January 25, 2018 Arts & Culture The Questionable History of the Future By Nick Montfort Many centuries ago, as history was being developed and before there was an idea of what prehistoric humans were like, societies generally imagined themselves to be of divine origin and to have always lived in a condition similar to their current state. People were most concerned not with invention, trade, discovery, or learning new things but with the natural forces that beset them, which could threaten their lives or provide for a good harvest. Nature and these forces might manifest differently at different times, of course. But it was thought that nature would stay more or less the same over the years. There was no reason the future would be different. Later, when human nature rather than the natural world became central to people’s concerns, the belief in the static nature of societies persisted, with unchanging human nature taking the place of unchanging nature. The historian and economist Robert Heilbroner cites Machiavelli, who wrote early in the sixteenth century, “Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same result.” This idea, of course, exhorts those seeking to foresee the future to look at history—but for very different reasons than we would imagine now. Reading history would not show the seeds of the current situation and help one think about how it might grow into the future. It would simply be an opportunity to look at some documentation of essentially the same stasis as that in which we currently reside, to understand people of the past who are the same as people today. Read More
January 24, 2018 Document Arthur Miller’s Sassy Defense of the NEA By The Paris Review Arthur Miller In the spring of 1995, then House Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed supporters of federal funding for the arts and humanities, asserting that Arthur Miller had written some of the most significant plays in American theater without receiving governmental aid. The first page of Miller’s reply, originally published in The Nation, appears below: Letter courtesy of the Harry Ransom Archive at the University of Texas at Austin.
January 24, 2018 On Music When Jazz Was Dangerous By Nathaniel Rich “Robinson’s Band Plays Anything,” F. Bildestein, 1890. From the cover of the New Orleans newspaper the Mascot (November 15, 1890). Musical forms have the life cycle of carnivorous beasts: clumsy in infancy, terrifying in adolescence, fearsome in maturity, fangless in old age, and pitiful in senescence, before the inevitable silent death. Their life spans tend to be longer than ours, so it can be difficult to recall that some of the more geriatric genres were once vital and fierce. But even Baroque music had a caddish streak—“a most dangerous reef,” in the words of a prominent seventeenth-century German rector, “along which many a young soul, as if called by Sirens … falls into dissoluteness”—and polka, in the 1840s, was a venal Bohemian menace (in 1844, the Illustrated London News wrote that polka “needs only to be seen once to be avoided forever!”). Jazz, now well advanced into its second century, had an especially violent youth. It was more than merely dangerous—it was homicidal. Jazz, to be precise, was never extraordinarily ferocious. “Jass” was. The soft sibilant turned heavy at around the same time—a century ago—that the music crossed over in the national consciousness, rumbling north on steamboats up the Mississippi and on the northbound Illinois Central to Chicago, then to New York and California, where it swiftly gained popularity, social acceptance, critical esteem. To do so, it had to leave New Orleans, its native home, behind. This was understandable, given the treatment it had received. Read More
January 24, 2018 Arts & Culture How French Libertines Are Reckoning with #MeToo By Lauren Elkin Henri Gervex, “Rolla” , 1878 It’s no news to anyone that France has a historically masculine-centric culture. The great republican project of the Revolution left women out; in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1791), Olympe de Gouges supplied her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. (When she got too mouthy, the Jacobins arrested and executed her.) Feminism here has always been articulated not as a philosophy of equality, as it has in Anglophone countries, but around a philosophy of difference. This has often resulted in essentialist ideas about women’s experiences; as the feminist journalist and activist Lauren Bastide put it recently, the universalist French feminist context “is the opposite of intersectionalist feminism. You’re never going to be able to say that being a black woman is different from being a white woman.” Still, unlike the U.S., France has actually taken steps to address inequality between the sexes. The new Secretary of State in charge of equality between men and women, Marlène Schiappa, is actively trying to implement legislation against street harassment. And in 1999, for instance, a law was passed that specified that political parties had to submit an equal number of male and female candidates for office or lose public funding in proportion to the inequality. By 2012, only two parties had even slightly approached parity: the Greens and the Communist Party. And, more recently, Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! saw 40 percent women elected, which was a record. Macron himself promised when he was elected that he would make a woman prime minister, if he found someone competent. His choice for PM? Édouard Philippe. It’s just a question of competence ladies, nothing more. Enjoy your march. Read More
January 23, 2018 Redux Redux: Dorothy Parker, Alexia Arthurs, Elena Wilkinson By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Dorothy Parker’s Art of Fiction interview from our Summer 1956 issue, Alexia Arthurs’s short story “Bad Behavior,” and Elena Wilkinson’s poem “After the Loss of a Limb.” If you like what you read, you can also listen to all three in the eighth episode of our podcast, “Questionable Behavior”; and if you like what you hear, why not give us a boost in the charts by subscribing on iTunes. While you’re there, tell us in the comments how much you love the show. Read More
January 23, 2018 Arts & Culture How Much for That Pepe? Scenes from the First Rare Digital Art Auction By Daniel Penny Blockchain technology could reshape the digital-art market for years to come. Digital art collection by artists from dada.nyc The first Rare Digital Art Festival, aka Rare AF, aka Rare as Fuck, was held on a cold January Saturday in the offices of Rise New York. The organizers, Kevin Trinh and Tommy Nicholas of the Rare Art Registry Exchange, had announced the event only a few weeks earlier, but by midmorning, the airy coworking space was swarming with crypto boosters and speculators, gamers, meme aficionados, artists, and collectors. This unlikely crowd (mostly young men, though I heard one audience member marvel at “all the women” present) had gathered for panel discussions, demos, an initial-coin-offering announcement, free sandwiches, and a live digital-art auction. Like many tech events, the aim of the conference was ambitious bordering on grandiose: the attendees of Rare AF believed they were witnessing history. They were certain that blockchain technology would reshape the future of digital art for years to come. All the panels shared an underlying premise: The rise of digital media has made every kind of art widely accessible, but it has also created many problems. Because people can copy and share files freely and infinitely, artists don’t receive compensation for their work. Worse, an increasingly powerful cadre of middlemen services (Amazon, Spotify, etc.) have been fracturing the media landscape while reaping almost all of the profits. Enter the blockchain, a decentralized and immutable ledger of digital transactions with the power to reintroduce scarcity and property rights to the digital-media economy. Many conference participants held strong beliefs about the superiority of a particular blockchain (Bitcoin vs. Ethereum), but for artists and collectors, the processes and results of these competing cryptocurrencies are fairly similar. An artist creates a limited-edition crypto collectible—the digital equivalent of a signed print—and exchanges it with a buyer for some cryptocurrency. The new buyer truly owns this digital object; they can keep it in their crypto wallet, show it off in a virtual gallery, or project it from a digital picture frame hung on their wall—a service offered by panelist Vladimir Vukicevic’s company Meural. Just as you can share reproductions of the Mona Lisa, someone could still copy and paste the image, but the provenance and price history of the original are accessible to all. The original of these works is identifiable and cannot be replicated, which is why they are called “provably rare.” Kieran Farr, a panelist representing a virtual-reality platform called Decentraland, summed things up to a round of applause: “Finally, authenticity has value.” Read More