Am working on End of semester tests at the moment but will be happy to speak on the opera as soon as I get over mustering up my crankiness.
REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 11:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Thoughts on the golden age Keith wrote: > All the arts were at their zenith around a century ago when they'd all > become pretty fully developed technologies after centuries of > brilliant endeavours by creative geniuses. One might even say that most art since, oh, say, since Dada, has constituted ironic references to all the art that has gone before. Even the photorealist school might be seen as an ironic reference to the centuries long pursuit by painters from the 16th c. (13th c.?) onwards to capture on canvas the realism that photography mastered at a stroke and offered straight out of the can. I know next to nothing about opera [1]. What's the state of opera in the last 100 years, Ray? The only newish one I've heard even part of is Glass's Akhnaton.[2] How does that fit into the tradition of opera? Creative? Ironic reference? Dada? Shingled off onto the fog? > The only exception to all this is architecture, which is still > developing, but here we have the continuing supply of brand-new > materials with new structural properties. 3D printing is making some forms possible that were formerly undoable or so time-consuming as to be practically undoable. http://www.bathsheba.com/ Where it isn't ironic or at least some kind of reference to older art, I surmise that visual art has tended to follow a path in the 20th c. similar to that followed by philosophy. From my (notably under-informed) perspective, philosophy in the last 100 or so years has come to consist mostly of an analysis of language. The metaphysics, epistemology etc. of canonical philosophy has been deconstructed as linguistics. [3] The last time I hung out at an art college, I couldn't go a whole day without barking my shins on the word "semiotic" and similar words related to the study of language per se. Am I wandering insufferably far off topic here? - Mike [1] Pace REH. It may be a neural ideosyncrasy that, for the most part, the trained voice grates on my ear, basses sometimes excepted. [2] This caught my attention because of Immanuel Velikovsky. He had originally come to North America to research ancient Egypt. His Earth in Upheaval and Ages in Chaos were the result of a two decade long digression. He finally got back to Egypt and wrote Oedipus & Akhnaton, identifying the Oedipus myth in detail with the people, events, art and archaeological remnants of Akhnaton's reign. Facinating book. Velikovsky obviously did a vry great deal of research. I doubt that I have the patience and dedication to expand into book form my short piece tracing the Winnie the Pooh myth back through Rome and Akhnaton's Egypt to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Probably just as well. :-) [3] Which nay now be on the verge of being deconstructed by neuroscience. Film at 11:00. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
