Quieting the Mind

John Cage (photograph by Rob C. Croes, from the Dutch National Archives, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

One of the most memorable quotations I learned from John Cage was that the purpose of art was “to sober and quiet the mind, so that it is in accord with what happens.” This may be the best antidote for recovering from reading the daily news, which, more often than not, seems to throw the mind into a state of crisis, if not downright panic. Mind you, another one of Cage’s favorite quotes was, “Every day is a beautiful day,” another adage that does not hold up very well against news reports. Nevertheless, in my experiences of watching Cage at work (including hunting for mushrooms), I have come to expect that the words I live by are “We do what we can.” Fortunately, I can hold to those words through my activities on this site!

Patrons of the Arts

This afternoon my wife and I attended the 2017 Medallion Society Luncheon of the San Francisco Opera (SFO). This is one of the ways in which SFO thanks its more generous donors. Our donation level is not up there with the heavy hitters, but it is enough to get us admission. This makes for a relatively pleasant afternoon of good food and people-watching.

My wife always likes to go through the enumeration of donors at the back of the booklet that awaited us at our places at the table. She encountered an ample number of familiar names. However, what surprised me was that my own traversal of the list turned up names that she did not know, members of the computer science community that I knew either as colleagues or individuals I had encountered at conferences. I was more than pleasantly surprised at how many of them there were, many of whom were more generous than we were. This led me to make a second scan in search of my more recent colleagues and familiar names associated with the younger members of the "technology generation" in the Bay Area. This time I came up with no hits at all.

This is the endemic problem of the performing arts these days, the "greying" of its audience base. I realize that the older generation writing about the young pups is a familiar cliché. Nevertheless, just about every sector of the performing arts to which I have some commitment has tried to attract a younger generation to the audience community; and the sad truth is that they have failed dismally. A generation that understands the world only through "social software" available on a smartphone is a generation that lacks either the motivation or the patience to become audience for the performing arts. Furthermore, it is very unlikely that anyone of any generation will be able to serve as a change agent to lure this sector into the "audience fold."

When I was a student, there were strident modernists who delighted in accusing concert halls of being little more than museums that served only past relics. However, in the city of San Francisco, there is an abundance of opportunities for "emerging" composers and performers interested in the more recent repertoire to lay out the fruits of their labors to those willing to serve as audience. Further more, those who show up tend, more often than not, to be appreciative. The question is whether those on the way up will have to rely on those "nearing the end of our journey" to serve as audience. If so, they face a future of dwindling audiences with little hope of having the resources to do anything about it.

It would appear that, regardless of how Hans Christian Andersen chose to tell the story, the Emperor's mechanical nightingale may have triumphed after all!

Has Buckminster Fuller been Forgotten?

I was glad to see that an obituary for Ruth Asawa made it into today's New York Times. On the other hand an early sentence by Douglas Martin gave me a bit of a jolt:

Ms. Asawa had been shunted from one detention camp to another as a child before blossoming under the tutelage of the artists Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline and Josef Albers.

I know that Fuller had a significant effect on the avant-garde movement of the Fifties. However, the way in which Martin lumped him in with three artists left me wondering if Martin had even a vague idea of the man's accomplishments!

"Was He Still Alive?"

I shall be interested to see what sort of obituaries are published following the announcement of the death of Andrew Wyeth. When Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980 (on April 15, in ironic date in light of many of his critical views about the United States), it seemed as if many of my friends reacted by asking, "Was he still alive?" I honestly cannot remember the last time I heard Wyeth's name raised in any context; nor do I recall reading any accounts of the retrospective exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006 (which, according to the report in the London Telegraph "drew more than 175,000 visitors in 15½ weeks, the highest-ever attendance at the museum for a living artist"). Worse, it is now hard for me to think of any reference to "Christina's World" as being anything more than a cliché (which probably has less to do with any aesthetic criteria and more to do with the overexposure the painting has suffered). The Telegraph report includes an Agence France-Presse photograph of George W. Bush with his arm over Wyeth's shoulder, which (accidentally?) raises the question of legacy. Whether Wyeth's legacy will fade into the same shadows of insignificance that now cloak Sartre, at least it will not suffer the infamy of the last President to honor him.

The Deceptive Headline

The title of yesterday's blog post by Jan Herman on The Huffington Post reads "Milton Glaser Loves Information, Not Persuasion." Fortunately, he began by reminding us that we were familiar with Glaser's work, if not his name:

The 79-year-old graphic designer perhaps most famous for creating the I♥NY logo had a dose of surprising advice last week for the propagandists among us -- the marketers, advertisers, public-relations spinners and, yes, journalists -- along with citizens at large facing an onslaught of political campaigns.

It is "essential for us all to question all the beliefs we cherish," Milton Glaser said in his keynote speech to a daylong 'ganda bash, "Where the Truth Lies," organized by the School of Visual Arts with The Graduate Center, CUNY. "Beliefs must be held lightly because certainty can be the enemy of truth."

Unfortunately, Herman's zealous desire to bash propagandists led him down the path of sloppy reporting, best represented by his choice of title, which turns out to be a misreading of Glaser's citation of Horace. The text Glaser cited was the aphorism, "The purpose of art is to inform and delight," which he then qualified by observing, "Horace did not say persuade and delight." Herman then tried to map this into twentieth-century rhetoric, thereby instituting as much distortion as any good propagandist would.

This is one of those cases where distinguishing between nouns and verbs is no mere matter of grammatical nit-picking. Horace chose to describe the purpose of art with verbs because his focus was on artistic practice, rather than artistic products; and, to make the situation even more complicated, it is unclear that the Latin language recognized "information" as a "product of informing." Indeed, my cheap paperback Latin dictionary reveals that the Latin word for "information" is informatio (which also happens to be the noun for "idea"), while the Latin for the verb "inform" is instruěre, as in "to teach." In other words the purpose of art is to teach and delight, which is pretty much the way Aristotle had put it in his "Poetics." Herman has basically deep-ended on current practices of warping the concept of "information" beyond any useful recognition, thus bashing those propagandists with a red herring.

All this just goes to show that Herman seems to have missed the entire point of Glaser's lecture. Glaser used a belief that he cherished as his focal point, and Herman then embraced and cherished his own corrupted reading of Glaser's text without ever thinking to question the position he just took. In other words he put a "spin" on his experience in order to use his blog post to flog the propagandists, not realizing that, in so doing, he was placing himself in the midst of their camp. Like most propagandists, he assumed that his text would never be read at more than a casual level; but we know better, don't we?

"Food for the Soul"

This morning Raymond J. Learsy used his Huffington Post blog to file a report on the second National Arts Policy Roundtable, recently held at Robert Redford's Sundance Preserve. Here is his summary of the activities:

At the forefront of the discussions that lasted nearly two days, was the importance of arts to the future of the nation's competitiveness in a changing paradigm of global, economic, technical and social evolution and cultural change. That creativeness, or perhaps better understood, 'innovation,' is and will become a factor of singular significance to the quickly changing world of the 21st Century.

Under the visionary leadership of Robert L. Lynch, its CEO, a fundamental goal of the American for the Arts is the advocacy of arts education. Much of the focus of this gathering centered on the lack of arts and cultural engagement in our schools at virtually all levels. That this reality was impacting the creative capabilities of our workforce and risked our ability to compete effectively in a world where innovation critical thinking and its attendant attributes of flexibility, problem solving, innovation, entrepreneurship were not only growing exponentially in importance but were becoming key to commerce and success in a wired and in an ever flattening world. The discussions were fascinating and a comprehensive report will be issued in due course by the Americans for the Arts.

Anyone reading my blog probably knows how seriously I take the arts, particularly the performing arts; and, as a minor matter of personal history, I honestly cannot remember whether I learned to read books before or after I learned to read music. However, it is because I am so serious about the arts that it is very hard for me to respect any discussion of them that is so dominated by the newspeak (thank you, George Orwell) of a globalized world of work that we barely understand. (The ambiguity of that sentence is intentional: Because our comprehension of the world of work is so weak, our comprehension of the words we use to babble about it is totally impoverished.) The worst of those newspeak terms has to be "innovation," which should be evident by the flood of equally hollow terms that emerge in its wake in the second paragraph I selected to cite. This takes us to the next paragraph in Learsy's account:

Much of the discussion surrounded "the arts" as a viable tool that would help our workforce be more productive and adapted to the exigencies of 21st century. Questions raised were how to disseminate and inculcate this message to hierarchal groups and to enlist their help. That is to help persuade government and educational institutions to introduce arts education into the curriculum of our schools from kindergarten through college. So that indeed, the arts and its attendant creativity could become a mainstay of our educational experience and thereby helping us as a society to embrace the arts on both a personal and national level.

That first sentence is the real killer. Anyone who talks about "a viable tool that would help our workforce be more productive and adapted to the exigencies of 21st century" is talking about technology, at least subconsciously, if not explicitly. This is the language of solving problems; and the very suggestion that art solves problems is a naive misconception that, in the past, has sometimes had tragic consequences. My favorite example is the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. His supporters said that he sincerely believed that, if Hitler heard Beethoven's ninth enough times, he would finally come around to appreciate that universal brotherhood of man behind the text "Alle Menschen werden Brüder;" and, on the basis of my own probes into Furtwängler's life and work, I have no reason to doubt that sincerity.

Learsy provided a take on an interesting anecdote to conclude his post:

A story was repeated at the conference of an especially revealing moment experienced by staff member of the Americans for the Arts, Randy Cohen, its VP . It is worthy of retelling. The Americans for the Arts were visited by a delegation of Russians on a fact finding mission, to learn about the methodology of support for our arts institutions. The Russian delegation was responsible for the fiscal well-being of myriad institutions ranging from the Bolshoi, to Moscow's and regional theaters and museums. With Russia's expanding cultural programs, money, as everywhere in the cultural world was a problem. Asked by one their hosts, what were the ticket prices to the concert halls, theaters and museums under their organizational umbrella? They responded with a touch of pride, "well, about the cost of a cup of coffee." Aha, was the almost automatic response, "why not raise your ticket prices, after all they seem very low compared to ours."

At the end of the table, a rather burly Russian stood up, placing the palms of his hands on the table, hunched forward, and intoned "You must understand, in Russia art is food for our soul. We would never do anything to keep it from our people." Hello America, hello Washington, hello state capitols. Are you listening!?

That final question should be directed at the National Arts Policy Roundtable, itself, before firing it at the upper echelons of government. Was there anything in all that utilitarian language than indicated even the most rudimentary grasp of a concept like "food for the soul?" Indeed, I found it interesting that none of the participants in Learsy's account were practicing artists (with the possible exception of Robert Redford, who seemed to be serving more as host than as participant).

However, that "rather burly Russian" understood something else about "food for the soul" that goes far beyond the Roundtable's agenda. He spoke from a cultural context that appreciated that appreciation for the arts needs to be tightly coupled to the rest of the educational process. On the basis of Learsy's account, it appears that the Roundtable chose to overlook the ugly truth that we have a badly hemorrhaging educational system desperate to sacrifice as much as it can just to make ends meet; and the arts tend to be the first discipline to go when the budget gets cut down to the bone. Yes, I think it is wonderful that we have advocacy for arts education; but, unless those advocates make active and aggressive contributions to the healing of the entire educational system (which can feed the soul with not just the arts but all the other benefits of a liberal education), the points they make are likely to be perceived as gratuitous (at best) or elitist (at worst). Hello, Robert Lynch, are you listening?