By means of what is, at bottom, a self-gratifying act, spending money—rather than by means of compassion, piety, courage, or self-sacrifice—a lucky elite has set itself above ordinary people by virtue of its aesthetic tastes and preferences, which it has elevated to a self-defined enlightenment. The result, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writes, is “a deep cultural divide that has never existed with such distinction as it does today.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Best Idea So Far? That We Have No Idea…
“I’d much rather live in a Universe where we discover that today’s view of physics is comically naïve. If I am so lucky as to live to see deep new discoveries about the true nature of reality, I hope to find them bizarre and shocking. In 1,000 years, physics and mathematics will probably have progressed so far that the very nature of the questions will be incomprehensible to us. Researchers will have moved on to bigger, more mind-blowing questions that today’s deepest thinkers are not yet even equipped to ask.”
This Year’s Emmys Sets Up A Debate Between Netflix, Cable And Broadcast
“An Emmy is not necessarily the mark of true greatness, any more than an Oscar win is. What the Emmys reflect is the taste of the voters who work in the TV industry. Not all will be familiar with nominated series on FX, National Geographic or PBS. But you can bet they all have access to Netflixand all the networks.”
As Classical Music Increasingly Becomes “Post-Genre,” Some New Language Is Required
“Post-genre thinking seeks to move away from objective judgment of music towards a subjective reality, where the emphasis is no longer on whether a certain piece fits/does not fit a pre-conceptualized genre “bin.” Instead, the emphasis is on the individual intent of the composer. The individual is quite important to post-genre thinking.”
The Man, The Idea And The Empire That Created The British Museum
Institutions like the British Museum do not come about by accident. The idea of the public museum is an “artifact of imperial enlightenment,” writes James Delbourgo in his new book, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. “Only a collector at the center of an empire could draw so many things together in order to tell them apart, in an astonishing attempt to catalogue the entire world.”
Report: This Year’s Documenta In Athens Created A 7 Million Euro Deficit
“Nobody thought that the electricity bill in Athens would be horrendously high because the exhibition venues had to be cooled from 40 degrees outside temperature to 23 degrees. Immensely expensive were also the transports of the works of art from Athens to Kassel.”
Documenta Artists Denies Report That This Year’s Athens Exhibition Resulted In Huge Deficit
“We feel that casting a false shadow of criticism and scandal over documenta 14 does a disservice to the work that the artistic director and his team have put into this exhibition. Shaming through debt is an ancient financial warfare technique; these terms of assessment have nothing to do with what the curators have made possible, and what the artists have actually done within this exhibition.”
The Oregon Bach Festival Mess
“Already there are rumblings of an exodus. Has the festival assured through its actions that it will become, if it survives, simply a regional educational event, without the ambitious reach it once enjoyed? As crucially, considering the public relations damage that has already been done, can the festival regain the public’s trust? This is a mess. And it needs actual solving, not just a lawyerly brushing-up of the crumbs.”
Paris Biennale Struggles With Low Attendance, Critical Press
“Attendance to the fair, especially by Parisians just back from the summer holidays, was notably lower that previous years and far from that of Frieze Masters in London or Tefaf Maastricht. In the middle of the week, late in the day, the aisles were almost empty. The organisers did not provide attendance figures or information on sales, but the press reviews have been grim.”
Will Augmented Reality Change The Ways We Interact With Art? Facebook Is Investigating…
AR makes art — in different ways — both more and less accessible. On the one hand, art can be everywhere around you now. On the other, AR art can only be enjoyed by people who own smartphones. Around 5 billion people still don’t.