Category: ideas

A new book from Sweden says the digital revolution – “the move from a society controlled by printed and broadcast mass media to an information age that provides interactivity is ‘at least as dramatic as the move from feudalism to capitalism’. The more information technology dominates, the more culture, society and the economy change. It’s the birth of a ‘whole new world’ — a world undergoing a paradigm shift right under our noses. Say goodbye to the nation state and governments. Capitalism will be no more and its chief proponent, the bourgeoisie, will gradually lose power and become a mere ‘underclass’.”

“The aesthetic revolutions of the 20th century, in painting, music and literature, reflected the galvanizing cataclysms of the times – the world wars, the Holocaust, the nuclear peril. Now, when the world seems more fragile, dangerously fragmented and morally ambiguous than ever, may not be the time for more form-smashing revolution in the arts. The great artists of our time are like spiders, poised on a web that spans the past as well as the precarious present. They sense vibrations, from now and then, and spin out glittering new strands of connection.”

“In a post-postmodernist culture swamped in sequels, self-reference, adaptation, irony, parody, reality TV, digital sampling and the thud-beat of rap, newness has become a novelty item, a dated curio from another age.” But does the reliance on old ideas necessarily mean artists aren’t creating original work? According to Steven Winn, that’s exactly what it means, and the art world is the worse for the lack of creative originality.

“The current artistic culture, which is replete with references, borrowings and parody, has collided with a corporate and legal culture that is bent on protecting intellectual property. If Andy Warhol were working today, he would be facing litigation from Campbell’s soup, Church & Dwight (the makers of Brillo pads) and every corporation whose logo he appropriated. ‘Virtually all art builds on previous work, either overtly or covertly’.”

Why does it seem so difficult to muster forces to create great architecture in America? “Citizens are the consumers of architecture. How are they educated to appreciate and judge what they must necessarily inhabit and, as taxpayers and clients, often buy? Primary and secondary schools rarely mention architecture or urbanism at all, except in the most elite or innovative schools. The general public’s lack of even the most basic education in architecture and urbanism makes for ill-informed, ill-prepared clients. With admittedly a few exceptions, asking members of those groups to judge inspired architecture is akin to asking people with a third-grade education to select the next winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.”

So much of the impetus for artmaking is motivated by a desire to be better and better, a need to excel. But what about the craft of art, the practice of art as discipline rather than accomplishment? Maybe this kind of art practice can counter “a market-driven society in which people assign value to each other (and themselves) according to socioeconomic status. It also can be a bulwark against the excesses of America’s SAT-calibrated meritocracy. ‘There’s so much emphasis on potential. Not on what people do, but on what they might do. … The judgment of people’s potential is devastating to people who lose out on that judgment. It deprives people of hope.”

In the 80s and 90s, culture advocates have authored more and more studies to measure the “impact” of the arts on society. What does the money buy? How many does it employ? What kinds of social “goods” are being achieved? “There is now a mass of primary data claiming to measure the impact of cultural policy.” But “the rise of statistics has paralleled an extension of government control over the arts, and the tendency to value culture for its ‘impact’ rather than its intrinsic value.” Surely this can’t be good for the service of art…

We like to think of evil as an aberration. That’s why it upsets some to examine the face of evil up close, as something more than an abstract. “Barely a year removed from the grisly, televised details of mass murder in the middle of New York City, evil has become tougher to pass off as a metaphysical bogeyman or a freakish glitch. And films including Max, The Pianist and Blind Spot are here to remind us that the Holocaust was suffered, perpetrated and even exploited by flesh-and-blood entities, not mythical embodiments of cruelty.”

“Culture was once thought to be a particularly human trait. But careful observation of apes demonstrated that they have culture, too. Before culture, tool use was considered a distinctively human capacity. Again, merely watching other creatures shows that this is not the case. One of the last refuges of the species exceptionalist is language, and indeed, human language does seem to be unique. What remains controversial is this: Does our use of language stem from some innate mental capacity that only humans possess?”