March 22

My comments about "hobbification" the other day find an echo in the latest column of academic "Thomas H. Benton" (William Pannapacker), who has been beating the warning drum against graduate education in the humanities for quite a while:

The suffering of underemployed Ph.D.'s is great because their devotion is so remarkable in a culture defined by marketplace values. Far from being a cultivator of the humanities, the academic labor system has destroyed dreams and stamped out passions; it routinely drives gifted and idealistic people to the brink of despair and beyond it. It has done so for 40 years now, and there's no end in sight. The enemies of intellectualism—for whom the word "professor" cannot be uttered without a sneer—have no greater ally than the wasted lives of so many would-be academics.

Graduate schools ask students to behave like idealists, but the schools act like the corporations they train students to despise....professors are becoming deprofessionalized.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Very-Special-Marketplace/64711/

Waggish adds nuance to the discussion by drawing attention to certain inexorable economic forces in higher education:

http://www.waggish.org/2010/03/20/the-structure-of-university-education

Inexorable economic forces are also shrinking the market for middle-tier goods, as James Surowiecki explains:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/03/29/100329ta_talk_surowiecki

Fun with Artistic Movements: The Automatistes were Canada's first "true avant-garde" (Jean-Paul Riopelle may be the best known of them):

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36942

http://www.albrightknox.org/exhibitions/Automatiste.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatiste

The Society of Independent Artists was a group of early modernist Ukrainian painters centered in Odessa. The largest collection of their work, long assumed lost, is going to be auctioned as a lot in April. Since the estimated going price is only $1.5-2 million, I assume some enterprising museum will snap the collection up:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36921 

The Nouveau Realisme movement of the Sixties believed in using "junk" materials and sometimes blowing them up:

The exhibition will....feature works by Niki de Saint Phalle, well known for her “shooting paintings”. Using plaster, paint, and a .22 caliber rifle, Saint Phalle would elevate her works onto a platform and open fire, exploding bags of pigment – thereby creating a work of art.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36950

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_realisme

I've got to think that these Nouveau Realistes were a key influence on Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories in San Francisco, with their destructive machines and robots -- I recall that in the Eighties, you had to sign an insurance disclaimer to attend their shows! 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_Research_Labs

"The Pleasure of Flinching," a Susan Sontag phrase which would have been a good name for an SRL performance, is also the title of an interesting Nicholas Sautin essay about our troubled relations with shock-documentary-type images that are readily available on the Internet:

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/1563/the_pleasure_of_flinching/

Among notables born on this date are painter Anthony van Dyck, theater composers Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, film composer Angelo Badalamenti, literary translator Edith Grossman, mime Marcel Marceau, figure skater Elvis Stojko, educators E.D. Hirsch and Derek Bok, sports broadcaster Bob Costas, comedian Chico Marx, novelists Nicholas Monsarrat and Gabrielle Roy (Quebec), Western novelist Louis L'Amour, pop/jazz singer George Benson, and actors Bruno Ganz, Reese Witherspoon, Lena Olin, Matthew Modine, Karl Malden, Ross Martin, M. Emmet Walsh, and William Shatner. Devoted as I am to Shatner, I cannot resist sharing a primo piece of video, his unforgettable performance of "Rocket Man" at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards (introduced by no less than Bernie Taupin, who I hope had a bottle of scotch handy). This is The Shat!