As Politico reported, “Most Americans think public broadcasting receives a much larger share of the federal budget than it actually does,” according to a poll conducted for CNN last year. The results of that survey, which asked respondents to estimate what share of the federal budget was spent on certain programs, found that just 27 percent of Americans knew that the money for PBS and NPR was less than 1 percent of government spending. Remarkably, 40 percent guessed that the share was between 1 and 5 percent and 30 percent said it was in excess of 5 percent — including 7 percent who said that more than half of the federal budget was spent on television and radio broadcasts.
For the arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization of the trades that would allow students to enter those fields without social prejudice (which often emanates from parents eager for the false cachet of an Ivy League sticker on the car). Among my students at art schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworkers who were already earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs.Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world—which, like it or not, is modern reality.
Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.
The Elements of Euclid, via the Ministry of Type
Many years later, he heard some of Inigo’s last words in the film again — “I have been in the revenge business so long, now that’s over, I do not know what to do with the rest of my life” — and he heard them quite differently. “As a young man,” Patinkin says, “I think I was in a bit of the revenge business for too many years of my life. And, you know, somewhere in the past 10 years, I stopped being so angry and started being a little more grateful, literally for the sunrise and the sunsets and my kids and my family and the gifts I’ve been given. And then I saw that movie, the end of that movie. I didn’t see the whole thing, I just caught the end of it, and I heard that line. And as a young man I remember saying it, I went back and looked at my script to see what notes I’d put in, and I really didn’t have any notes for that line. I just said it, and I didn’t realize what I was saying. And then I heard it as a grown up or whatever you want to call me, and it — it meant everything to me today.”
Louis-Léopold Boilly
I can personally attest that, despite the liberal bias, I was happy in academe. Another Republican-leaning faculty colleague liked to point out that a conservative student was likely to get a better education than a liberal one. Having one’s worldview challenged—rather than affirmed—strengthens one’s ability to think clearly and critically.Similarly, conservative faculty members learn to be polite and rigorous in defending their perspectives. And while the loudest voices on the campus tend to be the most extreme and intolerant, there are also many liberal faculty members who respect other viewpoints.
So here’s my advice to conservatives and libertarians in academe. Don’t think of yourself as a victim, and don’t use ideological bias as an excuse to stop trying. In my experience, academe is very much a meritocracy despite its liberal bias. It’s OK to express your views, but be nice about it. Some liberals on campus—like the hostile crowd at the D’Souza talk I attended—may choose to abandon civility. You will drive them crazy if you don’t.
Finding the ‘Beautiful Evidence’ of ScienceNew York-based artist Thomas Allen’s upcoming exhibition, Beautiful Evidence, is the product of many hours spent digging through the stacks of old bookstores and leaning over cheap purchases with his scissors. On display at Foley Gallery, the show displays old science books in new ways.
Photo: Thomas Allen/Courtesy Foley Gallery.
On a Saturday morning in November 1966, Tom Phillips picked a book at random from a pile of novels at a house-clearance sale in Peckham Rye. Phillips had never heard of W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document (1892), but he liked the title and the yellow cover and handed over threepence. Back at his kitchen table, Phillips began a process of remaking or ‘treating’ the book: by painting over most of each page with acrylic gouache or ink, he left visible a stream of text which, in dialogue with the images he added, told a new story. By folding the title-page, Phillips contracted the words ‘a human document’ into a neologism he liked: ‘a humument’. ‘An earthy word,’ he writes in the afterword to this fifth edition, ‘I like even the effortful sound of it.’A Humument is a strange, beguiling work, which Phillips found within Mallock’s long-forgotten novel. A Human Document opens: ‘The following work, though it has the form of a novel, yet for certain singular reasons hardly deserves the name.’ Phillips obscures most of the first page with a blue and orange arrow, leaving a few scattered words that cohere into a version of the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid (‘I sing of arms and of a man’): ‘I sing a book of the art that was/now read on/of mind art/though I have to hide to reveal.’ He treats each page of Mallock’s novel in this way, effacing most of the text, generally by painting, occasionally by cutting, slicing, or even in one instance burning the page, to leave an alternative narrative. Phillips’s revealed story was in one sense always there in Mallock, just lost amid the torrent of other text. This is authorship as pruning, a process of erasure or cutting away that finds in the buttoned-up A Human Document a teeming world of humour, sex, sadness and art that would have baffled and shocked the conservative Mallock.
The English Empire in America, N. Crouch, 1685
The New Yorker (Now Using Apple Maps) (via magCulture)