tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post1359968013058865588..comments2024-03-03T13:55:46.243-08:00Comments on Ambling Along the Aqueduct: Democracy needs the arts: but do the arts need democracy?Timmi Duchamphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00673465487533328661noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-2490060779311707462011-09-26T22:27:02.992-07:002011-09-26T22:27:02.992-07:00A link to download the article. Haven't read i...A link to download the article. Haven't read it yet, but thought this might be useful:<br /><br />http://www.haringwoods.com/userfiles/Benjamin_Barber_British_Council_Arts_and_Democracy_Speech_Nov_4_2009.docclairehttp://clairelight.netnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-40991956223306375812011-09-26T22:20:27.673-07:002011-09-26T22:20:27.673-07:00It occurs to me that Barber is laboring under the ...It occurs to me that Barber is laboring under the misapprehension that "freedom" (presumably of thought) and "critical imagination" are all internally-generated and unaffected by the social, ideological, and political conditions one lives in. I can't accept that assumption. For me, what it is possible to think or imagine depends to a significant extent on one's cultural and intellectual formation-- as well as on reactions to one's ideas and creative work from the people around one (unless, of course, you're an "outsider artist" and thus writing or sculpting or painting purely for yourself, for private reasons, and without intention of showing other people your work). <br /><br />Consider, for example, the history of formal European music. Extreme manifestations involving dissonance, complicated rhythms, and unlikely experiments with voicing and variant tonalities occurred at the tail end of each of the distinctive epochs (Late Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, & Romantic (perhaps or perhaps not Classical, depending on whether you consider Beethoven a bridge between the Classical and Romantic periods or a Classical composer who pushed the forms of his musical epoch to their extreme possibilities). A lot of people would like to explain Gesualdo's strangeness as due to mental aberration (or genius, placing him "out of his time"), and Beethoven's late work, particularly the late quartets, as due, somehow, to his deafness, but their exercise of extreme freedom and imagination was only possible because the forms they worked in were so well developed and nearly mined-out. (In fact, there was a lot of very strange, difficult music written in the last half of the 16th century, pushing the pope to ban a lot of music from Roman Catholic churches and to hold up Palestrina, who eschewed complexity, as the exemplary composer of music appropriate for the Church. (I tend to believe the Baroque period lasted longer than the Classical simply because its forms were much more elastic and, its peak, less uniform, too.) <br /><br />All of which ties into our on-going conversation about intelligibility, of course...Timmi Duchamphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00673465487533328661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-49880859657932041602011-09-26T16:50:30.146-07:002011-09-26T16:50:30.146-07:00"The arts have flourished under tyranny and a..."The arts have flourished under tyranny and authoritarianism where, though he may generally be in for a rough ride, the artist is always firmly grounded in his freedom, independence, and critical imagination" says <a href="http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/benjamin-barber-and-the-devil-we-know/" rel="nofollow">Barber</a>. Well, under <i>some</i> tyrannies. Barber should be condemned to spend the rest of his life reading nothing but North Korean literature.<br /><br />Nussbaum could probably make a better case for democracy needing the arts.Joshhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00156428408011131309noreply@blogger.com