Disruption
and the Can(n)on
A bit of filler
blog until I have some art to post…
From
The New Yorker recently, which, like
a stopped clock, is occasionally correct:
Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to
their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and
journalists to their readers—obligations that lie outside the realm of
earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business
executive has to employees, partners, and investors.
Forget rules, obligations, your conscience, loyalty, a sense
of the commonweal. If you start a business and it succeeds, Linkner advises,
sell it and take the cash. Don’t look back. Never pause. Disrupt or be
disrupted.
“The
Disruption Machine
What
The Gospel Of Innovation Gets Wrong.”
by
Jill Lepore
The New Yorker
June
23, 2014
Here's Harper’s, less recently, and slightly
less often wrong:
In a word, Marcus and Sollors are wrong. “Literary” does not
refer to “what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form,” and
literature does not encompass every book that comes down the pike, however
smart or well-made. At the risk of waxing metaphysical, one might argue that literature,
like any artifact, has both a Platonic form and an Aristotelian concreteness.
Although examples of imaginative writing arrive in all sizes and degrees of
proficiency, literature with a capital L, even as its meaning swims in and out of focus, is absolutist
in the sense that all serious writers aspire to it. Although writers may be
good or bad, literature itself is always good, if not necessarily perfect. Bad literature is, in
effect, a contradiction. One can have flawed literature but not bad literature; one can have something
“like literature” or even “literature on a humble but not ignoble level,” as
Edmund Wilson characterized the Sherlock Holmes stories, but one can’t have dumb or mediocre literature.
“What
Is Literature?
In
Defense Of The Canon”
By
Arthur Krystal
Harper’s
Magazine
from the March 2014 issue
And from The Atlantic, some wrong-headed analysis of truisms about the modern mind:
When Joseph
Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, studied a group of 15
abstract-expressionist painters in the mid-20th century, he found that half of
them had some form of mental illness, mostly depression or bipolar disorder;
nearly half of these artists failed to live past age 60.
“Secrets of the Creative Brain”
Nancy Andreasen
The Atlantic
June 25, 2014
To put it in perspective, how many artists committed suicide
before the nineteenth century?
Finally,
did you know that Leonardo was a loser? Never mind that the filmmakers use
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment to
illustrate a piece on Leonardo:
Allora,
tutto chiaro?
