Have you always wondered what the difference is between a violin and a viola? Or pondered exactly who it is that has to completely overhaul a museum’s galleries between exhibits? Or puzzled over how exactly that dancer is able to hold that other dancer in the air by her big toe without either of them sustaining serious injury? Well, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is here to help: from now until August 1, the paper’s arts section is accepting all the questions about the arts that you’ve never asked for fear of sounding stupid. And they promise to answer them, too. Go on – you know you’ve got one…
Tag: 07.19.03
And We Thought They Just Liked Art!
Regardless of the decison the heritage lottery fund makes in the Raphael case, the larger problem will remain: at the moment, there is nothing to prevent wealthy citizens who happen to own artworks with ‘national import’ from selling them to foreigners. For several decades, the high levels of inheritance tax, from which such art is exempt, forced the aristocrats not to sell simply as a matter of investment strategy. But in the last 25 years, “all tax rates have come down, and the dukes have changed their tune. It is once again worth their while to sell, so they want to sell.”
If You Can’t Beat It, Use It
For too long, says Simon Beer, museums have viewed technology as an unfortunate competitor for their high-minded offerings, and computers as the brain-sucking mechanism that was forcing them to ‘dumb down’ their exhibits. But “the misconception that technology simply means computers is giving way to the realisation that using technology creatively can bring the nation’s past to life and communicate with a much wider audience.”
Music The Healer, Music The Benevolent
Even in our post-religious society, music is frequently described with the sort of reverence generally reserved for prayer, says composer James MacMillan. Of course, the ties between religion and music are long and well-documented, but isn’t there a more fundamental reason why we view serious music with such awe? “It is not only theologians who see a wider context for the discussion of music. The English composer and agnostic Michael Tippett several times made the bold claim that there was a connection between music and compassion. This is fascinating since that was precisely the belief of the medieval music guilds of Europe, which venerated Job as the patron saint of music before Saint Cecilia came along.”
Feeding At An Empty Trough in Pittsburgh?
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which has been mired in financial quicksand for more than a year, is asking a municipal funding agency to nearly double the amount it contributes to the orchestra. The Allegheny Regional Asset District gave the orchestra $725,000 last fiscal year, on a request for $900,000. This year, the PSO says it needs $1.5 million, which will likely be a hard sell at a time when states across the U.S. are strapped for cash themselves.
Ivry: Jacobsen Influenced Whole U.S. Literary Culture
“The poet Josephine Jacobsen, who died last week in Maryland at age 94, was a cultural exception. Although she never attended college, she earned the respect of her fellow writers and was named poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (the honorary job now called United States poet laureate) in 1971. She did not gain widespread recognition until her 60’s, although her collected poems, In the Crevice of Time, and selected prose, The Instant of Knowing, which appeared when she was an octogenarian, are still in print and winning new readers at a vigorous clip.”
Harry Potter And The Academic Obsession
No, you can’t major in Harry Potter. Not yet, anyway. But JK Rowling’s boy wizard is becoming a figure of increasing interest to academics and intellectuals who are spending hours at prestigious conferences deconstructing the world of Hogwarts and matching it up with minutiae from the history of various real-world intellectual movements. “A bit enthusiastic, perhaps, but such outsize claims may spring from insecurity. After all, no less a figure than Harold Bloom has derided Ms. Rowling’s writing as ‘goo,’ while William Safire… scornfully (though presciently) predicted that ‘scholarly tomes will be written about the underlying motifs of the Potter series,’ despite its being largely ‘a waste of adult time.'”
The Woman Who Knows How To Rebuild Iraq
When the U.S. government needed a blueprint for rebuilding Japan after World War II, they looked not within the American military-industrial complex, but to a cultural anthropologist named Ruth Benedict. “The choice to rely so heavily on cultural anthropologists in the rebuilding of a defeated enemy has particular resonance now as the United States struggles to rebuild a stable and viable Iraq, a country that, like Japan, is seen as both impossibly foreign and forbidding.” The idea of rebuilding a foreign nation without a deep and abiding knowledge of and respect for its culture seems risky at best, but there seem to be few Ruth Benedicts around to help with the current mess in Iraq. Or, perhaps more accurately, if they do exist, no one’s asking for their help.
Chronicling the Art of the New Persuaders
They’re often annoying, they’re frequently invasive, they’re more than occasionally misleading, and almost no one admits to liking them. But ads have come to define modern culture, and while it may be a stretch to brand naked salesmanship as art, it’s difficult to overlook a phenomenon that causes millions of people to watch a specific football game in which they have little interest, just to see how Pepsi will be trying to get us to buy their product this year. A new 3-volume encyclopedia sets out to chronicle the history and uncover the cultural meaning of the advertising explosion of the last century.
Affirmative Action Needed At The Justice League?
Comic books are a booming business, and despite technological and marketing advances in the decades since the genre first burst upon the scene, superhero stories are much the same as they ever were. Good battles evil, and good wins nine times out of ten. Brooding crusaders in masks and (let’s face it) ridiculously inconvenient capes swoop about densely populated cities like flying cat burglars, and no one but the bad guys ever takes a shot at them. And after countless battles, endless fistfights, and millions upon millions of horrible puns, nearly all the heroes are still white, and most of the women are, to but it bluntly, ridiculously top-heavy. Will comic books ever get with the times?