by Thomas L. Krannawitter What George Washington’s promise to the Jews in Newport still means for America. I am not Jewish. Many of the people dearest to me are. Two of my most important intellectual mentors were Jewish; their teacher was Jewish. I have close friends and trusted business partners who are Jewish. So I …
by Joshua T. KatzAmerican Enterprise Institute For New Yorkers, one hard thing about moving to Washington, D.C. is that there aren’t world-class concerts every day. Both the nation’s capital and what is sometimes called the capital of the world have outstanding museums: a great boon for my wife and me as well as for our …
by Thomas L. Krannawitter The bell rings. Students settle into their seats with the practiced choreography of the modern classroom: a laptop flips open; a phone disappears—mostly—into a hoodie pocket; someone asks whether the assignment can be submitted as a link. Then the teacher writes a question on the board: What is justice? A few …
How is the tradition of Western classical music faring on our university campuses? Before answering this question, it is necessary to understand what has transpired with classical music in the wider culture, as the relationship between the two is so strong.
Artworks are powerful conveyors of ideas and values. They demonstrate that cultural artifacts are one place where the rubber hits the road, as it were, with respect to how images and ideas relate. In these protests, art’s power to propound ideas and embody values is being used as a weapon to oppose certain events and ideas some find objectionable.
The problem with the LAO guide is that it destroys meritocracy in the orchestral repertoire, and places a heavy burden on artistic organizations to choose diversity over compositional merit.
The artistic and creative personae of a performer or composer is a manifestation of his entire life experience, everything that he has listened to, and his basic constitution, and his personality. Whereas in the hard or social sciences we care little about the person who discovers a truth, because it is “out there,” with the arts, we wish to know about the painter or composer, because it comes from “inside,” it is of “them.”
It was Andy Warhol, who through Pop Art transformed the wedded cults of celebrity and consumerism into icons for our national and international contemplation.
Thus past, present and future converge to create an artwork whose meaning is immediately accessible but whose spatial and semantic depth successfully merge to produce one of the greatest works of art ever created.
Is it conceivable for such a deeply rooted art from an Asian culture to inform the spirituality of the American or European viewer? Quite possibly.
A space for the Beautiful.