Tag: 11.00

HOW WE MAKE CULTURE

Is there such a thing as “the culture?” “In some ways our thinking about nature on the one hand and ‘the culture’ on the other has undergone a reversal within a matter of decades. It used to be that the cultural aspect of ordinary reality was, by definition, the part most amenable to human transformation, whereas the natural aspect was seen as having a dynamic of its own, which was largely out of our hands. ‘The culture’ is today the more fearsome realm, or at any rate the more convenient scapegoat, and the notion that we have only limited influence over it appears to be widespread.” – The Atlantic 11/00

IT’D BE DIFFERENT IF IT WAS GREAT ARCHITECTURE

It will cost $1.5 billion to repair New York’s crumbling Lincoln Center. So instead, why not just tear it down and start over? “It’s time to start thinking hard about tearing down Lincoln Center and building up a new, much better one—an architectural masterpiece that will signal New York City’s miraculous recovery over the last decade and its renewed confidence that it will be the capital of the twenty-first century as it has been of the twentieth.” – City Journal 11/00

THE VALUE OF ART

“The tragedy is that American culture is increasingly Postmodernist, whether we identify ourselves as pragmatists or as persons of faith, as defenders of tradition or as progressives. To ask about the practical value of the fine arts is to trivialize them as thoroughly as the rabid academic deconstructionists who argue that standards and canons are simply tools of oppression and that all art is ultimately political. Both sides seek to subsume art to base political purposes. The Right wants to use art to ‘remoralize’ the society, and the Left wants to use it for social therapy, to encourage ‘oppressed’ groups.” – American Outlook 11/00

IS PRINT REALLY DEAD?

Last week’s E-book publishing conference in New York had everyone pondering the future of printed books. “Microsoft’s vice president in charge of electronic books and ‘tablet’ computing devices, reiterated the company’s prediction that the last print edition of The New York Times would appear in 2018, and you could feel the thought-wave slither through the room like an eel. 2018? Hey, I was planning to be around in 2018 – and with some time to look at the paper finally, too.” – The Atlantic

A DEALER’S MEMOIR

Chicago art dealer Richard Feigen sees art endangered everywhere — “by a misplaced egalitarianism, by a trendy, superheated market in contemporary art, by the fads that museums do not always have the willpower to resist, by trustees who wrest control from more knowledgeable museum directors and curators, and by opportunists who use collections for their own aggrandizement. Indeed, he provides plenty of scandalous examples of exactly these problems as they have affected major collections.” – Book Magazine

BUILDING A HOUSE OF JAZZ

The Lincoln Center jazz program is establishing a place for itself among New York’s cultural institutions. But what about those who say that institutionalizing jazz is to kill it? Wynton Marsalis: Those who say that are “closet oppressors armed with a ‘fake mythology’—the kind of people who not only don’t play it, but don’t even like it. It’s like telling somebody who’s in a two-room house, ‘You’ve done OK in a two-room house—why y’all want to build a five-room house?’” – Metropolis

A CRY ABOUT BELLOW

James Atlas’ new biography of Saul Bellow has been winning critical praise everywhere. Well, almost everywhere: “Errors and confusions abound, as do misreadings of passages from Bellow’s correspondence, even while passages from his novels never receive the benefit of close interpretation or stylistic commentary. Atlas’s characterisations of Bellow are peculiarly static. From beginning to end he is framed in an unchanging posture, and defined by a very limited and limiting repertory of psychological labels and clichés.” – London Review of Books

WRITING ABOUT WRITING AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

The modern literary biography is wrapped in a paradox. “Only famous writers attract biographies, writers who are famous because their writings are. But the more space a literary biographer devotes to discussing an author’s writing, the less commercial the biography will seem to be, to those who decide which books to publish and push. It looks as though the word is out that readers will happily read about famous writers as long as they don’t have to be troubled much about what they wrote.” – London Review of Books

THE MEANING OF ART

“Art, like beauty, has no essence: it cannot be defined or explained in purely rational terms. If anything, art-making and art-recognition are fundamentally irrational processes, based on intuition, or “what feels right”. There is a continuous battle raging between rational and irrational, order and chaos, creation and destruction, Classical and Romantic.” – *spark-online 11/00