“For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols — like a digital computer. More recently, however, a growing number of studies support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties — like a biological organism.”
Tag: 06.05
Can You Afford To Work In A Museum?
“The fact is that museum careers in the UK are becoming less and less affordable for anyone with even fairly modest life style expectations and a family to raise in a world of soaring cost of education, health and retirement provision. Add to this the cost of property (not just in London) and anyone starting off on a museum career today is almost guaranteed a pauper’s existence. Are traditional museum jobs imperceptibly returning to be the preserve of the privately wealthy or otherwise financially independent, with a sprinkle of inveterate believers in the cause happy to ‘pay’ for their careers with a garret existence?”
Art Of The Fake
Faking contemporary art is more common, but “with Old Master paintings, it’s just about over. Forgery is much more difficult because we have so many tools to discover them. (See article page 106.) It’s impossible to imagine a Picasso painting coming out of the woodwork that nobody has ever seen. It’s inconceivable that someone would get away with it.”
The 10 Most-Faked Artists
What are the most -faked aartists? Here’s a list…
Teachout: Culture Blogs And The Quality Of Culture
Terry Teachout sees the rise of arts blogs as a profound cultural change. “Artblogs are barely more than three years old. It is far too soon to say which of their opposing tendencies, the atomizing or the embracing, will have a more profound effect on the wider culture they have already started to shape. It may be that blogging will encourage the creation of a new kind of common culture, exerting something of the same unifying force as did the old middlebrow media (and as About Last Night seeks to do). Or not: if the experience of political blogs is any indication, blogging may be more likely to foster discrete subcultures of shared interest, larger and more cohesive but nonetheless separate.”
One View Of The Atonalists…
Schönberg, Babbitt and Carter et al. were failures as compoers, write Miles Hoffman. “They have either grossly overestimated or willfully ignored the limits of the auditory perceptual abilities of most human beings, and somewhere along the way they have either forgotten or willfully ignored the reasons most people listen to music in the first place. They, or their boosters, may write detailed, not to say impenetrably turgid, analyses of the structural underpinnings of their works and the strict mathematical relationships inherent therein, but to the extent that those relationships remain completely unapparent to the human ear—as they so often do—they’re meaningless, and what we actually hear is . . . noise.”