Category: ideas

The visually captivating and decidedly over-the-top opening ceremonies of the twentieth Winter Olympiad proved once and for all that “other nations can be as cheesy as the United States. That people the world over seem to share a common urge to stage bizarre interpretive dance… The Olympics are ordained to be completely self-important — no smirking allowed! — which perhaps is why the opening festivities always seem so campy. Still, as a general spectacle, last night’s show wasn’t bad.”

“A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others. Researchers found that popular songs were popular and unpopular songs were unpopular, regardless of their quality established by the other group. They also found that as a particular songs’ popularity increased, participants selected it more often. The upshot for markerters: social influence affects decision-making in a market.”

There’s quite a debate going on in Canada over health care, and in particular, over government bureaucracy and its role in ‘streamlining’ hospitals and clinics perceived as inefficient. But how can us arts folk understand such a debate? One doctor is happy to provide a useful analogy: what if the Montreal Symphony were similarly ‘streamlined’? “All 20 violins were playing identical notes! This constitutes needless duplication. The staff of this section should be cut drastically… For considerable periods during the concert, the oboe player and the percussionist had nothing to do. Both jobs could be done by the same person… The position of conductor, a non-player who amazingly is paid the highest salary, should be eliminated [and replaced with] an inexpensive metronome.”

It was ten years ago that Congress passed a sweeping law that would have stunted the Internet (it was later challenged and defeated in the courts). “The Communications Decency Act, or CDA, was passed by Congress as part of the Telecommunications Act and signed into law by President Clinton on Feb. 8, 1996. The law aimed to extend to the internet the same “decency” standard that applies to broadcast TV and radio, and is now most famous for leading to fines for Howard Stern and CBS television for explicit language and a wardrobe malfunction respectively.”

India is modernizing itself at a breathtaking rate, and while the economic benefits of embracing technology and Western culture have been obvious for some time, the inevitable culture clash has begun. “What is happening now, at least for India’s moneyed younger class, is a cultural shift akin to what happened in the 1950s and the 1960s in the United States. The topic of sex is coming out from behind closed doors and drawn shades… The result is a growing gap between affluent, urban young people who embrace the idea of sexuality and a prevailing society that still idealizes virgins; between a country struggling with an AIDS epidemic and the refusal by many men to even contemplate the use of condoms.”

“In the fields of literature, movies and music, prize scandals prompt people to pay attention to awards, if only to see what gauche lapse in taste happens next. And debates about the credibility of a prize, by their very existence, benefit the concept of art and artistic value by implying that they exist in a realm separate from politics and compromise. Clearly, questions about prizes’ credibility haven’t hampered their proliferation: ours is a culture beset by and obsessed with prizes, even if we disagree about their meaning. So what do they mean?”

Neuroscientists are studying improvisation in dance. Is there some similarity with how birds move in flocks? “There’s no lead bird who dictates, ‘Now we’ll be in this V.’ They’re forming patterns by sensing where they all are in space, by wind currents, all the different variables. They’re self-organizing themselves into a pattern. That’s what the dancers are experiencing, they’re forming their own patterns from within.”

Big media and telecommunications companies are considering plans that would dramatically change how the internet works. “Under the plans they are considering, all of us–from content providers to individual users–would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing “platinum,” “gold” and “silver” levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.”

“Not so long ago it seemed as if we all spoke the same pop-culture language. But in an era of 500 TV channels, billions of Web pages, unlimited Netflix rentals, and iPods with music libraries of Smithsonian proportions, popular entertainment has suddenly become mind-bogglingly vast. As the overlap between what we all watch, read, and listen to steadily erodes, the water cooler has become a modern-day tower of Babel, where conversations sound like the jumbled voices emanating from the jungle in “Lost.” (If that reference is lost on you then, well, Q.E.D.)”

Colleges are escalating their arts offerings. “According to College Board data, there was a 44 percent increase from 1996 to 2005 in the number of high school seniors who say that they plan to major in visual and performing arts. For business and commerce majors, the gain was much less modest, at 12 percent, while the percentage who plan to major in social sciences and history has decreased by 15 percent.”