[contextly_auto_sidebar id="b8rJJnGCXKiH3M8zWOVGbX2BXfYXXJBs"] DO we need cultural seriousness, intellectual contemplation, works of depth and complexity? I've been hearing for most of my life -- I came of age in the '80s -- that we don't. Just asking the question got you branded, when I was a kid, a sissy or a bookworm; now it gets you called a snob. But a very fine, reasonably long … [Read more...]
Six Questions: Where Do We Go Fom Here?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="1whRNQEaMtG6Y3rKjMLHRzTEwdTzdym6"] THE American Scholar magazine recently asked me to lay out some of the questions I was left with upon completing my book, Culture Crash. I was glad they asked me for questions rather than answers; the plight of the arts, humanism, the middle class, and art for art's sake seem so complex and impacted that it's a lot harder to solve … [Read more...]
Has Architecture Lost Its Connection?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="JXp6XOeglaoCeQ8tXG7WjOAVz5fmoupq"] ARCHITECTURE is a funny field: Much of its most important, most talked-about work is done for a tiny number of clients -- we'll call them rich people -- but the profession has a lingering (and in some cases sincere) social conscience and concern for the broader built environment the rest of us live in. That blend of ambitions has … [Read more...]
The Middle Class Gets Crushed
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="nlkSqy50Zn5Bw3CQlhpyfd29maMq78kr"] ONE of my guiding principles on this site and in the soon-to-be-published book it accompanies is that the creative class it almost entirely embedded within the middle class, and that musicians, writers, artists, etc. are even more exposed to contemporary economic pressures than the average burgher. This is despite the fact that the … [Read more...]
Waging War on Middlebrow
A PROFOUND story appeared in the New York Times a few days ago and seems to have gotten far less discussion that it deserved. I mean film critic A.O. Scott's "The Squeeze on the Middlebrow." This is one of the best pieces I've seen connecting income inequality and the whole 1 percent business to culture and the middle class's role in it. Scott begins by speaking about Thomas Piketty's Capital … [Read more...]
Publishing’s Shrinking Attention Span
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="CAxR2RewOYpbx08DLip9Jb3pvG0eQ2Sw"] THE Scottish novelist Val McDermid, who has sold 10 million books, says she wouldn't have a career in today's relentless marketplace. One of the things the Internet and the superstar economy have done is to shrink our already shrunken attention spans further, and that's doubly true in the culture industries. Crime writer … [Read more...]
Art, Work and Money
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="iZv7JeHqc41WMIllgv7eQnjxMkFtGil8"] IF art and culture produce something besides money, what, exactly, is it? Who are the people who devote their lives to this stuff? And how have technological and economic shifts changed things over recent years? Those are questions I ponder often, and A.O. Scott addresses them in a perceptive and wide-ranging New York Times essay … [Read more...]
Visual Art and Piketty’s “Capital,” and David Mitchell
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="38DeNwZGJisbGbTELS20TK8CUWph1kUR"] CULTURE and economics are connected, of course, in all kinds of ways, some simple, some complex. I often muse on the question of how rising income inequality relates to the arts, specifically the art market. A new story gets at some of it, using Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty's bestseller, as … [Read more...]
Will Gentrification Kill Music Scenes?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="TrbR7MBr156tnxxUjyokh6h5WiyTPKma"] ONE irony that members of the creative class lives with every day is that we help bring neighborhoods up, and then get priced out sometime after the ascend. This has been going on for decades, but it's taken on a special fierceness in places where the tech boom and high finance have reshaped the cost of living. We see a … [Read more...]
Making it as a Writer: MFA vs NYC
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="6RDST6owlrC0x8P60LIwnB5J7Z8Ftt9Q"] HOW does an aspiring novelist, poet, or essayist break into the business? What kind of ecosystem does he or she inhabit after getting established? Does grad school help? Among the best answers to those questions came from novelist Chad Harbach in his essay "MFA vs NYC," and he's expanded it into a provocative anthology that … [Read more...]