- John Stoehr
Arts Editor
There's more to art than you think. It's not just theater, paintings, books and dance. It's the enterprise of human creativity and it takes vastly different shapes and forms. Here you'll find my thoughts about the arts in Charleston and beyond. Neither of us knows what to expect.
Category Archives: Ideas
MUSC’s new hospital/art repository
January 28, 2008 – 8:34 am
I took a tour of MUSC’s new hospital, the Ashley River Tower, on Friday. It’s an impressive feat of architecture, technology, and design. More than that, it’s a repository of art. And more than that, it’s a repository of art by contemporary South Carolina artists. It opens next month.
Throughout its 641,000 square feet are 873 [...]
Journal: Emerson on Transcendentalism
January 23, 2008 – 1:36 pm
From Harper’s . . . .
“The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the [...]
Your Daily Vid: Big Think
January 22, 2008 – 7:32 pm
The next time someone tells you that most people — in the journalism biz, they’re called the “general reader” or the “general public” — are not interested in intellectual history, heritage and culture — point them in the direction of Big Think.
In a nutshell, it’s YouTube for ideas. It allows users to pose questions, provide [...]
Book Review: The Little Book of Plagiarism
January 15, 2008 – 6:23 pm
From a review I wrote back in February 2007 when I was living in Savannah. Posner poses important and relevant questions for everyone involved in creating intellectual property. The force of his argument underscores how serious the issue is, or will be, given that the chief export of the United States in the 21st century [...]
Your Daily Vid: Pinker on the Mind
January 5, 2008 – 11:27 am
This is a talk given by psychologists Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. I feel it’s important to have this kind of material in an arts blog, because what psychologists are finding about the nature of the human mind may well have great implications for anyone [...]
Journal: Art for Brains
December 28, 2007 – 2:20 pm
From The Guardian newspaper — J.S. |
Any onlooker fleetingly imagining they spotted a human brain in the flurry of cherubs and drapery swirling around the figure of God as he stretches out a hand to raise Adam to life in Michaelangelo’s famous fresco from the Sistine Chapel would probably conclude there was some malfunction in [...]
Falling behind Estonia
December 26, 2007 – 6:22 pm
Steven Lacey has his say about Charleston’s failure to get behind real technological innovation, especially something as simple as providing wireless access throughout the city. We’re not alone. The U.S. is quickly falling behind. It’s so bad that Estonia is beating us. I know. What country? That’s the point. —J.S.
. . . . .
By now, [...]
Journal: Study shows ‘cultural elite’ extinct
December 21, 2007 – 10:37 am
You might file this under: Already known but not understood. Culture has certainly flattened in the past 50 years. There are fewer and fewer people using “high,” “middle” and “low” class to describe the quality of a person according to his or her aesthetic, taste, and sensibility. In other words, I still his “high” to [...]
Journal: More than ‘Essential Truth’
December 19, 2007 – 10:28 am
A few months ago, I wrote a post that touched on multiculturalism and its tendency toward a kind of relativism that inspired incredibly thoughtful comments. Two have stayed with me, because they are about the center that continues failing to hold. That is, the primal human need for universal principles seems to be daily challenged [...]
Journal: ‘Culture wars are good for society’
December 18, 2007 – 1:15 pm
from The Age, a major daily in Australia —J.S.
. . . . .
There are two reasons why a conservative government should intervene in cultural issues. First, the public does care about the culture wars. Second, the culture wars are not about culture. Of course, questions of cultural taste should be left as far as possible [...]
