“Such is the fated result of an assumption deeply buried in our collective mind. It grew there early in the last century when the artist as a social type came to be glorified as a hero, a seer, a genius. Geniuses must be allowed to do as they please while the rest of mankind gratefully …
Fun Juxtapositions
Sometimes the news brings you fun juxtapositions. The last one I heard about was a local newspaper carrying two stories — one about the removal of Christmas trees from the SeaTac airport, and the other about the terrorist organization Hamas helping Christians in Bethlehem decorate the town for Christmas. Heh. But this is a new …
Blindsided
“Apart from that, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the technological revolution passed virtually unnoticed in the lands of Islam, where they were still inclined to dismiss the denizens of the lands beyond the Western frontier as benighted barbarians, much inferior even to the more sophisticated Asian infidels to the east. These had useful skills and devices …
Knowledge Extract
“But what we are experiencing is not the knowledge explosion so often boasted of; it is a torrent of information, made possible by first reducing the known to compact form and then bulking it up again—adding water. That is why the product so often tastes like dried soup” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, p. …
Islam and the West
“For many centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement . . . And then, suddenly, the relationship changed. Even before the Renaissance, Europeans were beginning to make significant progress in the civilized arts. With the advent of the New Learning, they advanced by leaps and bounds, leaving the …
The Cape and Beret Problem
“By the 1700s, moreover, ‘art’ and ‘artist’ had subtly acquired new meanings. The good or great artist was now understood to possess more than high technical competence, and he had gradually come to feel a special kind of self-regard. The graphic artists particularly demanded freedom of action; when commissioned they would no longer tolerate being …
Pursuing What You Love
“This active use of time is of course for pleasure; its impulse is love. Everybody used to know this when the words amateur and dilettante were taken in their original meanings of ‘lover’ and ‘seeker of delight.’ We have turned them into terms of contempt to denote bunglers and triflers” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We …
The Troubling Role of Artistic Theory
“In the arts, theory comes after the fact of original creation and, far from improving future work, usually spoils it by making the artist a self-conscious intellectual, crippled or mislead by ‘ideas.’ Not everything that is good can be engineered into existence” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, p. 19).
No Metaphor Mechanics
“The other use, direction, or bent, Pascal called the esprit de finesse—we might call it ‘intuitive understanding.’ . . . It does not analyze, does not break things down into parts, but seizes upon the character of the whole altogether, by inspection. Since in this kind of survey they are no definable parts, there is …
What We All Wished We Had
For the last several years, I have been privileged to be involved in editorial and writing work on the Omnibus project. Some of you may have noticed the books as they have appeared in the right hand column here. Just yesterday I received Volume III in the mail, and thought this would be a good …