“De Botton’s growing cultural presence, especially his recent forays into museum curation with his Art as Therapy project, has inflamed long-standing antipathy toward him from critics, both in the U.K. and in the U.S. Critics on the right attack him for diluting the purity of his sources, while those on the left accuse him of fashioning meaning where there is only historical contingency and politics. Ultimately, though, de Botton’s varied initiatives are best seen as a mostly salutary, if wildly ambitious and sometimes misfiring, effort to ennoble modern urban life.”
Tag: 05.15
SF Chronicle Art Critic Kenneth Baker Retires (Perhaps A Few Years Too Late, He Writes)
Being a newspaper critic has changed. “When Chronicle managers began telling us critics and columnists that we had to cultivate “our brand”—our own, not just the company’s—I knew my days in the industry were numbered. The reactionary libertarianism ascendant in recent years has been driven in part by the newly minted mythology of nearby Silicon Valley, of which San Francisco has lately become a bedroom community.
Philip Roth Said He Was Retiring. But He Hasn’t. Is This His Failure?
“No, Roth’s announcement that he would leave the literary stage, followed by his conspicuous failure to do so in favor of a series of curtain calls, is about us—Roth’s audience, a community of readers. We’re the ones endlessly fascinated by Roth’s penchant to pontificate about himself in public.”
Fraternities Once Were Paragons Of Accomplishment and Excellence. But Then…
These organizations, which were literary and social societies, were founded very much in the same spirit as Phi Beta Kappa. They fashioned themselves with the model of ancient Greece in mind. They were named after Greek letters during a period in American history when “Greece eclipsed Rome as the model for virtuous citizenship in the American imagination and at colleges particularly.”
Benjamin Millepied Talks About Running The Paris Opera Ballet
“The idea behind [L.A. Dance Propject] was to create a home for the American modern dance repertory, but Paris is bringing me back to my career as a dancer. It’s a ballet company, first and foremost. Of course there are all the issues that go with the size – the bureaucracy, the French laws, the unions. There is stuff in the system that’s 150 years old, and there is so much talk about tradition!”
We’re Losing Our Words For Outdoors Things As We Use More Words For Indoors Things
“Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for differ-ent trees and creatures. A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages. And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious.”
A Different Way To Think About Museum Deaccessioning
“As old fashioned as it sounds, and with as many mistakes as have already been made over the past half century or so, it may well be that art museum collections should only be assigned dollar values for insurance purposes and with the understanding that the loss of the collection is the loss of the museum’s reason for existence. As someone once remarked, Grant’s tomb without Ulysses S. is rather pointless.”
Are “Age Of Enlightenment” Ideas Messing With Our Ability To Cope In The Age Of Social Media?
Crawford’s basic beef with the Enlightenment is that it so loosened our grip on reality, plunging us into the wishy-washiness of our own subjectivities, that we lack the grit to resist the usurpation of our “attentional environment” by all the aspects of contemporary life that tick Crawford off.
When Big Architectural Firms Get Too Big
“Though small firms long for the workload stability that large firms can achieve, the management of the multiplicity of talent spread globally can be extraordinarily difficult. A large firm can form a 100-person team of engineers and architects for an infra-structure project in Hong Kong, but day-to-day it finds it has too many mechanical engineers in Singapore and not enough in Chicago.”
LA’s Architecture Patron (And What He Expects For His Largesse)
“Now that private philanthropy largely finances American arts institutions, private donors deploy dollars to wield vast influence over those public entities. No one has used such power like Eli Broad. With his generosity comes an obsessive involvement that can drive away allies, just as his gifts and unstinting commitment have raised millions for causes he cares about.”