“Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they’re no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere – artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we’ve often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.”
Tag: 02.05
Cuno: Chinese Art Embargo A Bad Thing
China has recently requested an embargo on art coming out of China. But this is bad policy, writes James Cuno. “China’s request to the US Cultural Property Advisory Committee for an embargo on exports of archaeological material and cultural property is injurious to the discovery and dissemination of knowledge about the art and culture of the many peoples who have lived and worked in, and traded through, China for millennia.”
MoMA – Back From The Spa
The remade Museum of Modern Art is the return of an old friend, writes Mark Wigley. “While savoring the return of this wonderful collection and expressing our appreciation to the museum, this is not a moment to celebrate architecture for its capacity to maintain subservient yet elegant good manners. Like the best art, the best buildings make us hesitate, disturbing our routines so that we see, think, and feel in ways we simply could not have imagined before. Architecture itself should be an education. To complain that the resultant building is attractive but tame, that the architecture has been domesticated, neutralized, just as the artworks it houses have had their social and intellectual edge removed to be enlisted for a singular global mission, is as pointless as accusing a church of preaching. MoMA is devoted to a particular form of education and does not pretend otherwise.”
Viab-le Construction
If robots can construct buildings, why shouldn’t they be able to improvise on the job, creating form as well as function? That’s the idea behind conceptual architect François Roche’s design for an automated construction worker known as a ‘viab’. “A viab would produce structures that are not set and specific, but impermanent and malleable – merely viable – made of a uniform, recyclable substance like adobe. The automaton’s output would have no innate design, boundaries, or service life. It would take whatever form was called for at the moment.”
China’s Building Boom Culture
China is on a building binge of cultural facilities. “Beijing alone is planning to add at least 32 new museums by 2008. Already underway is a $220 million expansion of the National Museum of China that will double the exhibition spaces, and, in a move that reflects a new emphasis on visitor services and earned income generation, complement them with a museum shop, café and cinema. And museums are not all. The new National Grand Theater, a $325 million performing arts complex designed by French architect Paul Andreu has broken ground and when complete will boast a 2,416-seat opera hall, a 2,017 seat concert hall, theatre and gleaming new patron spaces as well.”
New Music… Or Whatever It’s Called
Frank Oteri edits a web magazine on contemporary music. But what to call that music? “For better or worse, everything has a name. Everything, that is, except the music we feature in this web magazine. Sure, we give it names like “contemporary classical” or “post-classical” or “new music” but usually we preface the name by clearing our throats or doing some other sort of mea culpa. For years, we’ve bemoaned our music’s lack of a name in articles, conversations, editorials, you name it (pun intended). And many of the big names in our field have weighed in: Milton Babbitt with “cultivated music,” David Lang with “other music,” and on and on. I even posited Ivor Darreg’s one-time “neoteric music” a few months back. (Hey, I can dream, can’t I?)”
Classical Music – All Good Stories Have An Ending
Is Western classical music coming to an end? Every good narrative must have an ending, and Richard Taruskin’s new six-volume Oxford History of Western Music is an epic story. So “why is the sky falling, according to Taruskin, whose motives are no doubt higher than to simply lend his work cultural resonance? To him, it is an ‘ashes to ashes’ sort of scenario, one that he describes without passing judgment. Simply put, it is electronic music, which needs no scribblers but rather “ear players” to compose, coupled with the advent of the recent phenomenon of “sound artists” which signals that this tradition is not so much headed for a dustbin, but destined to shake off the shackles of notation, free at last to simply be music.”
Beware The Composer-Critic
There is a long and noble tradition of great critics who have also been composers. But Josh Kosman writes that he still has an innate distrust of the composer-critic. “The artistic marketplace is an adversarial arena—or at least a competitive one, like any marketplace—and that makes it a setting in which it’s important for the participants to be clear and consistent about their allegiances. A critic’s exclusive allegiance, I am convinced, should be to his or her fellow audience members. A composer, by contrast, has other allegiances entirely—to his or her own creative imperatives, to the larger community of artists, even in some cases to posterity.”
The Composers And Their Letters
“The best way to find out what the great composers of the past were like is to read their letters. Even those who left few or no other writings of significance (among them Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Ravel) often come through with special clarity in their correspondence with friends, colleagues, spouses, and lovers. As for those composers who doubled as part-time professional writers, their letters almost always supply strikingly fresh perspectives on their life and music—as well as no less strikingly candid opinions of the music of other composers.”
Of Universes And The End Of All Things (Maybe)
“Although thermodynamics and cosmology point to the eventual death of all lifeforms in the universe, there is still one loophole. It is a law of evolution that, when the environment changes radically, life must adapt, flee or die. The first alternative seems impossible. The last is undesirable. This leaves us with one choice: leave the universe.”