CapitalistImperialistPig

Leading arts professors keep saying so. Pinker has a theory why: The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves? Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (p. 416). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. One trouble, he says, is that their art is based on a discredited theory of human perception, based on - you may have already guessed - the idea of the mind as a blank slate, instead of one with lots of built in categories including detectors for pretentious bullshit. OK, he didn't actually say the very last bit, but I think he at least hinted at it.

I hear that there is a certain amount of consternation in liberal circles over the fact that David Mamet, perhaps the leading American playwright of the day, has "converted" from liberal (his claim) to conservative.  And not to any old intellectual conservative either, but to a Sarah Palin loving Glenn Beck and Rush what's his name listening National Palestinian Radio wingnut. I don't know anything about Mamet personally, and only a little about his plays and movies - think Glengarry Glen Ross - but I can hardly be surprised that some elderly rich Zionist turns into one of his own characters.  It's not exactly rare for scientists to lack common sense, but its practically mandatory for artists. John Gapper has a lunch interview with him in Financial Times via Slate .

Evolutionary psychology faces a fundamental challenge if it is to explain a few peculiarly human activities, such as music, mathematics, and art.  How could these abstract activities have had a survival value in their origins?  To try to make the point more acute, how could the guy sitting by his campfire decorating his spear have gotten a competive advantage over his counterpart investing the same time and effort into doing him in? It seems very plausible to me that the artistic impulse had its origins in ordinary pride in workmanship.  Fashioning a really effective stone arrowhead is far from being a trivial task.  I have noted previously on this blog that the human hand is equipped with muscles and control that our fellow great apes lack, and that these muscles give us a precison of control that they lack - chimps, at least, seem to be able to grasp the notion of making a projectile point but lack the fine motor control to be good at it. Just as the muscles an...

I was driving home listening to the overture to some Wagner opera, Tannhauser , I guess, and it occurred to me that nearly every science fiction story of the cruder type featured an evil scientist bent on taking over the world. How about evil artists? Are they common in reality or fiction? Wagner certainly fits the profile - a very bad man who wrote very good music. Now I've met a few evil scientists, but none of them actually seemed bent on taking over the world. Mostly they seemed to be focussed on making associate professor or some similarly mundane ambition. Wagner, though, was the sort to be bent on world domination.