“Large scale arts buildings have recently been opened in Madison, Dayton, Denver and Omaha; new ones are in the pipeline in Miami, Dallas, Orange County and Nashville. Given the economics, it seems likely that these buildings will have a major adverse impact on wider ecology of the arts in these communities as they preempt and siphon off existing audiences and philanthropic resources rather than generating new ones. This is hardly the regenerative function that the planners will have had in mind.”
Tag: 11.05
Image Overload?
“The average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day. One sees images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on websites, and on the sides of buses. Images grace soda cans and t-shirts and billboards. Internet search engines can instantly procure images for practically any word you type. The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: They have, by their sheer number and ease of replication, become less magical and less shocking—a situation unknown until fairly recently in human history.”
Is Conservation Killing Culture?
“It’s no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).”
For Poets – A Question Of Audience?
If you’re a poet, would you prefer “a beautifully produced physical book, with the guarantee that it would find two thousand engaged readers?” Or “no physical book, but the guarantee that, through various means of publication—anthologies, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and so on—the poems would find an audience of twenty thousand engaged readers?”
August Wilson On Writing A Play
“Once you get the first scene done (or it might be the fourth scene in the play), then you can sort of begin to see other possibilities. Just like working in collages, you shift it around and organize it: This doesn’t go here; that speech doesn’t really belong to that person, it belongs to this person. So, very much like Romare Bearden, you move your stuff around on the pages until you have a composition that satisfies you, that expresses the idea of something and then—bingo—you have a play.”
The 10,000-Year Wonder-Clock
A clock being built in Southern California is being constructed to be accurate for 10,000 years. “Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth’s axis.”