American houses have gotten a lot bigger since 1970, but people don't like their new big houses any better than their old small houses, unless they are bigger than the other houses in their neighborhood.
Also, having a big bank balance makes people feel richer than a much larger amount of property or investments.
In Sweden, an Iron Age man was buried in a boat with his horse, dog, and sword.
In Mesa, Arizona, a policeman fatally shot an unarmed man who was on his knees with his hands up. Even though this was captured on video, he was acquitted of homicide. He was fired from the force, but then he was briefly rehired so that he could claim disability because, he says, he suffers from PTSD from killing an unarmed man.
In 2009, the European Union gave a one billion Euro grant to a team of neuroscientists who proposed to create a computer simulation of a human brain. They promised they would do it in ten years. They failed.
Scott Alexander summarizes Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (a famous narrative of the origins of hippie drug culture) so you don't have to read it.
The NY Times brought together some artists and curators and asked them to name the 25 art works that best define the era since 1970. I had the same reaction as another old fud, David Brooks. Let me just state my credo here: politics is not the most important thing in human life, and when your art is just politics something vital is lost.
But there is one very interesting work among the 25, Arthur Jafa's short film "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death." It is political, but it is not just political; it is also art.
We might run out of sand.
1 comment:
"The NY Times brought together some artists and curators and asked them to name the 25 art works that best define the era since 1970. I had the same reaction as another old fud, David Brooks. Let me just state my credo here: politics is not the most important thing in human life, and when your art is just politics something vital is lost."
That's like looking to the state of European artwork during the Black Death, and saying "Mortality is not the most important thing in human life, and when your art is just depictions of death something vital is lost."
Art is always a reflection of what is gnawing at the minds of the people making it. If art since the 1970s is defined by politics, then that tells us that politics has been a particularly big issue in our society during that time period - at least among artists, if not perhaps all across the board.
Also, trying to represent a span of 50 years with only 25 works is quite a challenge. If you're forcing people to pare down their options so drastically, you're going to lose a lot nuance and detail, and get only the broadest of strokes. Moreover, they asked only a small handful of people, all from the same field, who likely all belong to the same schools of thought and have similar experiences and tastes. Skimming the article proper, it sounds like they somewhat address just how weird and limited an undertaking this was, and how arbitrary the results are.
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