Monthly Archive for January, 2011

From Rob Goodman at The Millions…

What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice?

There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music or a good novel “sweeps you along.” There’s a selflessness in it: not just the pleasure in pausing the parts of the brain that plan and calculate and select, but in the temporary surrender of investing in someone else’s choices. Good art can be where we go for humility: when we’re encouraged to treat each of our thoughts as worthy of being made public, it can be almost counter-cultural to admit, in the act of being swept along, that someone else is simply better at arranging the keys of a song or the twists of a book and making them look like fate.

Freedom from choice is a seductive way of thinking about art—and it’s at the heart of the debate over the cultural value of video games. Video games, for their cultural boosters, promise an art based on choice: an interactive art, possibly the first ever. For their detractors, “interactive art” is a contradiction in terms. Critics can point to video games’ narrative clichés or sloppy dialogue or a faith in violence as the answer to everything; but at base, they seem to be bothered by the idea of an art form that can be “played.” Choice is their bright line.

Last spring, Roger Ebert nominated himself to hold that bright line on his blog. And though the 4,799 comments (to date) on his original post weighed in overwhelmingly against his claim that “Video games can never be art,” and encouraged him to back off of that blanket assertion, he summed up as eloquently as anyone the danger posed to narrative by video games’ possibility of limitless choice… More.

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Two essays by Colin Eatock at 3quarksdaily…

What’s Wrong with Classical Music? (Published 4 Ocotber 2010)

Every day I pass through Toronto’s Bathurst Street Subway Station, on the way to work. And sometimes, on days when I’m not running late, I pause to listen to the classical music that the Toronto Transit Commission pipes into the station. But as much as I enjoy being gently eased into my working day with a Mozart symphony or a Vivaldi concerto, I’m well aware that the TTC isn’t really trying to gratify my particular musical tastes. There are other motives at work here.

Bathurst Street Station is a multicultural crossroads in the downtown, and there are several high schools nearby. Among the subway riders who pass through the station are thousands of young people of differing backgrounds – a volatile mix that’s constantly in danger of boiling over. The TTC’s answer to this threat is to crank up the classical music. More…

What Else is Wrong with Classical Music (Published 24 January 2011)

Last year, in my essay “What’s Wrong with Classical Music,” I discussed the causes of the marginalization of classical music in the Western world today. That essay approached the topic from the outside, examining the reasons why people who don’t like classical music are put off by it. In this “sequel,” classical music is approached from the inside. To do this, I’ll take a more subjective approach, addressing those aspects of the classical music world that I personally find troubling.

I’ve been around the classical music block – as a composer, critic, scholar, educator, booking agent and administrator. As a result, I find that my own “issues” often differ from the concerns of people blissfully unaware of what lies hidden behind classical music’s façade. Yet even though some of the things I find problematic might not be readily identified as problems at all by many others, they have an adverse effect on classical music in the world today. I believe that if my various concerns were successfully addressed, the changes wrought would be beneficial in subtle yet far-reaching ways. More…

From the Paris Review….

Amy Sillman and Tom McGrath are very different kinds of New York artists—Amy a modern-day action painter, Tom a new breed of realist—who share an ontological approach to the problem of pictorial staging: What is this thing I am making, they ask, and how can it be said to “represent” anything other than itself? Tom uses creamy, wet paint applied with directness and brio to depict more or less real places; Amy’s paintings, though populated with figures and figurative gestures, use the canvas as a workshop in which eccentrically shaped blocks of color are cobbled together in a kind of improvisational architecture, like memories of houses that you never actually lived in. Amy comes to us by way of abstraction, and over the past decade has been completely refurbishing the formal elements of painting: color, line, shape, and texture. Tom, a younger, cerebral artist, has established himself as an innovator by painting something that had not previously been considered a subject for art—the world viewed through the windshield of a car.

What makes a “picture”? Is every painting pictorial, or is it a quality of only some paintings? I think it is chiefly a matter of how forcefully a painting evokes the strangeness of the notion of a depicted visual world—the set of arrangements that results in something being pictured. Both Amy and Tom, using very different orchestration, make this pictorial staging palpable by calibrating three elements: the thing painted; the frame of reference, the rectangle; and the way the paint comes to rest on the canvas. More…