When -- at the Southwestern University symposium I've blogged about -- I said what I outlined in my last post, I got some pushback. One academic on stage with me said, rather pointedly, I thought (and she had every right to speak pointedly, if she wanted to), that it wasn't a good idea to equate artistic worth with popularity. Is that what I got because I said good things about popular culture? There's an ingrained belief among some reasonably large number of arts people that popular culture is, basically, defined by commercial success. … [Read more...]

Here's something I said at the Brown Symposium at Southwestern University, a gathering I raved about in my last post. What I said wasn't a formal presentation, since there weren't any, in the conversations I was part of. But it's what I wanted to add to the discussion. Our moderator, for the symposium on "Ethics, the Arts, and Public Policy" posed some questions we might want to address. (He was Paul Gaffney, Professor of Theater at Southwestern, and dean of their Sarofim School of Fine Arts. And also quite a fine actor, to judge from how … [Read more...]

Last week I had a lovely time at Southwestern University, in Georgetown, TX, near Austin. I'd mentioned earlier that I was taking part in their annual Brown Symposium, and judging a composition contest that was part of it. And now it's over. This was the 33d Brown Symposium, titled "Think -- Converse -- Act: The Salon and Its Histories." Three days of concerts, lectures, and discussions, plus a gallery show. The lectures, three of them, were about the history of salons, fascinating stuff, delivered by expert academics. My role, apart … [Read more...]