Ideas, Arts, and Culture in Interesting Times
From the category archives:
Uh oh.
A plunging stock market, shrinking endowments, disappearing visitors, evaporating donations, long-term declines in audiences… things are looking bleak for a lot of American cultural institutions. James Panero writes in City Journal that New York City arts organizations are only beginning to feel the punishing effects of the the Great Recession. Overly risky investments and poor management may also be factors. Even the wealthiest museums are barely keeping afloat. Quite a few of these centuries-old institutions may not survive:
To understand the current condition of arts organizations in New York City, visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, you will find one of Winslow Homer’s most famous works, The Gulf Stream. Painted in 1899, the canvas depicts a solitary sailor lashed to his boat on a storm-tossed sea. The mast and bowsprit have snapped, the tiller and rudder are gone, and a school of sharks circles the boat in blood-red water. On the horizon are two images. On the left, through the fog, is the silhouette of a ship under full sail: a possible rescue. On the right, a looming waterspout presents a far more ominous outcome.Homer was no allegorist, but his work serves, unfortunately, as an all-too-appropriate metaphor. Just as the storm has knocked out the boat’s propulsion and steering, an initial wave—the downturn in the financial markets—has smashed the endowments of arts organizations. Now a second threat, the indirect effects of the downturn, is appearing on the horizon like the waterspout. Its full force will be felt by arts organizations in the months and years ahead.
The rest of Panero’s troubling story can be read here at City Journal (via Arts & Letters Daily).
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From Charles Ives’ composition “Three Places in New England,” the segment inspired by the monument to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.
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There are some things that history books, even good ones, can’t teach you. I was recently reading The Third Reich at War, the final volume of Richard J. Evans’ magnificent trilogy about the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. Late in the book, Evans notes that there was some civilian opposition to Hitler, then adds the crushing truth: It was hopeless. The only people who could’ve changed things belonged to the military — figures like Count von Stauffenberg, the officer played by Tom Cruise in the movie Valkyrie. The others, however heroic, were just small fry.
Now, if you want to know what it was like to be small fry in that demented Reich, you’re better off going to Every Man Dies Alone, the recently rediscovered 1947 novel by the German writer Hans Fallada.
Read and/or listen to all of John Powers’ review from WHYY’s Fresh Air here.
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Looks like a great place to watch dolphin death matches!
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has released its annual list of endangered historic sites. It’s great to see more modernist buildings getting attention. The Miami Marine Stadium [pictured left] looks particularly sad and beautiful.
My sympathies are always on the side of history and architectural preservation, but I have some concerns about the National Trust’s approach to this list. Are there other sides we’re not hearing about? The press routinely covers this annual list by following a well-established formula of “greedy developers vs. history and beauty.” But there are real costs to the “preservation above all” approach. We can’t always have both preservation and progress or private property rights and public control of architectural detail.
And some of the places on the list don’t scream out as desperately important (versus other potential priorities). We need to mine uranium to improve our energy independence. Is it more important that a “sacred” New Mexico mountain remains pristine? Is a strong memory of our infrastructural history worth the cost of maintaining an 85-year-old mechanical lift bridge in New England? What about the fixing the sorry state of our non-museum-worthy infrastructure? These are questions even zealous preservationists need to consider.
Finally, I think it’s a pathetic, but unsurprising sign of the times when the National Trust invokes “combating climate change” as a primary argument for preserving old buildings. As anyone who has done home improvement work knows, a simple renovation is a very “carbon-intensive” process. Now imagine the resources, money, time, and energy consumed in a large-scale restoration to historic standards and a creative adaptation to some new “reuse.” I’m not convinced that preservation ends up using fewer resources than demolition and new construction. Anyway, I don’t think that the cause of historic preservation is going to get far by hitching a ride on the “green” bandwagon. There are other, better, stronger arguments for preservation… aesthetic, civic, educational, historical, and so on.
Anyway, the History Channel put together this short PSA-ish video that shows a bit more about each of the endangered historic sites. It’s good to “see” these interesting places for yourself:
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How bad is this?
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Al Mutanabi Street, Baghdad, February 2009
Named for a revered poet, Baghdad’s Al Mutanabi Street had been a sanctuary for books and writers through decades of tyranny and war. Two years ago, insurgents attacked this bookish enclave with a devastating car bombing. It was an especially heart-breaking moment in one of the darkest phases of the Iraq War.
But now, as security has improved, after a long, halting struggle, there is once again life on the street. The New York Times‘ indispensable Baghdad bureau covered the official “reopening” of the book market in December of last year. A number of the booksellers and their shops are gone forever, but there is once again a place for browsing, drinking tea, smoking, and arguing in Baghdad. This photo essay from the Sacramento Bee documents the state of things now.
It’s a bit like watching the first shoots of spring flowers emerging. There’s been so much destruction and fear, one can only hope–for all our sakes–that a gentle place like a bookshop can grow and flourish in Iraq. It seems surreal, but maybe some day there will be more tourists like this guy walking the street.
But unspeakable violence is never far away in Iraq, and it sounds like some of the worst elements may be attempting to regroup as American power and attention begins to drift away. Are the forces of peace and renewal strong enough now?
I haven’t found an organization that accepts donations directed to Mutanabi Street [suggestions welcome!], but the new university in Kurdistan is in need of books.
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Autumn at Gettysburg
What is the Park Service doing at Gettysburg? An interesting perspective from historian John Summers in the New Republic:
I grew up in Gettysburg, and my mother still lives in the shadow of Lutheran Theological Seminary, low in the lap of the ridge it names. Seminary Ridge is one of a string of ridges surrounding the town; General Robert E. Lee stood there on July 2 and 3, 1863. The woods atop the ridge had made it a sublime place to stroll for as long as I could remember–until that winter walk, which ended with a logging truck lumbering by.
Asking around, I learned that parts of the battlefield were in “rehabilitation.” In the hope of providing visitors with an authentic historical experience, the National Park Service (NPS) was seeking to restore some of Gettysburg’s landscapes to their condition when the Union and Confederate armies clashed on them.
Hundreds of acres of trees are being removed as the “rehabilitation” proceeds. Is the National Park Service really performing a service in attempting to recreate the hallowed landscape at Gettysburg? Does it make sense to try to replicate the exact appearance of the battlefield in July 1863? Can the Park Service really achieve the “accuracy” they are seeking?
One of three thousand or so...
To truly experience what it was like to be at Gettysburg, we would need to lie with soldiers as they bled to death, groaning in pain; rotting corpses with missing limbs; streams running red; winds swarming with flies; air smelling of burning horseflesh. As we cannot know the precise cartography of the battlefield, or the movements of every soldier, or the location of every tree, so we should not try to leap backward into authenticity, or expect to become an eyewitness to history simply by showing up.
Throughout the National Park system, there is a well-meaning drive to trap history in a static moment when “it” happened. But that’s problematic… The past can’t be immobilized and pinned like a butterfly. History is fluid, complex, and multilayered. A bucolic pasture doesn’t convey an “authentic” Civil War experience any more than Richard Neutra’s modernist visitor center.
Frankly, I think a well-done Hollywood movie like Glory is more effective at recreating the look-and-feel of Civil War combat than an open field of historic dimensions dotted with monuments and plugged-up cannons. Will cutting down hundreds of acres of anachronistic trees really help? Maybe the Park Service should focus more on interpretation and public engagement and less on horticultural correctness?
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