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Thursday, 10 September 2009
From Rob Kendt, news that Yosi Sergant has been moved from
his post as the NEA's Director of Communications. The Endowment itself has
issued this brief statement:
On August tenth, the National Endowment for the Arts
participated in a call with arts organizations to inform them of the
president's call to national service. The White House office of public
engagement also participated in the call, which provided information on
how the Corporation for National and Community Service can assist groups
interested in sponsoring service projects or having their members
volunteer on other projects. This call was not a means to promote any
legislative agenda and any suggestions to that end are simply false. The
NEA regularly does outreach to various organizations to inform of the work
we are doing and the resources available to them.
As regards Yosi Sergant, he has not left the National
Endowment for the Arts. He remains with the agency, although not as
director of communications.
And according to Ryan Grim at The Huffington Post, "Sources familiar with
the situation say that the move represents a significant step down and was
the result of the controversy. Discussion about his new duties is still
ongoing."
And the rest is lost in the murk of bureaucracy. Requiescat in
pace, NEA controversy.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
One of the implicit questions underlying Andrew Haydon's
Guardian blog post today on critics, academics and artists is
the role that the culture at large plays in the dissemination of aesthetic
discourse. Haydon notes that these poor ladies and gentlemen have been
unfairly charged with a variety of offenses, often inaccurately and much
beyond their control; he
offers this:
Critics are expected to approach plays without
prescription: we are meant to see if something works on its own terms, not
according to our rules or politics. But doesn't this highlight something
unspoken about the critic's job? After all, it isn't possible to function
without some form of ideological underpinning, some very basic sense of
what is good and what is not. However, for whatever reason, such
prejudices are rarely acknowledged.
This puts critics in a difficult position. Can they really
be expected to preface every review with a long disclaimer about the
fictions that theatre presents? It seems that the debate between critics,
academics and practitioners still has a long way to go before any kind of
synthesis even looks remotely plausible. Perhaps for the time being we
should revel in the tensions, and enjoy the fact that such arguments are
still taking place.
Taking place largely in the blogosphere in this case, despite efforts
from print critics like the Village Voice's Michael Feingold here and here towards similar meditations, even as he
damns the Internet and the theatre writers thereon with the faintest of
praise.
What is the theatre to culture, or culture to the theatre? Each
individual will have a different definition of what this "culture" is;
Nietzsche, as always, has a provocative offering for the
unapologetically neo-Romantic
view. This is from his 1874 essay "Schopenhauer as Educator":
It is the fundamental ideal of culture, insofar as
it sets for each one of us but one task: to promote the production of
the philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and without us and
thereby to work at the perfecting of nature. For, as nature needs the
philosopher, so does it need the artist, for the achievement of a
metaphysical goal, that of its own self-enlightenment.
Feingold quotes also Oscar Wilde's memorable definition of criticism as
"the record of a soul." True, this sits uneasily with Feingold's
conclusion: "Anyone can now publish theater criticism. But ... it will now
take a very clever writer to give it value, and an even cleverer one to
get paid for it." A soul that records the traces of its own journey to
self-enlightenment may not expect a paycheck for doing so. Only if a
society values that kind of culture will any remuneration be in the mail.
But
there is far more than money at stake. Is it only the provision of
cash that gives it credence?
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