Arts on Campus: There, but Not There

Marjorie Garber, author of the superb Vested Interests:Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety as well as Patronizing the Arts,  writes in the Boston Globe:

This is an era of what could be called the “visual intellectual.” Students on college campuses and members of the general public flock to hear - and see - addresses by filmmakers, artists, and performers. Cultural attention, and cultural primacy, have shifted to encompass art installations, the moving image, technology, and performance. Phrases like “visual literacy,” “aural literacy,” “digital literacy,” and “media literacy” are increasingly common.

But although artists and performers are highly prized as visitors to colleges and universities, the kind of work they do has not reached a comparable importance in the curriculum.

Art and higher education might seem a natural fit in many ways, but they have a long and uneasy relationship. The arts are often still consigned to a secondary role within universities, sometimes viewed as not intrinsically intellectual, or not intrinsically academic. Even when a university invests significantly in the creative arts, and offers an array of courses in painting, sculpture, creative writing, and performance, many scholars and academic administrators remain unconvinced: Arts do not seem to lend themselves easily to the “tenurable” standards of other university subjects.

That Book Thing in Austin

… which is how I heard one literature professor describe the Texas Book Festival. At any rate, the TBF’s official calendar for this fall’s edition, Nov. 1-2, is now online, including a session with NPR’s own Scott Simon, author, most recently, of the novel, Windy City.

Exposed and Rolling in Dallas

Best boy grip Sloane Schoeneberg on the set of Exposed.

Actors are being coiffed, grips are hauling equipment between sets, Joey Stewart is barking at his crew, and Jon Keeyes is being a great guy. This could describe a lot of film shoots that have taken place in North Texas in the past 10 or so years. This particular project, Exposed, is being financed by big time studio Warner Brothers. So when I visited the final day of shooting last Saturday at The Art Institute of Dallas, why did a set production assistant ask me not to use his name if I posted his picture?

“Eh, I’m really a producer, and this is just for the Web.”

Dude, really? Admittedly, I have a softness toward original content for the Internet - my hands are blogging in it - and Exposed pushes the new media boundaries of North Texas film production.

Supervising producer Joey Stewart in the inner sanctum.

“It’s the Metaverse,” says supervising producer Jon Keeyes. What Jon calls the Metaverse, I call transmediating, a term purloined from a book that rocked my world, Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins. Transmediating is telling a story through several media platforms simultaneously. Most famously, The Wachowski brothers transmediated The Matrix series; you could go see the movie and then go on with your life OR you could play the video games and read the comic books, too. The optional platforms don’t just repeat the films, they add exclusive information and make the whole Matrix universe a lovely onion screaming to be peeled (really bad but vivid metaphor by me).

Supervising producer/great guy, Jon Keeyes

For Exposed, one character will have a MySpace page with alternative perspectives on each webisode through blogging, social networking capabilities (with real people), and possibly even additional footage. (You might think interactivity and corporate copyright cannot mix, but the Hogwarts camp is doing an excellent job, from what I’m told.)

The details on Exposed:

– North Texas cast and crew (the lead actor was born here)

– Thirty episodes, each three to four minutes long, spread out over 16 weeks

– National promotional campaign, televised

– Coming soon to a computer near you (http://www.thewb.com/). Premieres November 3, 2008

I was on set for two hours when it dawned on me that I hadn’t asked about the plot (former Russian Mafia guy escapes his tormentors by posing as an American college student/janitor), then I realized my fascination came from form, not content. The Metaverse is here, baby! And it’s the wave of the future, so surf’s up, North Texas. The medium is the message.

Future of Cultural Criticism?

Doug McLennan is the mind behind Artsjournal.com, one of the best arts-news websites and art blog collectives around. Confession: I blog there as book/daddy, but seeing as Doug has been doing this for nine years and Artsjournal.com gets 45,000 users per day, my estimation of his achievement has some basis. Amanda Neer of Life’s a Pitch interviewed him about cultural blogs and art criticism.

Here are some of his thoughts about the near-future of criticism and how newspapers have only hurt themselves:

When do you think newspapers will croak for good? At some point Jonny Greenwood or whomever is going to declare that Radiohead no longer wants to be reviewed in print because it’s bad for the environment, and that will be the end, right?

I think there are already artists and arts organizations that have given up on newspapers. Hard to argue with their logic. I don’t think newspapers will ever really go away. I do think that 2-3 years from now it will be the exception for local newspapers to have staff critics. They’ll still run some form of writing about culture. But it won’t mean much. Really a shame. I think newspapers have hurt themselves greatly by the ways they’ve come to think about arts coverage. There’s a huge audience out there, but newspapers have pursued a dumb strategy when it comes to A&E coverage.

I feel like I came to the blog party circa five years late. Ah well. Are blogs over? Close to over? What will be the next big thing?

Blogs aren’t over. But blogs don’t have some magical property. Blogs are merely a quick publishing platform that allows the world to see what you write. They’re like a pen is to paper - a tool that enables you to write. What you choose to do with it is entirely up to you. There are as many kinds of blogs as there are people. Some of the bigger blogs are starting to look more and more like traditional publications. Some traditional publications are looking more and more like blogs. Some are very journalistic. Many are like personal diaries.

What’s next? I think there won’t be a huge revolution. Changes will be incremental. Video, audio, collaborative. Etc. The next immediate thing is the explosion of mobile use and interactive multi-media. I think this will very much change the way we use the web today. It will make how we use the web/create for the web today seem like the Dark Ages. Any artist, arts organization or journalist who isn’t thinking about the way mobile use is going to change things, is going to be left in the dust.

Critic too Critical?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has stopped its longtime classical music critic, Donald Rosenberg, from reviewing the Cleveland Orchestra. No reason has been given by the editors.

Rosenberg, who has been covering the orchestra for some 30 years, 16 of them at the Plain Dealer, is the author of “The Cleveland Orchestra Story: ‘Second to None’” (Gray & Co., 2000), widely acknowledged as the definitive source on the orchestra’s history.

Rosenberg is a past president of the Music Critics Association of North America and currently serves on that organization’s board of directors…. He will continue to write for the newspaper on various subjects, but staff writer Zachary Lewis has been assigned to cover the orchestra in his stead.

Rosenberg is 56. Lewis is 31. Perhaps the thinking is that the less experienced critic will be the kinder, gentler critic. Rosenberg has made no secret of his opinion that Music Director Franz Welser-Möst pales by comparison to his predecessors in the post. He is not alone in his opinion. When the orchestra announced in June that it had contracted the Austrian conductor through the year 2018 – giving him 16 years on the Cleveland podium – The New York Times commented that the news might “surprise” some observers who feel that the conductor “has not lived up to his potential.”

The New York Times story.

The Wall Street Journal commentary.

When the Texas Rich Were Really Texas Rich

Journalist Bryan Burrough has a knack for taking what would seem to be a thoroughly well-worn topic — 1930s bankrobbers, say, like Bonnie & Clyde or Machine Gun Kelly — and finding a fresh, inventive angle on the story. Which is what he did with Public Enemies, his action-packed history of how the gangsters and the early FBI fed off each other, establishing the legends of both and leading America, for good and ill, to accept a nationwide, internal security force without public debate.

Now, Burrough, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, has turned his eye on Texas oil clans in his new book, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes. The book won’t be out until January, but Burrough’s chapter on hell-raising Houston wildcatter Glenn McCarthy has been excerpted in the newest issue of Vanity Fair. (I’d expect Texas Monthly would like an advance excerpt, too, seeing as it concerns favorite topics of the magazine: the creation of Texas legends, wealthy Texans and their conspicuous consumption.)

These are certainly characters who’ve inspired plenty of books before this, notably John Bainbridge’s The Super-Americans from 1961 and Sandy Sheehy’s gossipy 1990 volume with the rather similar title,  Texas Big Rich. [Read more →]

Monday Round-Up and a Farewell

Author James Crumley

• The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts gets its third-largest donation, $15 million from Sammons Enterprises, for the outdoor spaces around the Winspear Opera House and the Wyly Theater.
• Some parents and DISD teachers have expressed fears about students seeing images in the PBS arts documentary series, art:21. The first three seasons of art:21 were given to middle and high school teachers as supplements to a new arts curriculum. Specifically, what has caused concern are photos by Sally Mann of naked children and racially and sexually charged works by Kara Walker — whose exhibition, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, is currently at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through Oct. 19
  

  The Dallas district’s current curriculum is old, Ms. Sohm said, and mainly focuses on basic elements of art, such as lines, colors and shapes. It also doesn’t allow students to express their feelings through their artwork and no contemporary art is used, she said.

  “What we’re trying to do is put forth a curriculum that mirrors the real world of art,” Ms. Sohm said.

  For high school students, the first six-week semester includes having students observe and examine controversial art, according to a planning guide given to teachers. For sixth-graders, a portion of the lesson focuses on students using artwork to think critically about “crucial and painful issues of past and present societies.”

  Skyline High School parent Robin Brown said parents and students should be given notice before the documentary is shown in class. She said students should have to acknowledge in writing that certain behaviors in the documentary are illegal – citing the work of one artist that includes tagging private property.

  “The notice should also serve as protection to the teacher against legal action for showing what some may view as illicit or pornographic,” Ms. Brown said. She added that the documentary is a great tool but is more appropriate for college students.

• Texas Ballet Theater dancers are pounding the pavement trying to rally support (and money) for the financially troubled troupe.
  

  In the parking lot behind them, lines of multicolored flags roped off a small benefit sale featuring used and new items. Shoppers idly perused the clothing, computers, glassware, and artwork, furniture, and other items on display.

  There were tell-tale signs that this was not your average fund-raiser. Items up for sale included an autographed portrait of Elizabeth Taylor and a limited edition “Fantasy Goddess of Asia” Barbie doll with diaphanous gold dress designed and signed by Bob Mackie. Clusters of scuffed pointe shoes, autographed and stuffed with bright pink material, were on sale. Tucked away in a shady corner, a young female ballet dancer in puffy tutu was posing for $20 photos with excited little girls, who’d formed a short line with their parents. … Meanwhile, the score from Delibes’ comic ballet Coppelia swelled vivaciously out of the speakers.

• The hardest of the hard-boiled crime novelists, James Crumley. has died. The 68-year-old former Texan died at his home in Missoula, Montana. He was perhaps best known for The Last Good Kiss, which introduced his drug-taking, simmeringly violent tough-guy hero, C. W. Sughrue, and was celebrated for its opening line, “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
  Photo from the NYTimes

He Writes, He Edits, He Swims, He Models: What Can’t Willard Spiegelman Do?

On p. 90 of today’s The New York Times Magazine — and in a slide show on the Times’ website — Willard Spiegelman, SMU English professor and editor of The Southwest Review, appears as a male model. The issue is dedicated to teaching, and Dr. Spiegelman is an exemplum of a “Class Act,” one of six college teachers appearing in the Style section. They all make “academia look good” — in Dr. Spiegelman’s case, he’s looking good in front of an ivy-covered wall with a Brooks Brothers windowpane jacket plus Ralph Lauren waistcoat. It’s an ensemble that does make him appear George Will-ish, although perhaps that is the fate these days of all dapper, mature gents wearing a bow tie.

Conveniently, in other fashion news in the Times, Caroline Weber reviews Glamour: A History by Stephen Gundle. The glamorous, she quotes Gundle, exemplify ” accessible exclusivity” and “democratic elitism,” not to mention, ahem, “sleazy elegance.” By doing so, “the glamorous personality is always performing for an audience, without whose envy or admiration he or she would not exist.” Dr. Spiegelman, we note, wears his glamor lightly, shoulders back, head high.

Sunday Afternoon with Junot Diaz

For a day that saw the tragic end of contemporary writer David Foster Wallace, a fortuitous counterbalance was found in Dallas with life expressed by author Junot Diaz. Diaz participated in a vibrant discussion of his work for the Writers Studio at the Dallas Museum of Art. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Although he has been publishing short fiction for publications such as the New Yorker and The Paris Review for many years, Oscar Wao has brought him a buzz strong enough to land him on television programs as diverse as the Colbert Report and Charlie Rose. The Sunday afternoon buzz was no different. He managed to fill the Horchow Auditorium with fans eager to ask him questions about his writing, teaching and vulnerabilities. He didn’t disappoint.

[Read more →]

A Shock: David Foster Wallace Commits Suicide

DFW. the celebrated postmodernist, author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, was 46. The NYTimes appreciation is here.