Barney McLelland is sick to death of bad poetry being churned out by untrained hands in the misguided name of self-expression. “Numerous surveys, declining SAT scores, and classroom anecdotes have established that many… young Americans can barely read, cannot spell or do arithmetic, and know next to nothing of their own history; but they do not let mere ignorance get in the way of self-expression.” People are free to write whatever they like, of course, but just as we would not buy a handmade wood cabinet from an amateur, McLelland says we should stop encouraging every moron with a word processor to set his personal neuroses to verse.
Tag: 05.03
Am I Hot Or Not? (Scientifically Speaking, Of Course)
It’s surprisingly easy to find agreement on what is an attractive face and what is not. But “finding answers to why we regard one face as being more beautiful than another is actually not as easy as it seems.” A major research project on ‘facial attractiveness’ by two German universities has been attempting to find out “why some faces are more beautiful than others, how scienctists help unravel the mystery of beauty, and the dangerous relationship between a beautiful body and social power.”
The Literacy Decade
“According to UNESCO, there are currently about 861 million illiterate adults in the world. In response to this staggering number, the UN has declared the next 10 years the UN Literacy Decade. During this period UNESCO will initiate its ‘International Plan of Action,’ designed to mobilize national governments, public and private organizations, universities, and local communities to create literacy programs, research who will most benefit from such programs, and find ways to monitor their success so that they can be improved upon and replicated elsewhere.”
Choral Union – Where New Music Thrives
Where’s the action in American contemporary music? Choral music. “In terms of concert music, choral and ‘educational’ music represent the lion’s share of most titles that are commercially published each year. There is a significant and constant demand for new works for chorus that significantly surpasses demand for new string quartets or symphonies or operas. Choral unions, community choruses, professional choruses, and choirs in faith communities regularly commission new works?oftentimes, there are numerous commissions each year. The premiere of a new work is a matter of course for hundreds of thousands of American choir members every year.”
Why New Music Doesn’t Play
Why don’t orchestras play more new music? Especially now when some contemporary composers seem to be picking up buzz. There are plenty of reasons, writes Greg Sandow. There’s the audience, for one thing…
A Study Of African American Art
“The study of African American artistic production has emerged as a growing field within art history, while its subjects have proven equally amenable to visual culture studies. But a dearth of quality reproductions, institutional holdings catalogues and subject indices, and the number of out-of-print texts continue to slow our scholarly labor.”
Official Art – Minimally Unacceptable
Roger Kimball believes that the official art world has its priotities on backwards when it comes to touting art it thinks is worthwhile. “When it comes to the Art World — to the congeries of critic-publicists and curator-publicists, museum-director-publicists, publicist-publicists, and artist-narcissist-publicists who set the agenda and spend the money—the front-burner issue is not aesthetic quality but one or another species of trendiness. When exhibitions of Velázquez or Leonardo or some other historical name-brand worthy roll into town, you can reap some reasonably straight oohs and aahs from the arts pages of the Times and other finger-in-the-air publications. But let the focus shift to what’s happening now and, presto! instant lobotomy and onset of Tourette Syndrome.”
Go West Young Collector
Traditional Western art is getting serious attention these days. “The trend is to de-ghettoize Western American art and integrate it into the mainstream traditions of American scholarship. Much the same is true, according to dealers, of the market value for these works: prices for 19th- and early-20th-century artists of the West are now approaching the same levels as those for their East Coast peers.”
The Next New Thing – Distributed Journalism?
Distributed research offers out projects over the internet – Information is freely available and researchers take little pieces of a problem and work on them. Many people work on many parts of a problem, sharing their results until a solution emerges. “Distributed journalism works similarly. Different lines of inquiry will occur to different people, who bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on the same topic. The ability to concatenate that information online – particularly via those motley commentary sites and open diaries called blogs – makes the information discovered by each available to all.”
Are You A “Choice Machine” Or Are You A “Situation-Action Machine”?
Situation-action machines are built with a bunch of rules that say, “If in situation X, do A,” “If in situation B, do Z,” and so forth. It’s as if you had a list that you kept in your wallet and when important decisions came up, you looked at the list. If the conditions for a particular decision were met, you just did it. You don’t know why. It’s just that the rule says to do it. A choice machine is different. A choice machine looks at the world and sees options, and it says, “If I did this, what would happen? If I did that, what would happen? If I did this other thing, what would happen?” It builds up an anticipation of what the likely outcome of one action or another would be, and then chooses on the basis of how much that outcome is valued or disvalued.”