Month: April 2011

neurotically invested

Posted on by Morgan Meis

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Last February, a professor of biology and Harvard PhD named Amy Bishop, having recently been denied tenure by the University of Alabama in Hunstville, released the contents of a nine-millimeter pistol on her colleagues during a departmental faculty meeting. She killed the department’s chair and two others. Three more were wounded. Startling as the homicides were, and though they ratcheted up the common, unglamorous tensions of the tenure process to something fit for a media spectacle, they were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education. Unless, that is, you were unfortunate enough to peruse the reader comments on the New York Times’s online coverage of the killings and their aftermath. Among the helpless expressions of sadness was a large and growing strain of anger amounting to celebration. What was bizarre about the reaction was that, though Bishop worked in the Department of Biological Sciences, most of the commenters’ rage was directed toward the humanities. The dozens of hateful posts — however incoherent their stated reasons — were troubling moreover because they borrowed the rhetoric of neoliberal reform. Away with unjust privileges (like tenure), away with the guardians of unmonetizable knowledge (the humanities, the speculative sciences), away with any kind of refuge from the competitive market! Academics may not need to worry much about hostile gunfire, but they do need to worry, more than ever, about the more legal means by which hostility toward the academy gets expressed.

more from Nicholas Dames at n+1 here.

the clock

Posted on by Morgan Meis

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The Clock makes you realize how finely attuned you are to the rhythms of commercial (usually American) film. Each foreign clip is spotted at once, long before the actor opens his mouth. And it’s not the film stock or even the mustaches that give the game away, it’s the variant manipulation of time, primarily its slowness, although of course this “slowness” is only the pace of real time. In commercial film, decades pass in a minute, or a day lasts two and half hours. We flash back, we flash forward. There’s always a certain pep. “Making lunch” is a shot of an open fridge, then a chopping board, then food cooked on the stove. A plane ride is check-in, a cocktail, then customs. Principles dear to Denzel—tension, climax, resolution—are immanent in all the American clips, while their absence is obvious in the merest snatch of French art house. A parsing of the common enough phrase “I don’t like foreign movies” might be “I don’t want to sit in a cinema and feel time pass.” Given that nobody has given you the rules—given that you have imagined the rules—how can you be indignant when these rules of yours are “broken”? But somehow you are. If Christian Marclay returns to the same film several times—a long “countdown” scene, say, from some bad thriller—it feels like cheating. And because you have decided that the sharp “cut” is the ruling principle of the piece, you’re at first unsure about music bleeding from one scene into another. But stay a few hours and these supposed deviations become the main event. You start to find that two separated clips from the same scene behave like semicolons, bracketing the visual sentence in between, bringing shape and style to what we imagined would have to be (given the ordering principle of the work) necessarily random. Marclay manages to deliver connections at once so lovely and so unlikely that you can’t really see how they were managed: you have to chalk it up to blessed serendipity. Guns in one film meet guns in another, and kisses, kisses; drivers in color wave through drivers in black-and-white so they might overtake them.

more from Zadie Smith at the NYRB here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Melding

After supper, the dishes done, the news
over, the boozy father snoozing in his chair—
now is the hour when mother and I repair
the rips of the day's separations. She woos
me to the cards with cakes and tea: we play
Canasta, the melding game, with double decks
to cut and shuffle. Sharers, two of a sex
are we! We deal, we squeal, we moan, we pray
out loud for luck. It's flirtation, dalliance.
The cards splay in our hands like a geisha's fans,
we gaze in one another's eyes. She scans
me; I'm her poem. I goad her; it's a dance
we danced till I was twenty-five. “Play!”
she pled. I sighed and put the cards away.

by Kate Bernadette Benedict
from Here from Away
Wordtech Communications, 2003

Indian-American’s Cancer Book Wins Pulitzer

Posted on by Azra Raza

From The Wall Street Journal:

Siddhartha_Mukherjee_by_Deborah_Feingold Indian-American Siddhartha Mukherjee’s non-fiction account of cancer won the Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category when the awards were announced in New York City late Monday. A cancer physician and researcher, Dr. Mukherjee’s book drew upon his experience practicing medicine to write “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” which documents the disease from its first appearance thousands of years ago to the medical battles still waged by doctors to combat and control it today. The Pulitzer Prize citation described the book as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.” The prize comes with $10,000 in award money.

Published in the U.S. by Scribner and in India by HarperCollins Publishers India, the book was inspired by a personal event. One day a patient with stomach cancer asked Dr. Mukherjee a simple question about her prognosis: “Where are we going?” That led the author to think the larger scope of the question in terms of cancer research. The author, a Rhodes scholar, said in an interview that when he started writing the book in 2005 he thought of cancer as a disease, but as he wrote, he began to start seeing it as something that “envelops our lives so fully that it was like writing about someone, it was like writing about an alter personality, an illness that had a psyche, a behavior, a pattern of existing.”

Before winning the Pulitzer, Dr. Mukherjee has already received critical appreciation for his book, which came out in November 2010. The British newspaper The Guardian, in its review of the book said, “It takes some nerve to echo the first line of ‘Anna Karenina’ and infer that the story of a disease is capable of bearing a Tolstoyan treatment. But that is, breathtakingly, what Mukherjee pulls off.” Perhaps what may differentiate the book from other vast literature on cancer is the way Dr. Mukherjee deals with the subject and its narrative. Laura Landro wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “He has a certain awe for cancer’s victims, for their ability to withstand the ravages of the disease and the sometimes drastic measures taken to treat it. The stories of his patients consume him, and the decisions he makes about their care haunt him.” “The Emperor of All Maladies” found coveted spots in the New York Times list of “The 10 Best Books of 2010” and in “The Top 10 Non Fiction Books” list by Time Magazine.

More here. (Note: Heartiest congratulations to dear friend and co-worker, Sid!!)

To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons

Posted on by Azra Raza

From The New York Times:

Music The other day, Paul Simon was rehearsing a favorite song: his own “Darling Lorraine,” about a love that starts hot but turns very cold. He found himself thinking about a three-note rhythmic pattern near the end, where Lorraine (spoiler alert) gets sick and dies. “The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview. “The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”

An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another. The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool. Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians. And what really communicates emotion may not be melody or rhythm, but moments when musicians make subtle changes to the those musical patterns.

More here.

Formerly Blind Children Shed Light on a Centuries-Old Puzzle

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Greg Miller in Science:

ScreenHunter_03 Apr. 19 11.12 In 1688, an Irish polymath named William Molyneux wrote the English philosopher John Locke a letter in which he posed a vexing question: Could a blind person, upon suddenly gaining the ability to see, recognize an object by sight that he'd previously known by feel? The answer has potentially important implications for philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Now, researchers working with a medical charity that provides surgery to restore vision in blind children say they've found the answer to Molyneux's question. It's “no” but with a twist.

Molyneux posed his question in the midst of a philosophical debate about how we comprehend the world around us. An affirmative answer to the question would support the argument that we possess innate (and presumably God-given) concepts that are independent of the senses—for example, that we possess a concept of a sphere, regardless of whether we have only seen one, only felt one, or both. A negative answer to Molyneux's question would support the alternative argument that any concept of a sphere or other object must be tied to sensory experience. In that view, a blind person would have only a tactile concept of a sphere that would be of no use in recognizing the shape by sight.

More here.

The Liberation War Museum in Dhaka

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Huma Imtiaz in the Express Tribune:

ScreenHunter_02 Apr. 19 10.26 As a Pakistani schooled in a sanitised version of history, the museum makes one cringe with revulsion. Skulls and bones recovered from a killing field in Mirpur, Dhaka, stare at you from a glass cupboard. A black and white image shows vultures picking at the bodies of those left for dead. In another image, a snake is stretched out on the back of a dead body — an unknown victim of the cyclone that battered East Pakistan in 1970, and led to increased feelings of alienation amongst East Pakistanis with the slow aid response from West Pakistan. Lewd sketches of women are among the graffiti found in a Pakistan Army camp.

My tour guide turns to me, “You tell me, how can we forgive or forget this?” Umm-e-Hani Shoily is a college student and, though this is her third visit to the museum, some of the images still fill her with horror.

Occupying a two-storeyed house, the Liberation War Museum documents the history of East Pakistan from the days of British Rule to 1971.

More here. More photos can be seen at Huma Imtiaz's blog here.

Of Quislings and Science: Reflecting on Mark Vernon, The Templeton Prize and Richard Dawkins

Posted on by Tauriq Moosa

by Tauriq Moosa

Richard_Dawkins_080430103832597_wideweb__300x375 Recently, Sir Martin Rees was awarded the most lucrative science-prize in the world, The Templeton Prize. Notice I said ‘lucrative’; not most respected or prestigious, though some indeed do think it is. This prize is awarded because it, according to its official website, “honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” It is given to those “who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality” – a sentence worthy of a tacky Hallmark card.

Sir Martin is in the company of £1,000,000 sterling and Mother Theresa and Billy Graham. Indeed, I wonder if that amount is enough to sway anyone, so that he or she is mentioned in the same breath as these fanatics. The point being there is little that is, by definition, about science. The Templeton Foundation and Prize is about promoting notions of the Divine, in whatever loose language you can fathom, using something vaguely non-Divine in approach. If you can anchor your pursuits that effect the world, dealing with sick people (not aiding) like Mother Theresa, or probing the mysteries of the universe with an appreciation for its beauty or possible higher purpose, then you qualify. They’ve melted the solid idea of the theistic god down into liquid form, so it slips through any pretention even when the person awarded the prize is not religious. Like Sir Martin Rees.

If Sir Martin donates it all to Oxfam, I would have little to quarrel with it suppose, except I think any scientist who doesn’t think there’s a conflict between faith and reason or science and religion is wrong. But that’s another discussion. What interests me about this whole episode was not the prize itself but the views that arose concerning the atheist culture wars. I’m interested particularly in ex-Anglican-priest-turned-“agnostic” Mark Vernon’s ever-banal criticisms of Richard Dawkins, as seen here (an ad hominem attack), here (how Dawkins is doing nothing new even though Vernon keeps writing about him), here (when Dawkins praises fellow writer, Christopher Hitchens, Dawkins is promoting hatred), here (Dawkins… groupthink… bus… bad), here (I don’t even know).

I rather enjoyed Dr Vernon’s books 42 and Plato’s Podcasts, so it is disappointing to see this usually clear, clever writer putting on the same performance each time Dawkins is mentioned in an online discussion or in the media. This is especially so when Vernon reflects on Sir Martin’s recent prize and… Richard Dawkins’ stridency. Yes. You obviously made that connection as quickly as I did. Vernon, expert bar none on how Dawkins should conduct himself publicly, has to write something… and it might as well be as Dawkins’ media nanny.

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Inaccurate but Plausible

Posted on by Jen Paton

by Jen Paton

There is a scene in David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet where a British captain addresses his crew, men from all over the world. The Captain pauses “to let words trickle into other languages.”

Drawing of the city of rome The novel follows a Dutch clerk, Jacob De Zoet, at Dejima, the Dutch trading island off the coast of late 18th and early 19th Century Nagasaki. Mitchell’s book is full of translation and mistranslation: from Dutch to Japanese, English to Dutch. It is a problem implicit in the historical novel itself, and in history too, to translate the past to the present. It is a long way for meaning to trickle.

In the book’s Reader’s Guide, there is a short essay on historical fiction (don’t be embarrassed to read Reader’s Guides, they are often good), where Mitchell writes of the difficulties of putting words in the mouths of past people: to avoid “smacking of Blackadder” one “must create a sort of dialect – I call it Bygonese – which is inaccurate but plausible.”

One of the hardest things about studying history, and especially the distant past, is trying to understand not just the speech, but also the mindset of the people one reads, and reads about. The people of the past are just as foreign to us in history as in historical fiction. What did it feel like to enter Justinian’s Hagia Sophia? What beliefs, and how true to him, made a man carry a Saint’s bones, or a piece of wood from the ‘True Cross,’ thousands of miles? What made a noblewoman wear a hair shirt underneath her fine gowns? My favorite history book, Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom, is about these questions. It is satisfying for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because it makes Other the people of the past in a way that, to me, is more honest than is usual.

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After the Internet was shut off

Posted on by James McGirk

James McGirk

A year and decade after the turn of the century, things looked dire in the United States of America, but not that dire: the economy was stagnant after an exuberant but lopsided decade of prosperity, job opportunities for graduates and social climbers had dwindled to a few openings changing bedpans for the large, parasitic over-class of aging boomers, and the gleam of enthusiasm following Barack Obama’s presidency had faded quickly. But the fact that *that* and a few years of hardship was all it took for open revolt among the most highly educated, entitled generation of Americans ever to be born would have been quite unimaginable at the time. That the change they got was not at all what they were expecting is one of the great ironies of our age.

The second clamor for change was born in the creative class; brought to term by the poets, as all good revolutions are, if not precisely not in the usual way. This revolution was born from a coalition with a notorious group of email spammers. Perhaps this requires a little explantation. Let us back up a little.

Since the introduction of fax machines and the Internet into Nigeria and other English-speaking third-world countries, mysterious missives would materialize in the inboxes of the industrialized world. These would purport to be from high-ranking bureaucrats, deposed princelings and other dubious figures, and ask recipients for permission to transmit a few million dollars of embezzled funds into their bank accounts in exchange for a hefty cut. If a mark agreed, he or she would be asked for a moderate advance of funds to cover transaction fees… This was known as a 419 scam, and, given the ludicrous spellings of their messages, these emails weren’t considered much of a threat, and indeed were something of a joke (at first).

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Directors’ Notes: Exploring OUR TOWN

Posted on by Randolyn Zinn

Actors, Accents, Imaginary Ice Cream, a Chair Ballet, Music and the Stars

By Randolyn Zinn

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Alexandra Jennings, Richard Howe, Katherine Stevenson, Jim Staudt in Our Town

This past February, after a three-hour drive north from Manhattan, Allen McCullough and I found ourselves in an eerie New England landscape. A white opaque sky slid seamlessly at the horizon line into glazed fields piled high with snow. The back kitchen windows of the donated house we would call home for the next seven weeks had frozen into a solid slab of icicle. Shivering, we wondered if we had made a mistake….did the world really need another production of Our Town?

We had arrived in Cambridge, New York to co-direct the play at the acclaimed Theater Company at Hubbard Hall. After a warming bowl of soup, we bundled against the cold, stepped outside to gaze up at the sky and pondered Thornton Wilder’s one-sentence description of his play. “The life of a village set against the life of the stars.”

This essay is a personal recounting and an attempt to catch hold of, at least in part, the ephemeral experience of making theater.

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Bollywood Meets Lifetime, and Gets a Great Director

Posted on by Hasan Altaf

by Hasan AltafBoots

All throughout That Girl in Yellow Boots, Kalki Koechlin stomps around Bombay in a pair of mustard-yellow Doc Martens until, at the end, devoid of hope, dreams destroyed, illusions shattered, etc., she takes them off and climbs into a rickshaw clutching them to her chest. The Doffing Of The Boots turns out to have a complete lack of resonance: The Docs are practical and fashion-forward but really not much else.

I went into the movie with high expectations – an Anurag Kashyap film, a Kalki Koechlin vehicle, a project that was clearly a labor of love, written by the director and the star – and left disappointed. The meaninglessness of the boots is obviously a minor complaint (sometimes an eggcup really is just an eggcup, although then why would you put your eggcup in the title?), but it seems to me emblematic of many of the weaknesses of the movie: Nothing really resonates, nothing really means anything, nothing really counts. Much like Koechlin’s Ruth, we plod through the movie in our boots until the plot twists a bit at the end, and then we take them off and go home.

I still can’t quite decide what the problem of the movie is, but I’ve narrowed it down to two completely contradictory possibilities: Either there is too much in it, or not enough. The basic plot is theoretically interesting – girl travels to foreign land looking for missing father, discovers deep dark family secret – but the meat isn’t there, and the outlines aren’t enough, on their own. Everything is sketched in so quickly that it becomes almost generic.

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Of Rimbaud and Insider Information on Disasters Foretold

Posted on by Maniza Naqvi

by Maniza Naqvi Tej

One perfect morning over several hours and cups of Tomoca macchiatos, under a clear blue sky and a sun whose warmth is like the perfect heat of a clay oven—I sit listening in at a café to the conversation at the table next to mine. Impossible not to, the short story which has engrossed me has come to an end. What better option then, but to keep the magazine open in a habit of reading and just listen instead. Two recently acquainted friends, I decipher, by way of an embassy dinner party two nights ago, sitting at the adjacent table and as Fereng as I, are arguing, or so it seems to me, about the local newspapers.

I find myself educated thus on Rimbaud and on how to read the local broadsheet and tabloids. I write here only what I have heard, from the two and not at all an opinion that I may hold myself. Far be it for me to hold such opinions for I am only here to mind my own business, and in the intervals to enjoy the mild climate and the coffee that the day has presented to me.

The scholar amongst the two, whom I have mistaken by his accent at first to be South Indian, is from Mauritius, and who, as I have understood from the conversation till this point, is on his way to Harar tomorrow, to deliver his own opinion at a local university on a paper on Arthur Rimbaud, who in this paper has been presented as the resident of Harar 1801-1807 and as the arms salesman and importer of brilles. Apparently, Arthur Rimbaud had inside information on market demand, through his friend in the palace of Emperor Menelik, the Swiss born Alfred Ilg, who was the chief advisor to the Emperor. Ilg kept Rimbaud informed about the royal household’s demands for such things as mini carafes or brilles for Tej. All this is news to me, this sunny morning, not only the poet, but also his trade. And it bears repeating, that he was the importer of arms and of the fragile long necked glass decanters from Italy called brilles, favored by the elite of Ethiopia as the vessels of choice for serving the traditional honey wine, Tej. So while other scholars would comment on his poetry, this scholar was to shed further light on the paper to be delivered there on Rimbaud the businessman in Harar, contributing to the weapons and alcohol trade. He was in the rather novel position of having to speak not of the poet’s art but rather his reasons for being in Ethiopia and his craft.

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Dispatches on the Tohoku Earthquake: Part II: Mourning

Posted on by Ryan Sayre

by Ryan Sayre

Sitting in a circle 8e5bf977-8bf4-49e9-9e3e-03d057570c57_1 around my computer with Kumagaya and his fellow fishermen at an evacuation center up north, we watched footage taken by him of the tsunami coming in. A good number of clinical terms offer themselves up to help understand Mr. Kumagaya's seemingly untroubled manner when explaning whose boat that was being pulled under now, whose fishing nets washed inland there, whose homes brought out to sea over yonder. Why is the mood closer to good humor than sorrow, nearer to excitement than despair? We can guess what words diagnosis will throw at us; words like 'shock' and 'truama'. But these terms are of limited use. The creases on Kumagaya's sun-beaten cheeks hold his visage to a single benign expression, sorrow having little room in it. It is a face reminicent of Basho's line, fishes weep with tearful eyes. Sorrow would be filtered immediately out of his face by the creases just as the salty tears of basho's fish are devoured by the vastness of the salt-sea the moment they spill from the eye. Where does all the sorrow go without the possibility for outer expression?

A few days ago my dearest informant and quasi-host father, with whom I am staying at present, took me aside to demand a strict outwardly emotional suspension. I was given orders not to offer tears, hugs, or even a listening ear to my host mother when she returned the following day from the funeral services for her father who had died the previous week. I was to use with her a certain one-word greeting generally offered after a long day’s work, a road-trip, or any minor daily task at all. This simple recognition of fatigue was the only one made permissable to me. I forced myself to agree that talk does indeed have something monstrous in it, all its energies being directed to the ear, leaving the rest of the body, and the rest of the enormous event, adrift. My host father was inviting me into a more delicate kind of care, a non-event-based care, an abeyant care. He was offering me in on a relationship honoring silence precisely where to me talk would seem most in order.

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Philosopher in Business, Part 1

Posted on by Jonathan Halvorson
by Jonathan Halvorson
The tribes of businessmen and philosophers live, for the most part, in mutual incomprehension and hostility. It is the rare philosopher who understands–emotionally, not just intellectually–why I left the field for a career in business, and even worse, health insurance. Couldn’t I just have started working in porn instead, and saved more of my soul? It is no less rare to come across someone in the corporate world who understands why anyone would want to do something as navel-gazing and irrelevant as philosophy. The first reaction is usually eye-widened surprise, and then the residue left is a taint. For if I ever seriously wanted to be a fussy professor of philosophy, can I now be serious about business, or am I just an idealist disguised in a suit?

ScreenHunter_01 Apr. 18 09.36 So why did I abandon my previous tribe mid-stream, while teaching at a very good research university only two years out of graduate school? The decision went down like this:

My position at the time was not tenure track, so in December 2002 I was back at the annual slave auction….that is…the American Philosophical Association convention. I had just interviewed with a university in California that was arguably the best of the lot I had scheduled. As I exited the room, I thought: I do not want this job. In fact, I didn’t want any of the jobs for which I was interviewing. To clear my head, I decided to leave the convention. This being Philadelphia, I set out to walk from the convention center from the Art Museum. By the time I reached the triumphal steps where Rocky Balboa gave Philadelphia a reason to continue existing, the proverbial enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders: I was done being an academic philosopher. Despite over 10 years of training and the fact that I had wanted to do philosophy from the moment I knew that it was a thing one could do, I would quit.

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Beware the Worm, and Other, More Obvious Attempts to Manipulate Public Opinion

Posted on by Meghan Rosen

by Meghan Rosen

Hawaiian-hula-dancer On the morning of April 8th, the day the government was scheduled to shut down if a budget deal couldn’t be reached by midnight, Arizona’s Junior Senator, Jon Kyl, made a passionate plea on the Senate floor for bipartisanship. He urged congressional leaders to “bridge the differences between the two parties” and reach an agreement.

The House had already passed a bill that made dramatic cuts to government spending, and it was time for the Senate to follow suit. The problem? Senate Democrats refused to vote for a bill that (among other cuts) defunded Planned Parenthood, and President Obama threatened to veto.

Senator Kyl, however, believed the bill was a reasonable measure to keep the government running; in fact, he said, it was necessary. To him, it just didn’t make sense to shut down the government over a program that cost taxpayers 300 million dollars a year. He wanted to put things in perspective.

For the first few minutes of his speech, Kyl sounded like the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate leadership should sound: bold, confident, and committed to solving tough fiscal problems. In these (fleeting) minutes, it was easy to see why he was unanimously elected by his party in 2008 to serve as the Republican Whip.

And then he clarified his position. It wasn’t that the amount of money going to Planned Parenthood was too insignificant, in the grand scheme of budgets and deficits, to warrant a government shutdown; rather, it was that 300 million was too much. Why hold up the budget debate for such a costly organization? Especially one that peddles abortions. After all, according to Kyl, “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood. That’s well over 90 percent of what [they] do.”

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But is it art?

Posted on by Dave Maier

by Dave Maier

He knew very well the dilettantes' manner (which was worse the more intelligent they were) of going to look at the studios of contemporary artists with the sole aim of having the right to say that art has declined and that the more one looks at the new painters, the more one sees how inimitable the great old masters still are. – Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

An interesting phenomenon of contemporary cultural life is that attitudes towards art, while often closely connected with one's political and ethical beliefs, are only with difficulty associated with points on the political spectrum. One finds populists, elitists, traditionalists, philistines, and even revolutionaries on both left and right. In addition, not surprisingly really, one generation's radical bomb-throwers can turn into the hidebound old fuddy-duddies of the next.

Serrano Even so, the rhetorical battle lines are fairly predictable. Progressives regard conservatives, whether elitist or populist, as stuck in the mud, while conservatives regard the left as rashly throwing away our cultural heritage in a mad dash for the latest trend, or as indulging in hyperpoliticized provocation instead of Real Art. There have been innumerable books and articles about the radical assault on traditional artistic values, and they all seem to follow the same script, even using the same handful of examples of (and yes, some do use this term, albeit possibly ignorant of its historical resonance) degenerate art: Andres Serrano (Piss Christ!), Robert Mapplethorpe (those icky pictures!), Karen Finley and her unspeakable yams, etc., etc.

Most of this criticism is mere harrumphing, the negative image of art-world puffery, neither of which it is worth our time to discuss. However, some more serious critiques raise important issues, not easily dismissed. Indeed, to the extent that such criticism questions the value of artistic radicalism, it may be congenial even to those who do not identify themselves as conservative. What should artistic progressives say about these things? Can these “conservative” points be adapted to provide a defense of non-radical progressivism? Or are they too alien, forcing us to choose between a) rejecting progressivism entirely in order to acknowledge them, and b) resisting the points themselves even when stated in their strongest form?

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RICHARD SERRA IN TWO (AND A HALF) DIMENSIONS: THE DRAWINGS AT THE MET

Posted on by Jeff Strabone

by Jeff Strabone

What happens when a great artist in one medium exhibits work in another? 'Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art asks us to consider this question. For forty-some years, Serra has developed a non-representational sculptural practice based chiefly on physical properties of mass, weight, and counterbalance, as opposed to visual agendas of image and representation. In doing so, he has opened up new ways of thinking about art in an era when representation and image-making, no longer the raison d'être of art, are simply two among a smorgasbord of options.Serra, Untitled (1972-1973)

Although the world's attention has gravitated to his sculptures, Serra has been drawing for his entire career. That the Met's exhibition is the first retrospective devoted to his drawings is telling, particularly given his many exhibitions of sculpture and site-specific works around the world. We must ask then, Why has it taken so long, and what do Serra's drawings have to offer us?

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