After the storms of 20th century developments in the arts, provoked by changes in society, wars and their aftermath, increasing industrialization and technological advance, and overviewing the multifarious cultural field today in the Western world, it may be appropriate to return to the fundamental question concerning the raison d’être of the arts: where are…
Category: List of articles
The ‘killer myth’: the fallacy of progress in the arts
In the last century, very often the concept of ‘progress’ was projected upon the arts as a measurement of quality: ‘good art’ was ‘progressive art’: if an artist did not commit some ‘groundbreaking’ artistic deed, his work was considered worthless. While progress in science is a fundamental notion, in the arts it is meaningless, because…
Het FPK is niet voor haar taak geschikt
Op vrijdag 30 augustus 2013 publiceerde Dagblad Trouw een summiere aankondiging van mijn artikel dat de dag daarna verscheen in haar bijlage ‘Letter & Geest’: Kunstsubsidie is corrupt. De aankondiging was voor het Fonds Podiumkunsten (FPK) onmiddellijk aanleiding voor het volgende commentaar, dus nog vóór het artikel verschenen was: ———————————————— Van de site van het…
Conservative?
Regularly the accusation of ‘conservatism’ is thrown at me, in the way a shoplifter is caught with his hands in the jewelry box, but without arguments and without consequences, so that the occasion passes like a cold draught on a sunny afternoon. But delving deeper into the possible motivation of such burbs, may contribute…
Why Ives is not a ‘great composer’
Today – 23/8/13 – I stumbled into an article on the interesting website www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/ which is, I believe, run by an American radio station called NPR. Under the title ‘An American Maverick Turns The Symphony On Its Head’ the well-known musicologist Jan Swafford celebrates the modernity and genius of Charles Ives, who was so much…