Pshaw – Neuroscience Can’t Explain Great Art

“Neuroaesthetics may be a very new field, and neurology may be relatively contemporary, but aesthetics has been studied for millennia. What use can these results be put to? If the blood doesn’t flow as predicted to someone’s brain when they look at a Turner, do we conclude that the scientific paradigm is wrong, or that something is wrong with that individual’s capacity for aesthetic appreciation?”

Modern Dance – Not Really So Modern Anymore. So…

“What is modern dance today? Is ‘anything goes’ really an aesthetic? One of the last of the Greats, Merce Cunningham, has just passed from the scene, taking his dances with him. The last of the Great Modern Generation, Paul Taylor, still creates work that, at its best, is equal to his best, but he won’t be able to do this forever. Modern dance must wake up from its recycling sleep, digest, rethink, and move.”

The Anti-Cirque Du Soleil

After 25 years, No Fit State Circus (yes, that’s what it’s called) “can justly claim to be one of the world’s leading exponents of contemporary circus. … You can hear the miked-up breath of the performers, smell their sweat, look into their eyes, touch the hem of their raggedy garments. It’s very consciously the opposite of the antiseptic enormo-shows put on by the globe-stomping Cirque du Soleil.”

Czech Literary Hero Josef Skvorecky Dead At 87

A novelist, scholar, and dissident, Skvorecky fled Prague during the 1968 Soviet invasion. He and his wife settled in Toronto, where they founded a press and published writers such as Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera whose books were banned in Czechoslovakia. Best known among Skvorecky’s own books are The Engineer of Human Souls and The Republic of Whores.