The Fredösphere

Watch Alex Ross' appearance on the Colbert Report.  ACD is not entirely approving; Iron Tongue has the discussion.

My public demands ... and I deliver ... more ... airships!

2 Blowhards supply related links on the evil of government subsidies for the arts:  Taki on the decline of music in the last 60 years, and Paul A. Cantor on the market's role in producing some of the greatest art of all time (Shakespeare, Dickens, etc.).  Taki's grumblings are less than completely persuasive, and his commenters are all over the map in terms of quality.  Paul Cantor's lectures at the Mises Institute, however, are wonderful.  His thesis:  a free-market environment, with its competitive pressures and collaborative arrangements, is the best (or more precisely, least-bad) environment for the development of art.  I tend to agree; in the least, modern government arts subsidies will find only a narrow subset of all deserving artists.

At this point, let me make a point very clearly so there is no mistake:  if, by some chance, there happens to be a government bureaucrat out there on the verge of giving me a huge grant, please proceed.  I'll take money any way I can get it!

Cantor identifies a constant complaint made of all new art forms, a complaint that can be seen, for example, in Plato's reaction to Greek tragedy.  The complaint has three parts:

The art contains too much of what my friend Steve would call "sax and violins."
It's addictive.
People caught up in it loose their ability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

("And he's right!" Cantor says with a laugh.)  Cantor makes a prediction, which would seem fairly tame to anyone connected to tech culture, that video games will be the dominant art form of the 21st century, as film was in the 20th.  Cantor makes this prediction in the face of his own antipathy to video games; the strong parallel of current criticism of video games to previous new art forms, such as Elizabethan theater and the serial novel, causes him to doubt his own dislike.  I would go a bit farther; I believe video games will be the dominant art form for the next 40 years maybe; cultural change will accelerate.

Oh, wait; none of this matters because we're all going to die.

Labels: Airship, Culture