Academia screwed up, writes Nicholas Maxwell, and we need a revolution to fix it. “We urgently need to bring about a third intellectual revolution, one which corrects the blunders of the Enlightenment revolution, so that the basic aim of academia becomes to promote wisdom, and not just acquire knowledge. Every branch and aspect of academic inquiry needs to change if we are to have the kind of inquiry, both more rational and of greater human value, that we really need.”
Tag: 12.03
The Downfall Of MTV
“MTV has always pursued teenagers; what has changed is the sort of teenagers it is chasing, and what ideal of cool it established to court them. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the network tried to convert its viewers, suggesting to hungry-for-hipness suburban teens that there was something out there cooler and more compelling than their own high school melodramas. The gospel has since changed. What MTV is selling its teen audience now (with “Sorority Life,” “Fraternity Life,” “Spring Break: Cancun,” a more juvenile “Real World”) is a bland vision of the immediate future in which the first years of college look pretty much like high school, but without parents or homework. The focus is on having fun, not being challenged by new or different experiences.”
WTC Memorial – The Impossible Dream
Everyone want the memorial at the World Trade Center site to be special, writes Martin C. Pedersen. “Unfortunately, the more I studied the designs, the less promising I found them. None are fully realized. They all feel provisional, like ambitious first drafts. Still I am reluctant to condemn them, because the designers were handed a near-impossible brief.”
View From The Top – Museum Directors Speak Out
A roundtable of blue chip museum directors talks about the challenges faced by museums. “The more art museums look like multinational corporations and the more their directors sound like corporate CEOs, the more they risk being cast by the public in the same light.”
A New New History Of Art (That Prefers The Old)
Paul Johnson’s much-discussed “Art: A New History,” is unexpected, writes Joe Phalen. “Johnson’s book differs from the academic tradition best exemplified by Janson’s and Gombrich’s classic histories of art in two points. He goes out of his way to explore and praise many neglected artists of the 19th century: Realist painters well worthy of attention. Secondly, Johnson dismisses the dominant trend of 20th-century modernism as being too much in the nature of “fashion” art, which is to say a combination of novelty and skills with an unhealthy emphasis on the innovation.”
Is Publishing Too Glamorous For Its Own Good?
Dubravka Ugresic laments the evolution of publishing into a marketplace that doesn’t have much attachment to the concept of culture. “In the contemporary media market, literature has acquired an aura of glamour. How has it come to be that all sorts of people —like, say, Madonna— are now rushing into the places formerly reserved for outsiders, bookworms, romantics, and losers?”
Defining Race – Can You?
“How valid is the concept of race from a biological standpoint? Do physical features reliably say anything informative about a person’s genetic makeup beyond indicating that the individual has genes for blue eyes or curly hair? The problem is hard in part because the implicit definition of what makes a person a member of a particular race differs from region to region across the globe.”
In Touch With Genius
“Until recently, much of what we knew about savants came from the observations of clinicians like Treffert and neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Now researchers are probing the savant mind from the inside, using tools like gene mapping and PET scans. As these two paths of investigation converge, many of our long-held notions about the limits of human potential are being overturned.”