Items of Interest, Night Garden Edition
"Man is the creature who does not know what to desire."
Theodore Dalrymple, The Ravages of Cultural Termites. “Soon into Gatrell’s fascinating book, I noticed a typographical oddity: the decapitalisation of titles such as that of the Duke of Wellington, the Archbishop of York, or the Lord Chancellor, King George IV, which became the duke of Wellington, the archbishop of York, the lord chancellor, king George IV etc., all against customary usage. Presumably, this was in some way an attempt to cut them to down to size, to express a lack of respect for, or even a hatred of, the social hierarchy of the time: a democratic gesture. This, of course, is profoundly silly, as if to write Tsar Nicholas I were to endorse Tsarism, or to write Pope Francis were to be a believing Catholic. But we live in a world of costless gestures—costless, that is, to those who make them.”
Luke Burgis, Why Everyone Wants the Same Things. “‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,’ Girard wrote. We have instinctual responses to help us choose the objects that meet our most basic needs—when we’re hungry, we seek food; when we’re cold, we want warmth. But there is an entire universe of desires for which we have no instinctual basis for choosing one object or another. For these objects of desire, Girard saw that the most important factor in determining what we want are the desires of other people, or what he calls our ‘models of desire.’”
Esther Wickham, More than 1,000 professors sign on to Stanford Academic Freedom Declaration. “The open letter calls on universities and professors to adopt and implement the ‘Chicago Trifecta’ — the Chicago Principles on unilateral free speech, the Kalven report that requires institutional neutrality on political and social topics, and the Shils report, making ‘academic contribution the sole basis for hiring and promotion.’”
Closing soon: Sterling Mulbry at Clark Gallery in Lincoln, MA.
Niall Gooch, Why Are Universities So Ugly? “As it is, the interiors of university buildings present a nullity. They presuppose, and create, people without roots and without concrete allegiances. Nothing is remarkable, nothing is mysterious, nothing is awe-inspiring. There is no room for vaulted ceilings that draw the eye upwards and outwards, nor for the frivolous artistic detail that announces the importance of the unimportant. The niche and the decorated window are banished. Students’ lives will remain unenhanced by the interplay of light and shade that marks the great Gothic masterpieces, the brilliant proportions of the best classical buildings, and the elaborate grandeur of the Baroque. Instead we have endless tedium, thinly carpeted and lit with headache-inducing, uniform brightness.”
Aidan Harte, The souping of Saint Vincent. “Growing up in the Eighties, the only iconoclast I knew was Madonna. That’s what they called her every time she had a haircut so I assumed that iconoclasm had something to do with peroxide. Only later, slogging through Gibbon, did I discover that it means breaking icons. Civilization restrains the atavistic urge to smash and slash, but a hooligan lurks within all of us. With the right cause, the vandal becomes a holy warrior. Sometimes the mobs are organised by the state, but the German word bildersturm nicely conveys the inherent instability of the phenomenon. It’s worrying then that iconoclasm is back in style, a trend confirmed by last month’s news of eco-warriors invading art galleries from Manchester to Milan.”
John M. Ellis, The Decline of Higher Education. “If we fast forward to the present, one feature of what’s happening on the campuses looks similar: that crucial analytical function is still getting stifled whenever it offends an equally shallow local moralism. But there’s a startling difference: the actors have changed places. It’s now the professors who do what the small-minded small-town worthies used to do, shutting down analysis whenever it offends them, which is often.”
Jason Zito, How Kendrick Lamar's new album tackles cancel culture, artistic expression, and social justice. “Lamar goes on to rebuke just about everyone: cancel culture, virtue signaling, fake social justice, and our immersion in the metaverse. He demands that the hypocrites of the new world take off their masks; once the facade is gone, the ugliness is revealed. But Lamar doesn’t stop at the hypocrisy of our culture today. He also explores the deeper contradictions within the human condition, including the hypocrisy he sees within himself. He starts by defending the indefensible, taking the whole world down with him.”
Kendrick Lamar, “N95.”
Clayton Fox, Fuck David Mamet. “Rereading The Secret Knowledge 10 years on it is impossible to deny that Mamet has a prophetic gift for understanding American life, honed in his drama, perfected in his prose, and that there’s a lot that Americans of all political leanings could probably stand to learn from reading his work. But for the past 14 years, the cognoscenti have ignored, shunned, and demonstratively not read, David Mamet. His crime? Abandoning his tribe.”
Joshua T. Katz, The Academic Memory Hole. “A disorienting fact: At the very same time that I became invisible to my former friends and acquaintances, what I wrote propelled me, wholly unwillingly, into the public sphere. The result is that plenty of people no doubt talk about me but almost no one I used to know talks to me.”
Scott Alexander, Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise. “But (Brooks continues) these people are elite and do insist on playing the usual elite signal games. Your particular Native American blanket might have been made by the most famous Native artisan, using only heirloom wool sustainably harvested from free-range sheep raised on traditional farms run by indigenous people of color. If your guests have any class, they will see the blanket, recognize it, and know all of that. Otherwise, you’ll have to subtly hint at it until they get the point.”
The Burgis piece obviously applies--and how--to the art world, notoriously to people who are in it (often prominently so) despite having no eye or truly personal taste, but who know the rules of the game and what they're supposed to like and not like. It's not that humans have no instinctual basis for choosing one art object or another, but rather that taste varies widely, and many do not trust their own and adopt the "correct" taste, which is safer and more convenient. It's a form of fashion victimhood, though the "victims" can be opportunists who know they're full of it but are fine with that.