There will be a panel discussion this afternoon at Princeton (4:30pm EST) about the Passion movie (see live Webcast). My good friend, the very smart Steven Tepper will be on the panel as will some other interesting Princeton academics plus representatives of national Catholic and Jewish organizations. Steve studies controversies over art and culture so it should be interesting to hear his take on the reactions to this movie.
From the category archives:
Arts
I don’t usually watch the Oscars but I hope to tune in this weekend. A friend of mine, a frequent visitor of CT – comments by “laura” – will be performing at the event.
So how does a Sociology PhD student make it to the Oscars? Certainly not by planning for it. Laura’s dissertation is on Sacred Harp singing. It’s not something most of us know anything about. I’ve learned from her that it’s an a capella four-part harmony style that’s been a living tradition in the South for over 150 years and has undergone something of a folk revival in the Northeast, Midwest, and West coast over the past 20-30 years. It is participatory singing, not usually performed in this way so the Oscar performance will be a bit artificial. But anything is possible in Hollywood, as we know.
With great power comes a little responsibility. As guest timberwossname, I inform you the best lit/film/culture online journal is Pseudopodium – formerly, Bellona Times. I wandered in one night by accident, while making my drunken way home. Well, it felt more like I fell through the roof, as Indiana Jones might find himself suddenly amongst the treasures of an ancient temple. For, you see, it’s one of those serially updated personal sites/online journals that goes back so far that it’s … older than blogging. Damn, you think, running a fingertrack through the dusty HTML. Place is old. 1999; 1997, even. Crap, some of this stuff was written in 1990. Frankly, it spooked me how good – smart and winning and heartfelt and erudite. Hazlitt and Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Ruskin. I felt about uncertainly in this marvelous terrain, then with increasing delight; finally I was cramming my pockets with treasure to call my own ever after. I have returned regularly and very lately entered into edifying correspondence with its ten-times admirable demiurge, Ray Davis.
Now go and don’t come back until you have read for an hour. I could tell you which are my favorites, but I want you to have your own, that you found yourself.
Here’s the song that gave my title. Hope Ray doesn’t mind me provoking you all to strain his bandwidth.
UPDATE: Just to explain the joke, the connection between the two is, via the world, ‘with a kick to it’.
Until this afternoon, a “Google search”:http://www.google.com/search?q=valentine+poem&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 for the phrase “‘Valentine Poem'”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000281.html promptly returned “this elegaic masterpiece”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000281.html high on the first page of results. (I know this because its been the most popular search referrer to my “website”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog for each of the past ten days.) Written last year by one of the leading poetic talents of his generation, I think it’s a lot better than the crap that appears to have displaced it — but whoever said “democracy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001306.html makes the best choices?
The “Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy” is organizing a conference with the nonsense title of “NOISETHEORYNOISE#1”:http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/events/noise.htm although NONSENSETHEORYNONSENSE might be more appropriate. The “theme” of the conference is described thus:
bq. Noise is an unprecedented harbinger of aesthetic radicality: no-one yet knows what it is or what it means. This non-significance is its strength rather than its weakness. Noise is ‘non-music’ not because it negates music but because it affirms a previously unimaginable continuum of sonic intensities in which music becomes incorporated as a mere material.
And further elaborations include:
bq. Where a ‘new aestheticism’ might present itself as a resistance to pragmatic instrumentality, postmodern academicism continues to adopt theory as ballast: works are mere pretexts for ostentatious displays of theoretical chic. But in what way could noise change the conditions of theoretical possibility, not to say intelligibility or even sensibility?
In what way indeed? Explanations on a postcard please …. (or in comments).
We don’t often have photographs on Crooked Timber, but I though it worth making an exception in this case. I spent the afternoon at London’s “Tate Modern”:http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/default.htm where an installation by Olafur Eliasson entitles “The Weather Project”:http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/eliasson/ currently dominates the Turbine Hall through which one enters the gallery. The “sun” bathes everyone in yellow light, figures are reflected in mirrors on the ceiling and steam jets create an atmosphere of shimmering mystery appropriate for an operatic stage set. It is as if we are in the dying days of an aged planet. Go and see it if you can.
I saw a play last night (in Budapest) in which no one said anything. Everything was conveyed through music and dancing. It wasn’t a musical as none of the actors sang at all. They moved and danced. The set changed a bit, but most events took place in a café. The play portrayed Hungary’s history from the 1930s through the 1990s. [If you’re getting sick of Hungary-related writing this week, don’t give up on this post just yet, I’m aiming at something hopefully with a bit more general appeal.:)]
I’ve posted this before, but indulge me (or skip it). This is the monologue from the Late Show with David Letterman on September 17, 2001, his first night back on the air after September 11th.
“Tyler Cowen”:http://volokh.com/2003_08_10_volokh_archive.html#106060688626674065 has a nice, short piece on art and Western civilization, which gently takes a forthcoming Charles Murray book to task. The Murray book, by Cowen’s account, concludes that Western civilization has an overwhelming advantage over its non Western equivalents in music and the arts. As Cowen says, it’s hard to sustain this argument with great confidence, because the surviving evidence is grossly skewed. Since many forms of non-Western art haven’t survived, or went unrecorded until very recently, we can’t say with any degree of certainty that, say, John Dowland was any better than his Gabonese equivalents.
But there’s a second issue, which is very nearly as important – a version of what anthropologists refer to as Galton’s problem. The quick and dirty version of Galton’s argument is that there’s something very iffy about the assumption that cultures are self-referential, coherent wholes, which are absolutely isolated from each other. Western art didn’t evolve in isolation from its non-Western equivalents : at crucial points in its history, encounters with non-Western art drove it in new directions. Peter Conrad’s definitive study of 20th century art, _Modern Times, Modern Places_ has an entire chapter on how African art deeply influenced various modern greats. Conrad claims, and I have no reason to doubt him, that it’s simply impossible to understand Picasso without taking account of the influence of African mask art from Congo and the Gabon.
Thanks to Michael Blowhard I’ve just wasted loads of time at Yugo Nakamura’s site. Is it art? I’ve no idea, but it is certainly compulsive and fun (broadband connection needed).
I’m going to get a reputation as CT’s resident wistful nostalgic if I’m not careful (what with my posts on “real” sausages and what have you). Still I couldn’t help getting a Proustian rush on reading Paul Morley’s funeral oration for the single in today’s Guardian:
bq. The first single I ever bought was Ride a White Swan by T Rex. It was the first thing I had ever got for myself that wasn’t a toy or a comic. I was 13 years old and it was like buying a piece of magic. It was as if I could begin to understand what I was living for. I would slide the mysterious black disc out of its paper sleeve. I would put it with unlikely care on to a soft rubbery turntable. I would nervously drop the needle on to the edge of the disc and hear the tantalising crackle and pop that seemed to last an eternity before Marc Bolan, as if from space, as if for me only, began singing his electric folk song that seemed to be all about swans, sex and the strangeness and tender brilliance of being a teenager.
I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.
The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.
I took the day off today for a trip to London (free lift from a mate who is a sales rep). The main thing I wanted to do was to go to the National Gallery. I’d been bowled over by a Bellini triptych I’d seen in the church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice recently and planned to look through the Bellinis in the Sainsbury Wing with the aid of the little MP3-player guide they loan you these days. Very useful, except when the number displayed next to the painting fails to correspond with the commentary (the gallery’s only Giotto linked to a commentary on Duccio). Anyway, my attention was drawn to something I’d never noticed before: a number of paintings, originally painted on wood panels, had been transferred at some time in their history to canvas, and in one case to a “synthetic panel”. Probably this is just everyday stuff for art conservators, but it struck me that it was amazing that a whole painting could be lifted off the surface on which it was originally painted and transferred to a new one. How?