status. Science usually struggles when that which is unquantifiable can’t be squeezed into an equation, while music and the arts often stretch perception away from the steady state. Yet equations are metaphors for reality and perhaps have more similarity to art than we might usually accord them.”
The Moscow Biennale’s Important First Steps
It’s not clear if the first Moscow Biennale achieved its ambitious goals, but “visitors, Russian and Western, agreed that the biennale was the most important event in Russian art of the past ten years. And it seems that legitimization of contemporary art was at least partially achieved.”