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.

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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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.

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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by Alyssa Pelish

For Julia Turner, who, on Slate’s Culture Gabfest of 30 March 2011, declared, “I hate epigraphs!”

You see how cream but naked is;

Nor dances in the eye

Without a strawberry;

—Robert Herrick, “The Lily in a Crystal”

There is a scene in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that, I must admit, I was pretty crushed out on in my younger years. In it, the novel’s young heroine, Tatiana, pores over the private library of Onegin, dandified object of her unrequited love. Here, she finds not only the books (heavy on the Byronic heroes) from which he has clearly fashioned himself, but his marginalia: “crosses or a jotted note /…the question mark he wrote.” There it is: his soul laid bare, the primary sources of his character. And the truth is, she’s not sure she likes what she sees; he’s so obviously cloaked in the robes of someone else’s genius – “a Muscovite in Harold’s cloak,” she thinks, noting how ostentatiously Onegin has affected the world-weariness of the first Byronic hero.

What makes the scene doubly great is that Pushkin is all the time inviting us to level a similar charge of appropriation at his entire novel. And it’s true: Eugene Onegin emphatically borrows characters and tropes from the body of Western European literature and culture that once cast a long shadow on Russia’s literary aspirations. As if this weren’t enough, Pushkin inscribes his novel with many, many epigraphs plucked from the Western canon, playing with the idea that his sprightly “novel in verse” is just a hodgepodge of re-heated scraps from the real geniuses over in France, Germany, and England. But of course that emphatic playfulness is what makes Pushkin’s novel: the constant Western references (Onegin eating Strasbourg pie and reading Byron next to his bust of Napoleon, Tatiana captivated by the sentimental heroines of Richardson and Rousseau) and, most visibly, the epigraphs that front every canto. Pushkin is wildly, dazzlingly aware of the role his consumption of Western European culture has played in his literary creation, and he now re-animates the lines he’s learned – in the context of his own verse[1]. The difference between Pushkin and Onegin, you could say, is that Pushkin takes those old lines and makes you see them anew; Onegin, alas for Tatiana, merely takes them.

In fact, the difference between Pushkin and Onegin is really the difference between a well-deployed epigraph and an ill-used one.

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A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints
of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.
…………………………………………. –BBC 4/7/2011

More Splintered Than Common Sense

Having heard hints
of a never-before-seen particle
my day becomes new;
the blue day is fractured further

What were small thoughts become
more pint-sized then the nonsense
of politicians: smaller even
than the bits of stained tile mosaic
under my feet beneath
a urinal

But I’m disappointed. I’m told
this is not the much-sought-after
Higgs boson that I’ve been chasing
my whole life, looking for it between
the pillows of my couch where I
often find keys and nickels or dimes.
Hope surged when I first heard the news;
but now, again, life seems to be shy
of something elemental, and yet my
tomatoes have just perked green
in several of my potting flats
their petite leaves pulling-in
light

Disappointment aside, scientists say
this hinted-at particle could be a
new force of nature —beyond sex and
maybe greater than greed? Who knows
what new element of nature they’ve
found hinted-at in their accelerator
in unexpected bumps in jets
of colliding particles which they
note while sipping Starbucks
as the white dust of a sugared torus
settles upon the lapels of their lab coats
and the micro-world simultaneously
fragments with the macro
into something even more splintered
than common sense

by Jim Culleny,
© 4/9/2011

by Sarah Firisen

If there’s anything that we should have learned from the world events of the past couple of months it’s that the desire to be autonomous is a universal human one. Events in Egypt seem to show that when people feel empowered and can taste freedom, anything is possible. Perhaps this insight into the human psyche can be used to think more creatively about education.

I recently came across this blog piece by a 6th grade teacher discussing his school’s recent, inaugural Innovation Day during which all the 6th grade students were told, “that they would have an entire school day to learn about what they wanted and to create evidence of their learning in any way they chose.” The end result was over 200 learning projects made up of students working independently initially and then often merging into groups as they began to help each other with projects. One of the most telling findings that this teacher notes when answering the question, ‘Did you have any discipline issues with giving kids the freedom to day what they wanted for a whole day?’ was, ‘None! When you give kids a highly engaging activity that they choice in [sic] and buy into; behavior problems are nonexistent.’

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

One of the more anticipated and dreaded publications of the year is the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (SISI). It arrived again this year with the usual fanfare and condemnation. The battle lines are familiar: To some it is a celebration of idealized feminine beauty, to others its representations of women are so far removed from reality as to be laughable, except that some consequences are so serious.

What may not be obvious at first glance is that this tension is a very old one: What is perfection and how do we as individuals compare to these perfect forms? It is well represented in Raphael's 1509 painting, The School of Athens. At its center, Plato is pointing up to the heavens where perfect, transcendent forms reside, while his pupil Aristotle is pointing to the earth, where we live our lives. Though Aristotle was closer to our modern conception by focusing on what “is,” he was still guilty of typological thinking. That is, he recognized organisms as belonging to abstract classes or representing idealized forms. As an example, Ghiselin (1969) makes a distinction between seeing “the horse” as opposed to “this horse” or “that horse.” The recognition that populations are composed of individuals that have variation in traits is a recent one, only going back to the time of Darwin. Before then, Platonic Essentialism, Aristotelian typology, and their Christian derivatives held sway over much of Western thought (Mayr 1982).

The Neo-essentialism and typological thinking provided by the SISI is not subtle and provides wonderful opportunities to market wares and services. Not blonde enough? Here is some peroxide. Bust not measuring up? Push-up bras or implants can be yours! Nose too big? No problem. We can trim other parts too (If you really want an eyeful, try Googling “labioplasty before after” with SafeSearch toggled off). Overweight? Here's a diet; or how about liposuction? Razors, depilatories, & wax can mask your mammalian characters. And so on.

The thinking behind SISI doesn't do men any favors either. How many of them are waiting for “the one” who looks like a supermodel while barely acknowledging the existence of fabulous women around them who happen to dwell in something other than so-called perfect forms?

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by Feisal H. Naqvi

Most people know the former Chief Justice of Pakistan, A. R. Cornelius, as one of the great jurists produced by this benighted country. He is remembered fondly as the lone dissenting voice in the infamous Dosso case (which was the first of a long line of cases to justify military rule) and as a crusader for fundamental rights. Very few people though know that Cornelius was a champion of recasting Pakistan’s entire jurisprudence in Islamic terms.

M.R. Kayani, the former Chief Justice of what was then called West Pakistan, is on his terms, just as well known as Cornelius. Like Cornelius, he is remembered as a great jurist. Like Cornelius, he is remembered as a voice of strength and courage, one which refused to be silenced by the might of the state. But unlike Cornelius, his view on religion was that it was a dangerous tool in the hands of fanatics. As one of the co-authors of the famous 1953 report on the causes of the anti-Ahmedi riots, he wrote:

If there is one thing which has been conclusively demonstrated in this inquiry, it is that provided you can persuade the masses to believe that something they are asked to do is religiously right or enjoined by religion, you can set them to any course of action, regardless of all considerations of discipline, loyalty, decency, morality or civic sense.

The Cornelius-Kayani debate is examined at length in a brilliant upcoming article by Professor Clark Lombardi of the University of Washington. In brief, his view is that (a) as argued by Cornelius, human rights norms are strongest when entrenched in public acceptance of those norms, (b) Pakistan’s public discourse is dominated by considerations of what is Islamic, (c) the experience of Egypt’s Constitutional Court shows that a secular institution like the courts can imaginatively and sensitively reinterpret Islamic norms in a modern and progressive manner and therefore (d) countries like the United States which are interested in promoting liberal secularism in Pakistan should also consider promoting if not Islamization, then “at least a certain type of Islamization.”

As much as I respect Professor Lombardi’s acumen and learning, I disagree. In my view, the legal and political system in Pakistan needs to be kept as de-Islamized as possible.

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by Dave Munger

Whenever I call my stepbrother Mark, one of his persistent complaints is how prices are going up. “Everything costs more,” he tells me. Yet for the past two years, he's received no increase in his Social Security Disability check. His money, which never went very far, now barely seems to be enough to get by. But when I read about inflation in the media, a very different picture emerges. Kevin Drum says inflation is the lowest ever. Paul Krugman says that worries about inflation are misplaced. What's wrong with this picture? Could Mark have a mistaken impression of what things really cost?

I decided to take a closer look at how inflation figures are actually derived, to see if the numbers are painting a misleading picture of what real people pay for the goods they need to survive. Inflation in the US is tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which has a very informative web site explaining exactly how they arrive at their figures. Prices are tracked by looking at a typical “basket” of goods and services people buy, currently set at a value of $100 in 1983 dollars. This is the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, which is used, among other things, to determine the annual increase in Social Security payments. The most recent BLS figures put the CPI at about 220. So the stuff that cost $100 to buy in 1983 now runs you $220. That's the basic idea, anyways.

In practice, my purchases, like those of most people, are a lot different from what they were in 1983. I'm not buying a lot of vinyl LPs any more, and my budget for skinny pink ties has significantly diminished. In 1983, I didn't have a cell phone or internet service bill, and instead of buying iPad apps, I was pumping quarters into Donkey Kong and Q-Bert. How does the BLS account for all that?

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by Tom Jacobs

All the time there is this split in the American art and art-consciousness. On the top it is as nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey. […] You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness. That blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knows disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise.

Always the same. The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish. Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Hums the under-consciousness. Love and Produce! Cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and-Produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.

–D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

One of the most upsetting scenes in Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” (1994)—a film full of upsetting scenes—is what one would probably have to call the “rape scene.” It’s the scene where Bruce Willis’s character (Butch Coolidge) returns to save Ving Rhames’s character (Marsellus Wallace), from an already-in-progress rape and, presumably from a subsequent certain death. All of this takes place in the basement of an already disturbingly creepy pawnshop run by a coupla good old boys. This, in and of itself, is not funny. It’s hard to imagine how or why it might become funny. But it does, oddly, become funny. This is intriguing: how does it comes to pass that we laugh not so much at suffering, but rather at violence, even if it’s fictional.

Susan Sontag, the prophet of how we consume suffering, says this: “Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.” She also says this: “For the photography of atrocity people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance.” Imagination and contrivance, it seems, are the problems that plague us. She is right, of course. We don’t understand images of suffering either because we can’t completely empathize because we see these images everyday, or else because they seem too contrived, too beautiful (and one might check the front page of the NY Times…it invariably presents us with an image of beauty and death). We don’t imagine ourselves, not really, in the sufferer’s shoes, and the representations of their lives seem distant and abstract. This is a problem. It is all so far away, so distant and remote, and I asked for a grande not a venti, type of thing.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

The making of cocktails often falls unhappily into one of two extremes. If you have previously been subjected to the sickly sweet frozen neon drinks, so beloved of chain restaurants and a certain kind of tourist, you probably think of cocktail making as a base practice that strikes terror into the heart of anyone remotely fond of alcohol. On the other hand, with the modern cocktail revival, it seems easy to be forced up against a bewildering variety of obscure ingredients and cacophonous combinations, surrounded by a subculture presided over by self-important bartenders. The making of cocktails is an art, true, but it is quite easy to make good cocktails at home, cocktails that are faithful to alcohol (rather than trying to disguise it) and that at the same time are simple to make and do not require the memorization of entire recipe books.

There are general principles underlying many mixed drinks, and understanding them makes making and drinking them a lot more fun. Like those underlying any good explanation, these principles are both structural and historical and, of course, structures are historical entities as much as history unfolds within structural confines. All this is to say that this is one possible means of making sense of mixed drinks, but one that hopes to cut reality at some set of natural-seeming joints.

Historically, the cocktail was a combination of liquor, sugar and bitters (and was preceded by a sling, which was a combination of liquor and sugar) and, while the modern cocktail is generally more complex than this, this formulation already gives us structural insight. The Old-Fashioned is a straight-forward instantiation of this principle: take rye or bourbon, a little sugar or simple syrup and a few dashes of bitters and mix them together. Why? At the very least, mixed drinks add a new discursive dimension to alcohol and, like with sex or politics, talking about drinking is almost as much fun as drinking. But there’s much more. Even this simple combination tastes surprisingly good. The sugar, as long as it isn’t enough to overpower, rounds out and softens the alcohol, and the bitters give a herbal complexity and depth. This is admittedly vague and, if you haven’t tried this before, you should compare a rye and sugar drink against an Old-Fashioned and you’ll see what I mean. Even if you have, if the ingredients are available, make one up and sip it while you read this.

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by Vivek Menezes

Look, the fact is that cricket barely qualifies as an international sport.

There are a billion and a half subcontinentals who’ve been fed cricket, cricket and more cricket for decades – the very definition of a captive audience – so there’s steady interest here. But look beyond, and we’re talking a very steep, genuinely precipitous, drop-off to England, Australia, South Africa and the West Indies, where “our” sport runs a distant third or fourth to the popularity of football, rugby, basketball, athletics, swimming, etc. And after England and its overseas spawn, you may as well stop counting, because you’re done with all the legitimate cricketing sides in the world. Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?

Indians don’t like to consider this truth, but it’s become quite apparent that most other countries only continue with cricket because India is obsessed with it – they play to keep us company, to humiliate us when the chance presents itself, and, especially, to pick up generous paychecks which would be entirely unforthcoming if India grew up, and concentrated its efforts on real sports, played by a majority of nations, the kind of sports that show up at the Olympics.

But you see, that precise sticking point is the crux of why Indians are obsessed with cricket – it’s another plain fact that we’re really, really horrible at sports where the rest of the world competes, and we hate the Olympics, beacause we get ritually creamed each year (at Beijing, India’s best Olympics ever, little tiny countries like Mongolia out-ranked us. Yes, Mongolia.)

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by Misha Lepetic

“Any energy not recycled becomes some form of pollution” – Andy Lipkis

Much as the 20^th century taught us that central planning failed our nations, the 21^st century will teach us that central planning will fail our cities.

It is commonly known that sometime in the last few years, we have passed the milestone, with half of the world’s population now residing in cities. Somewhat less known is the projection that 60% of all people will do so by 2030 – that is a rate of almost 180,000 persons moving into cities every day. This is a trend of such immensity that it is basically irreversible, and yet city governments (as well as their state-level counterparts) are ill-equipped to handle it from just about any point of view. Specifically, urban growth will mostly occur within the context of peripheral, unplanned environments, where physical, social and legal infrastructure is present in only the most arbitrary, self-organizing fashion. When coupled with the increasing frequency of extreme weather events that is the true consequence of climate change, the resilience of cities themselves is called into question.

As an example of such events, consider the catastrophic monsoon that visited Mumbai beginning July 26. In the course of the first 24 hours of rainfall, nearly a meter of water descended on the city, almost double the previous 1974 record. More importantly, the sewage system at that time was only capable of handling a flow of 25mm of water per hour. Over a thousand lives were lost, and the city was brought to a complete standstill for days. The costs exacted from an outdated infrastructure, ineffective bureaucracy and massive growth in population density were high indeed.

Much as commentators in the United States have done following the experience of New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, it is easy to consider symptomatic solutions: if city planning agencies were funded better, they could deploy more powerful infrastructure that would have effectively prevented levee failure. However, weather events several standard deviations beyond what is anticipated only compromise the implicitly conservative planning process. These processes use probabilities generated from past experience, hence the terms ‘100-year flood’ (ie, a 1% chance of such a flood happening any given year), which nevertheless seem to be coming along every few years. The estimated cost of centrally planning for and upgrading an urban infrastructure for a putative ‘1000-year’ flood is so prohibitive and seemingly distant that our psychological biases pull us – and our policymakers – toward such magical thinking as “We’ll just have to take our chances” or “Well, probably not in my lifetime.” And yet, Hurricane Katrina followed almost exactly a month after the Mumbai floods.

This is not to say there is causality, or even correlation, between these two black-swan weather events. Geography, size, density and economic wealth clearly show New Orleans and Mumbai to be radically different cities. What is relevant is the common failure of centrally planned urban infrastructure, from both the policy and technological perspectives.

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By Namit Arora

I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, ‘call no man happy until he is dead’, I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?

The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to an Indian Institute of Technology, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being in the right place at the right time.

A pivotal question in market-based societies is ‘What do we deserve?’ In other words, for our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements are just? How much of what we bring home is fair or unfair, and why? To chase these questions is to be drawn into the thickets of political philosophy and theories of justice. In this short essay, inspired by American political philosopher Michael Sandel’s Justice, I have tried to synthesize a few thoughts on the matter by reviewing three major approaches to distributive economic justice: libertarian, meritocratic, and egalitarian, undermining en route the dominant narrative on my own well-being.

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