Tag: 12.03

The Electric Guitar Going Digital

Gibson is setting out to introduce the first major innovation to the electric guitar in 70 years. “An audio converter inside the instrument’s body translates string vibrations into a digital signal that can travel over a standard Cat-5 Ethernet cable. The company will continue to sell traditional Les Pauls, but CEO Henry Juszkiewicz thinks it won’t be long before all guitarists go digital.”

The Nature OF Nurture (Or The Other Way Around)

“Fifty years after the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, we are for the first time in a position to understand directly DNA’s contribution to the mind. And the story is vastly different from—and vastly more interesting than—anything we had anticipated. The emerging picture of nature’s role in the formation of the mind is at odds with a conventional view.”

Where’s The Art In Art History?

Roger Kimball doesn’t think much of the teaching of art history these days. “Today, the study of art history is more and more about subordinating art—to “theory,” to politics, to just about anything that allows one to dispense with the burden of experiencing art natively, on its own terms. This is accomplished primarily by enlisting art as an illustration of some extraneous, non-artistic, non-aesthetic narrative. Increasingly, art history is pressed into battle —a battle against racism, say, or the plight of women or on behalf of social justice. Whatever. The result is that art becomes an adjunct to an agenda: an alibi for … you can fill in the blank by consulting this week’s list of trendy causes. In a word, what we are witnessing is the triumph of political correctness in art history.”

NEA Shakespeare Program Pacifies Critics

New Criterion editors have generally been against public funding of the arts in general and the NEA in particular. But “it is gratifying to report that the National Endowment for the Arts seems finally to have come around to our way of thinking on these issues. Under the leadership of the distinguished poet and critic Dana Gioia, the NEA has said farewell to the ephemeral and the meretricious. One evidence of the agency’s new commitment to quality is Shakespeare in American Communities.”

LA Discovers Alt-Film

Los Angeles has never been much of a home to independent or alternative film; there’s too much mainstream industry going on. But recently that’s begun to change. “Most striking are several expensive new or renovated theaters either just opening or being planned. They are evidence that interest in film’s history here goes far beyond the casual stroll along Hollywood Boulevard’s tacky Walk of Fame. Blessed with access to pristine 35mm prints of old movies from various studios and other archives, these venues are making L.A. a mecca for retro cinema. And independent and art/experimental films.”

DBC Pierre – Out Of Texas…Really Out

How could DBC Pierre have won this year’s Booker Prize? “Set in America, Pierre’s book is not just bad; it is so awful that its victory suggests there is something deeply wrong with British literary culture. To an American reader the book provokes neither amusement nor outrage, but puzzlement: are the British literati so ignorant of the US that they can think this is a competent parody?”

The Year That Was (And Not Any Better)

Why do annual reports always make things look as rosy a possible, asks Theatre Communications Group director Ben Cameron. So his assessment of the current year in theatre business: “Conceived in affluent times, the 2002 fiscal year was one redefined by the events of 9/11, by unanticipated new patterns of audience behavior and fears of terrorism, by a crumbling national economy and rapidly escalating unemployment. As our recently released TheatreFacts 2002 demonstrates, it was a year in which local and city funding fell by 44 percent, in which the number of corporate donors fell, in which foundation funding slipped and in which field expenses grew more quickly than earned revenues. It was a year in which 54 percent of theatres finished the year with a deficit—a shocking slide from the 71 percent that had achieved a surplus just two years earlier—and had not individual contributors rallied in unprecedented numbers, covering more than 20 percent of expenses, as opposed to the 9.6 percent covered five years ago—the results would have been far worse.”

Outsider Art Comes Inside

“During the 1990s, the field of outsider art—a term for work by self-taught, often visionary artists, made in idiosyncratic styles or folk-art traditions—gained increasing respectability and value. In 2001, at the same time as a new headquarters for the American Folk Art Museum opened in midtown Manhattan, a wave of contemporary artists, many with M.F.A.s and major gallery representation, began to exhibit works that unapologetically resembled the style and intensity of the best of their self-taught predecessors.”

Of Thee I Sing (Won’t Anybody Listen?)

Why is choral music such an outsider in the larger music world? Indeed, choral music has almost as much trouble gaining acceptance as new music. “Could it be that the choral world has too strong a hold on its citizenship? Are the immigration policies too stringent to allow “non-choral composers” inside, and likewise, to allow “choral composers” opportunities to sell their wares to the outside world? Certainly composers such as Arvo Pärt are becoming known in the choral world almost to the point of being appropriated into that ‘community,’ albeit willingly. On the other hand, many composers find it difficult to break into, but not for lack of desire.”