BOOK REVIEW: Has art given up creating 'works that could contribute to the perfection of society'?
- Details
- Written by Fran Lucientes
On Saturday the Financial Times of London reviewed Paul Greenhalgh's new volume, The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, which argues that a centuries-old tradition of art aiming to contribute to social improvement was broken in the 1970s with the arrival of postmodernism....
BOOKS: As Uncle Alex used to say, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is'
- Details
- Written by Hank Berger
One of the most enduringly popular items on the UFPPC web site has been Kurt Vonnegut's piece from May 2004 in which he said: "We are all addicts of fossil fuels, about to face cold turkey." -- That's one of the items that Vonnegut has included in a new book entitled A Man without a Country (Seven Stories Press, 2005). -- By way of a review, USA Today published this interview with the American literary icon, conducted in a Manhattan restaurant. -- Not everything is grim in Vonnegut, though: "In A Man Without a Country, he repeats something his Uncle Alex used to say when they were sitting under an apple tree, chatting and drinking lemonade. 'Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."' It is a saying he now carries around with him, and he urges everyone to 'please notice when you are happy.'" ...
BOOK EXTRACT: John Battelle's <I>The Search</I> analyzes how search engines are changing our culture
- Details
- Written by Hank Berger
On Sept. 20, Nicholas Brealy Publishing is releasing The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle. -- This edited extract from the book, which was published Friday by the Financial Times of London, describes the benefits and risks businesses incur when they rely on the internet for customers, and the speculates about the future social effects as more and more human acitivities are mediated through search engines. -- At the end of the passage, Battelle holds out the promise that generalization of optimized search programs in commerce may lead to a more just world: "Vendors of products that have been made in third-world sweatshops or in factories that overpollute; or vendors that support causes some consumers do not wish to support; would be called out in a far more transparent fashion. Refusal to participate in such a system would mean that vendors or merchants had something to hide, and so the system could be a major force for good in the global economy, forcing transparency and accountability into a system that has habitually hidden the process of how products are made, transported, marketed, and sold from the consumer." -- Perhaps. -- A more certain effect, it may be, is a world in which even the simplest human actions become the object of invasive advertising....