THE RENAISSANCE ON TV

As a subject, the Renaissance should have made great TV. Just point and shoot the art, hire someone who knows about the period to write the script, and you’ve hooked your audience. Yet the BBC’s new six part series views like a “Travel Show” marathon. Yet again, “the BBC has demonstrated that it is incapable of delivering a serious program on the visual arts.”  London Telegraph

TOO MUCH TOO LATE

Covent Garden opens tonight, but what should have been a grand opening celebration is marred by things left undone to the last minute. This is not right, writes critic Norman Lebrecht: “Much of our cultural map is a mosaic of mediocrity and make-do. Covent Garden exists to excel.” London Telegraph

WHERE’S THE LITERATURE IN LITERARY STUDIES?

Even the current economic boom can’t accommodate the best of our new humanities Ph.Ds. “Some assume that we humanists have a clear sense of what the humanities do and what makes them valuable – that we simply need to convince those crass others, whether within the university or outside its walls, that they really need us. But that assumption is untrue. No one’s even angry with us now, just bored.” – Boston Review

MOZART EFFECT REVISITED

Six years ago scientists reported that listening to Mozart made people smarter. But last summer a new study failed to reproduce the results from the first, disappointing waves of music fans. A closer look, though, “shows that Mozart’s music does have a profound effect on the brain, though no one knows why. Rats raised on Mozart run through mazes faster and more accurately. People with Alzheimer’s disease function more normally if they listen to Mozart; the music even reduces the severity of epileptic seizures.” – Toronto Globe and Mail