This blog has repeatedly called attention to the battle over the Kennewick man. A&L links to Edward Rothstein’s review of James Cuno’s Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage
Arts & Letters
Quote of the Day
Tom Smith sees art plain:
And now for some deep thoughts about Art. I think the heart of the problem is not that artists take themselves too seriously, but that everybody else takes them too seriously. People forget that art is fundamentally interior decoration. And occasionally outdoor decoration. The job of art is to produce stuff that rich people want to buy and put on their walls or in their gardens because it is nice to look at, or use, if you are talking about, for example, pots. Rich people here includes rich institutions, such as the Catholic Church. That is, contrary to what Ms. Something or Other of Yale says, art is a commodity. Well, maybe not a commodity. In justice, I suppose frequently it qualifies as a unique good for purposes of commercial law. But just a good. This notion that markets make bad art, is just the opposite of true. Institutions supporting art for non-market reasons produces bad art — political art, ideological art, art about issues, and so on. Dreadful stuff. Art produced for markets produces stuff you can imagine wanting to buy if you had the money.
[…]
I think a good rule of thumb is that if a piece of art has to be explained to you before you can see why anybody would bother to make it or look at it, you are wasting your time looking at it. One useful thing about repellent performance art, such as videos of abortions, is that it disabuses people of their earnest middle class sentiment that art will somehow improve or elevate them, if only by opening their minds. It can do that, but it has to start with something else, and it has to have something to improve you and elevate you with, which is not going to be art itself. I suspect that governments giving money to artists has done a lot to promote bad art. Finally, there is a lot of shockingly dreadful Marxist theory of art stuff out there, which I advise you to avoid.
A tangentially related post is here.
Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride
Megan McArdle is upset by something that Roy Edroso, a writer for The Village Voice, has said about her. He called her a “libstick libertarian”, which she feels is a misogynistic statement.
Well, it is a sexist comment! Considering that Mr. Edroso let it slip in an article where he rates ten Conservative blogs as to their Stupid to Evil ratio, Megan seems to be most incensed that he would be considering her femininity as a factor. What would being female have to do with being either stupid or evil?
She has a point, but that isn’t what I want to discuss. What puzzles me is how Mr. Edroso could have missed including The Chicago Boyz in his list!
Aren’t we Evil enough? We certainly try! I’m a gun-toting self defense instructor, and I even teach violent crime survivors how to shoot their disadvantaged attackers without charging them anything. To a New York liberal writing for a Leftist propaganda rag, that should put me somewhere above Joe McCarthy and just a little lower than Pol Pot. I mean, c’mon!
And stupid? I have bathtubs full of stupid at home, just in case a Village Voice columnist comes on by and wants to borrow a gallon or two. There are a few thousand rounds of ammunition in my living room alone, and I keep the guns used in the self defense class in my basement. According to those discredited studies the anti-gun lobby keeps quoting, I should have accidentally shot myself and every member of my family a few dozen times over by now. The fact that I haven’t shot anyone yet can probably be taken by a Liberal as proof that I am so stupid that I can’t even screw up right! If, that is, they can get over the fact that I am so stupid that I own guns in the first place.
And let us not forget my fellow Chicago Boyz! I doubt that any of them will be able to rise to the lofty heights of both Stupidity and Evility that I have achieved, but they all have their own geniuses in these areas. I figure that our combined talents creates a giant black hole that sucks all Goodness and Smartiness out of just about anyone unfortunate enough to glance at the title bar.
So the next time Mr. Edroso is compiling his little list, he should first stop on by and see what’s cookin’ with The Boyz.
Mamet & Human Nature
2nd Update: (If anyone’s reading this far down). Tom Stoppard on ’68.
The idea of the autonomy of the individual is echoed, I realise, all over the place in my writing. In The Coast of Utopia I was using 19th-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen’s own words about the English in the 19th century: “They don’t give asylum out of respect for the asylum seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it’s liberty.”
Update: Henniger on Mamet’s essay (WSJ video).
Original post: David Mamet
began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
He describes his conversion in the Village Voice. His picture of Bush still has elements of BDS, but he has begun to examine his experience and finds the best keys to understanding it seem to lie on the right. As some (some critical) commentors note, his work indicated he might be moving that way. (Certainly a television series about the professional & home life of a special forces unit might indicate that.) And certainly a playwright worth his salt might be interested in how character actually acts – an inadequacy that some of the more ideological playwrights of our time demonstrate rather nicely. But it was life that had forced him to look again at his beliefs.
Fun Fact
If you submit electronic files (e.g., digital photographs) on a CD to the US Copyright Office as part of a copyright application, the Copyright Office stores your CD but does not transfer the files on it to its computers or other durable media. There is also no way to resubmit or otherwise replace electronic files stored in the Copyright Office archives if the magnetic or optical media you submitted them on deteriorate.
This appears to mean that the registrations for many copyrighted photographs will become legally indefensible if/when the CDs on which the images were submitted deteriorate. The person with whom I spoke at the Copyright Office suggested submitting photographic prints or contact sheets rather than CDs. This suggestion would have been good advice until recently, but it’s impractical for people who copyright large numbers of digital photos.
I have no idea if the deteriorating-media issue will become a significant problem. Maybe not: the odds that any particular image file submitted in a copyright application will be needed to defend a copyright are low. Happily, the Copyright Office is testing a system that allows copyright registrants to upload image files over the Internet, and this new system should eliminate the CD issue for people who use it. But the many files that have been and will be submitted on CDs and DVDs are still vulnerable.