Whereas “artists” originally were, by definition, people who create art, “art” is now defined as anything made by a purported artist. The “institutional theory” codifying that premise is fully operative in the global art establishment.
Tag: 04.17
When Ancient Athenians Tried To Make Athens Great Again
“Twenty-four centuries ago, Athens was upended by the outcome of a vote that is worth revisiting today. A war-weary citizenry, raised on democratic exceptionalism but disillusioned by its leaders, wanted to feel great again—a recipe for unease and raw vindictiveness, then as now. The populace had no strongman to turn to, ready with promises that the polis would soon be winning, winning like never before. But hanging around the agora, volubly engaging residents of every rank, was someone to turn on: Socrates, whose provocative questioning of the city-state’s sense of moral superiority no longer seemed as entertaining as it had in more secure times.”
TS Eliot Had Very Specific Ideas About The Function And Role Of Criticism
What makes a critical judgment true is still a quandary. Eliot and F.R. Leavis exempted themselves from “interpretation,” which Eliot declared to be “only legitimate when it is not interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed.” This sentence marks a typical rhythm in Eliot’s critical mind: he tends to say that an exalted something is nothing but something mean to which it may decently be reduced.
Music Prof: All Music Today Is “Classical” – Music Styles Interact/Blend/Recombine
From my own teaching of introductory music classes, I can report that today’s students still listen to classical music—but they don’t single it out as anything special or elite. Armed with laptops, tablets, smartphones, and iPods, and assisted by iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, and other online resources, they consume vast amounts of music on a daily basis. And they have astonishingly cosmopolitan palates, happily taking in reggae, heavy metal, gamelan, hip hop, grunge, salsa, jazz, classical, klezmer—and much more, in equal measure. It’s all one playlist, it’s all music, and it’s all “classic.”
Death, Destruction, And Deity: How Traditional Spanish Religious Art Was Incorporated Into Picasso’s ‘Guernica’
Experts and lay viewers alike have seen countless images and ingredients in the Picasso masterwork, but scholar Gijs van Hensbergen identifies a key influence little known outside Spain: the loose canvas works known as sargas.
Darwin Had It Right: Work Way Less, Accomplish Way More
“Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest ‘working’ hours.”
Who Are Today’s Great Cultural Critics? (Are There Any?)
“Cultural criticism, we should remind ourselves, can be almost as important as the art itself, can indeed be part of the art. There have been great creative critics, from Alexander Pope (in The Dunciad, Epistle to Lord Burlington, etc) and Dr Johnson onwards, who combined the two arts with the skill of genius. Byron was another, in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Vision of Judgment, and parts of Don Juan. Can you name a great contemporary cultural critic? Someone who could, in writing about literature and other aspects of our culture, hold a candle to T. S. Eliot on poetry, or Herbert Read on modern art? I asked several highly knowledgeable people, who struggled to do so.”
Where Did Thinkers Search For The Location Of The Human Soul Before Modern Neuroscience?
Daniel Suggs reviews the early history of the science of the soul in the Western world, from Vesalius to Donne to Marlowe to Overton to the New England doctor who determined (with methodology that wasn’t exactly rigorous or ethical) that the soul weighs 21 grams.