There’s at least a third reason to stop state funding of the arts, and it’s the one I take most seriously as a literary scholar and writer. In the 17th century, a great religious dissenter, Roger Williams (educated at Cambridge, exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony), wrote the first case for total separation of church and state in the English language. Forced worship, said Williams, “stinks in God’s nostrils” as an affront to individual liberty and autonomy; worse still, it subjugated theology to politics.
Something similar holds true with painting, music, writing, video and all other forms of creative expression. Forced funding of the arts — in whatever trivial amounts and indirect ways — implicates citizens in culture they might openly despise or blissfully ignore. And such mandatory tithing effectively turns creators and institutions lucky enough to win momentary favour from bureaucrats into either well-trained dogs or witting instruments of the powerful and well-connected. Independence works quite well for churches and the press. It works even more wonderfully in the arts.
Nick Gillespie, featured guest for “Economist Debates: Arts Funding”, The Economist, 2012-08-29
August 29, 2012
QotD: Government funding for the arts “stinks in God’s nostrils”
July 29, 2012
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The amusing “real” story of how Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired to write Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.Percy Bysshe Shelley
Out in a field just off I-27 south, maybe 15 minutes away from Amarillo, our beloved Stanley Marsh 3 commissioned this statue, “Ozymandias.” Of course, being a merry prankster, he pretends on an introductory plaque that these “ancient ruins” in fact inspired Shelley’s poem.
H/t to “Fishplate” Jeff for the link.
June 11, 2012
An epitaph for the original Arts and Crafts movement
Colby Cosh has an interesting slant on William Morris and the original Arts and Crafts movement (for the record, I’m quite a fan of a lot of A&C artifacts, if not quite so much of their philosophy):
In the 19th century, William Morris preached a social revolution in which exploitative “useless toil” would be replaced by “useful work”. He dreamt of a world that would reject shoddy mass-produced goods in favour of objects made with care and craftsmanship. Any business that sells “artisanal” goods, whether the goods be curtains or crumpets, is essentially quoting Morris and referring to his promise.
That promise, of course, failed spectacularly. It did not even survive Morris’s own time. His “libertarian socialism” of crafted objects and honest work found itself drowned out at every turn by leftist alternatives which, more sensibly, accepted the power and inevitability of mass production. 20th-century Marxism wasn’t opposed to factories; it worshipped them, fetishized them. The fatal problem with Morris’s appeal is that he was just plain wrong about mass-produced objects necessarily being unlovely junk. We have been to Ikea; we know better.
Morris felt very strongly about this, and from his own historical standpoint, he was certainly on to something. It’s impossible for us to imagine what kind of things factories suppurated into the marketplace before things like statistical control charts were invented, or before items like micrometers were themselves mass-produced to a consistent high standard. Morris lived in a world where individual masons and cabinetmakers and weavers really were losing their livelihoods to a tide of undifferentiated, undistinguished banality; his feelings of alarm now seem fussy when we read him, but that is because only the better-made Victorian objects have physically survived destruction or disposal and reached our time.
Soon enough, however, the art of industrial design would come to the rescue. If Morris could have lived long enough to see the Studebaker Commander or the IBM Selectric II or, yes, the furshlugginer iPhone, he would have packed in the Arts and Crafts talk and gone straight to work designing pickle-jar labels. (Morris was not too consistent when it came to the ultimate logical consequences of a world made by hand, anyway. The influential Kelmscott Press he founded in 1891 favoured early printing techniques and letterforms, but it was, at any rate, a press; unlike his spiritual ancestor William Blake, he didn’t set out to mimic the appearance of illuminated manuscripts by the actual method implied in the etymology of the term “manuscript”.)
While I picked this section of the article to quote, you really should read the whole thing. It’s some of the most thought-provoking writing I’ve seen in months.
April 19, 2012
Pentagon sleuths foil Anglo-Canadian military plan
The story of Ensign Chuck Hord’s memorial portrait in the Pentagon, with both British and Canadian military angles:
In a Pentagon hallway hung an austere portrait of a Navy man lost at sea in 1908, with his brass buttons, blue-knit uniform and what looks like meticulously blow-dried hair.
Wait. Blow-dried hair?
The portrait of “Ensign Chuck Hord,” framed in the heavy gilt typical of government offices, may be the greatest — or perhaps only — prank in Pentagon art history. “Chuck Hord” can’t be found in Navy records of the day. It isn’t even a real painting. The textured, 30-year-old photo is actually of Capt. Eldridge Hord III, 53 years old, known to friends as “Tuck,” a military retiree with a beer belly and graying hair who lives in Burke, Va.
[. . .]
Capt. Hord at the time was director of the Multinational Interagency division, a new Pentagon office designed to coordinate military logistics between the U.S. and its closest allies.
Office colleagues say Capt. Hord developed close bonds with his British, Canadian and Australian counterparts. Their office boasted its own beer fridge.
Several of Capt. Hord’s work colleagues attended the 2004 party, including a British captain who smuggled the portrait into his car and put it on display at the office. Capt. Hord, amused, called it an act of “buffoonery.”
[. . .]
Back on the wall in the office, visitors often asked who it depicted. “They all looked at it and said, ‘Man, what year was that? It looks like the 1800s,'” said Canadian Lt. Col. Brook Bangsboll.
That was the light-bulb moment. On one of his last days at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Bangsboll went to a jewelry shop to have a brass plaque engraved, egged on by colleagues and co-conspirators. “We didn’t know what to do so we said, ‘Let’s just lose him at sea,'” Lt. Col. Bangsboll said. “It makes it interesting and kind of mysterious.”
He kept the circumstances of the ensign’s death vague because he thought some nosy Navy historian would spot the ruse if the plaque cited a specific battle.
April 3, 2012
Creativity as mainly hard work, plus a bit of talent and inspiration
As I’ve said before, I’m not at all a creative person but I’ve always admired those people who are creative. However, Jonah Lehrer suggests that perhaps I’m just lazy:
“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code,” writes Jonah Lehrer in his new book Imagine.
In his book, Lehrer examines the inner workings of what we call imagination. He looks at the neuroscience behind sudden insights, how the brain solves different kinds of problems and which personal traits help foster creativity. He also shares how external forces factor into the creative process, how to design a workspace to enhance your chances of having an epiphany, why creativity tends to bubble up in certain places and how we can encourage our collective imaginations.
Above all, though, the message of Lehrer’s book is that creativity is not a super power. Anyone can be creative — it just takes hard work. “We should aspire to excessive genius,” says Lehrer, who took some time from his book tour to sit down with Mashable and answer a few questions about the mysteries of how we imagine.
[. . .]
Yo-Yo Ma says his ideal state of creativity is “controlled craziness.” How can we learn to harness that?
What Yo-Yo Ma is referring to is the kind of creativity that occurs when we let ourselves go, allowing the mind to invent without worrying about what it’s inventing. Such creative freedom has inspired some of the most famous works of modern culture, from John Coltrane’s saxophone solos to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. It’s Miles Davis playing his trumpet in Kind of Blue — most of the album was recorded on the very first take — and Lenny Bruce inventing jokes at Carnegie Hall. It’s also the kind of creativity that little kids constantly rely on, largely because they have no choice. Because parts of the brain associated with impulse control remain underdeveloped, they are unable to censor their imagination, to hold back their expression. This helps explain the truth in that great Picasso quote: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
March 11, 2012
The creativity switch
As a life-long non-creative person, I found this article to be of interest:
Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They’re “creative types.” We’re not.
But creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. (“Inspiration” literally means “breathed upon.”) Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.
But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use “creativity” as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.
February 28, 2012
Hacker-Artist group UX roves under Paris streets
A fascinating article in Wired talks about a French group that does the opposite of vandalism — unauthorized repairs to neglected historical objets d’art:
This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde — confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new — its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.
What has made much of this work possible is UX’s mastery, established 30 years ago and refined since, of the city’s network of underground passageways — hundreds of miles of interconnected telecom, electricity, and water tunnels, sewers, catacombs, subways, and centuries-old quarries. Like computer hackers who crack digital networks and surreptitiously take control of key machines, members of UX carry out clandestine missions throughout Paris’ supposedly secure underground tunnels and rooms. The group routinely uses the tunnels to access restoration sites and stage film festivals, for example, in the disused basements of government buildings.
H/T to CuthSpies for the link.
December 18, 2011
Tyler Cowen on “aesthetic stagnation”
Responding to an article in Vanity Fair by Kurt Andersen, Cowen lists a few things that must be taken into consideration:
1. Movies: The Hollywood product has regressed, though one can cite advances in 3-D and CGI as innovations in the medium if not always the aesthetics. The foreign product is robust in quality, though European films are not nearly as innovative as during the 1960s and 70s. Still, I don’t see a slowdown in global cinema as a whole.
2. TV: We just finished a major upswing in quality for the best shows, though I fear it is over, as no-episode-stands-alone series no longer seem to be supported by the economics.
3. Books/fiction: It’s wrong to call graphic novels “new,” but they have seen lots of innovation. If we look at writing more broadly, the internet has led to plenty of innovation, including of course blogs. The traditional novel is doing well in terms of quality even if this is not a high innovation era comparable to say the 1920s (Mann, Kafka, Proust, others).
4. Computer and video games: This major area of innovation is usually completely overlooked by such discussions.
He also includes something which — at least for me — counts as a “killer app” for this kind of discussion:
7. Your personal stream: This is arguably the biggest innovation in recent times, and it is almost completely overlooked. It’s about how you use modern information technology to create your own running blend of sources, influences, distractions, and diversions, usually taken from a blend of the genres and fields mentioned above. It’s really fun and most of us find it extremely compelling
That “personal stream” is so pervasive that we generally don’t notice that it’s a hallmark of the modern era. We don’t get our news from single sources anymore: not just a single local newspaper, or a single TV newscast. We can easily find like-minded communities for just about all our niche interests with relatively minimal effort. In the past, such communities were severely distance-challenged to even form, never mind to thrive.
That we now can easily control and direct our personal streams to include and exclude in such fine gradations is something that few could even imagine 20 years ago. In a sense, we all have “clipping services” providing us with interesting and relevant snippets, but we can literally have hundreds of such services — at little or no cost — to chase down our merest whims for fresh information. It doesn’t show up on the GNP as a gain, but it’s very much a differentiator between today and just a few years back. Yet we don’t notice because we’re immersed in it.
November 2, 2011
Disagreeing with Pete Townshend
Felix Cohen has an interesting article up at the Guardian‘s “Comment is free” section:
When I was originally sent some quotes from Pete Townshend’s John Peel lecture on Apple — which he refers to as a digital vampire — and music piracy, I was ready to fundamentally disagree with the thrust of his argument, but having taken the time to read it and parse it I’m surprised at how much sense there is. Regrettably, though, he also commits some fairly serious and unforgiveable misunderstandings of Apple and Amazon as companies, the internet and, perhaps least forgivable, the nature of creativity and the auteur as arbiter of what’s acceptable for public consumption.
[. . .]
Because I also believe that the commercial success you and your peers achieved was a brief, Burgess Shale-like period in popular culture, where the dearth of real social recommendation meant that people like John Peel, and now, sadly, Simon Cowell, imposed their tastes on swaths of youth. Peel (Cowell considerably less so) was an amazing, charismatic, much missed man who was able to tap into the zeitgeist and promote acts who wouldn’t have a chance without him. But he had his tastes and dislikes like anyone, and that’s the downfall of auteur theory; you don’t get to see outside of someone else’s perspective.
[. . .]
And, like the creatures in the Burgess Shale, we can look back and say: this brief flowering of bizarre and fantastical cultural expression was only made possible by its environment. This was what popular culture looked like when the only people who could make a real living were the top 0.0001%, while everyone else toiled in garages, college music rooms and village halls, trying everything in their power to break through. And, sadly, it ended up anodyne, populist and, well, The X Factor.
[. . .]
I’m not sorry that the period where you were able to be wined and dined by vast, terrifyingly wasteful record labels because you were paying for all of their A&R failures is over. To return to my prehistoric metaphor, the Cambrian period ended with a mass extinction event, but the period that followed allowed for the establishment of the species we see today. We should hope that creative popular culture follows a similar pattern, and that new artists and musicians will be able to be successful, widely heard, nurtured by crowd-supported services such as PledgeMusic rather than bloated A&R corporations; companies with a more human attitude to what they do and who they are doing it for.
October 24, 2011
August 9, 2011
Fish. Barrel. Bang
If you’ve never seen these god-awful science fiction book covers, you’ll quickly understand why this website will have a long, long list of candidates for mockery:
Kelly Comments: Considering that later editions have an absolutely gorgeous cover by Michael Whelan, I’m always a bit horrified to see the travesty on my own copy of the book. It looks like a poster for some kind of low-budget 70s bondage. My poor eyes!
H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold, who said “SF covers more dire than my own. Some of these even make me feel better . . .”
May 27, 2011
Swedish subway stations or hallucinatory flashbacks to a 1975 shopping mall?
Andrew Coyne linked to this set of photos of Swedish subway stations saying “Good LØRD. Who was their designer, Willy Wonka?”
I shared the link with Jon, my former virtual landlord, who responded:
Tonight’s nightmares are going to leave a mark.
I can only imagine what the flashbacks must be like for you, though. I suspect that these stations look remarkably like Sherway Gardens did to you and your friend after you guys went drinkin’ at the Steak’n’Burger.
If there is a 1970’s-era Sherway Gardens in Hell, this is what it looks like.
I had a similar reaction to the photos . . . strikingly ugly where they’re not just flat-out disturbing. But what else could we expect from publicly funded artists selected by public transit officials?
Powerpoint: it’s not presentation software, it’s visual assault software
I’ve attended lots of meetings where the Powerpoint slides have been really bad, but I’m happy not to have encountered anything quite as bad as this:
One of this year’s winners in the InFocus Worst Powerpoint Slide Contest.
Our “What Not to Present” contest was epic! Many thanks to all of you kind folks that submitted entries and spread the word about it. Many amazingly horrendous slides were sent in from all around the world. We laughed. We cried. We cringed.
[. . .]
We randomly chose our top 3 winners, but then quickly realized that we had to do more. So we are giving away ANOTHER projector to the slide we thought was the most horrendous. We passed the ugliness around the InFocus offices and to many of our partners pandering for votes — and we have a winner!
Update: While I’m busy poking fun at PowerPoint, here’s the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation. H/T to Paul “Inkless” Wells for the link.
April 4, 2011
For a change, this isn’t about an uptight, prudish American mayor
This time, passing all belief, it’s a French mayor having the vapours over the exposed breasts of a patriotic statue:
The good burghers of the French town Neuville-en-Ferrain will no longer be able to enjoy the ample charms of a “patriotic female statue” after the mayor ordered its removal from the town hall on the grounds of excessive chesticles.
Gerard Cordon took exception to the bust of Marianne, the “traditional female embodiment of the French Republic”, the Telegraph explains. He “persuaded” councillors that a €900 replacement based on Laetitia Casta would put an end to unfavourable comments about Marianne’s assets.
A town hall employee explained: “It was making people gossip. Remarks were made, during weddings for example.”
[. . .]
An old boy in Neuville-en-Ferrain expressed his support for Lamacque in a France 3 TV report last week, summarising: “People are stupid. Better nice breasts than none at all.”
September 27, 2010
Europe according to . . .
Amusing infographic source including “Europe according to France”:
H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.
