The humanities save

Via Luminous, Stanley Fish has a what-is-it-all-for moment in a NY Times Op Ed.  In short, are the humanities useful?  He says, "if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them."  Is he implying that reading books and listening to records are selfish pursuits?  You don't say.  He goes on: "you can talk about “well rounded citizens,” but that ideal belongs to an earlier period, when the ability to refer knowledgeably to Shakespeare or Gibbon or the Thirty Years War had some cash value (the sociologists call it cultural capital). Nowadays, larding your conversations with small bits of erudition is more likely to irritate than to win friends and influence people." Ok, now he's really stripping us of our laurels. 

Comments

[Brian]

Bryant,

I was reading an article on the future of Non Profit organizations, and ran across this section, that I thought you would find interesting. If enough rights to classical performances could be acquired to garner the classical communities attention, could it not also be a great platform for new artists, and new performances to be reviewed? It seems to address a discussion that was happening here a month or so ago.

The pursuit of making classical music or literature a point of focus for the younger generation has no easy answer. The assumption that new is always better, as erroneous as that may be, appears to rule the day. It is such a shame that it delegates the role of what has come before to the sidelines. Maybe the constant attempts to reinvent classical music(Neo-Classical/Neo-Romantic eras) are less effective than standing firm and saying, "No, this is important, and here it is available to you in a format you can understand." Although, your text message post a while back makes me wonder how Kerouac, Faulkner, or Melville would translate to text, thus making it, per se, more appealing to the younger generation. But I digress, Here's the quote from an article by Phillip Greenspun.

Internet Classical Music Free Library
Go down to your local symphony hall or opera house, a building that very likely has recently benefitted from a $50-100 million renovation. The audience will be so old that you wonder why they didn't add a Medevac helipad on the roof. That seniors suffering from cardiac arrest aren't hauled out at every intermission is a hard-to-solve mystery.
Classical music organizations bemoan the graying of their audiences and try various gimmicks to attract new listeners. They will pay headline conductors in the neighborhood of $2 million per year to show up for a handful of performances. They will indulge in expensive building campaigns. They will experiment with selling tickets for less than $100/seat. They've tried everything except actually delivering music to young people.
Where are the young people? On the Internet. Do they buy CDs? No. Why not? First, their apartments are too small for the clumsy "music in a physical package" idea that Edison developed in the 19th Century. Second, more sophisticated industries have collected 100 percent of their entertainment dollars. After paying their cable TV, Internet, Netflix, and XM Radio bills, the average young consumer doesn't have any money left over.
Classical music is good enough to sell itself, but it hasn't been packaged very well for distribution over the Internet. A classical work might be broken up into 32 individual tracks. Who wants to download, organize, and name these tracks? How can you guarantee that they will play in the correct order after transferring to an MP3 CD to play in your car?
For a tiny fraction of the cost of rebuilding a concert hall in a part of the city where nobody under 50 has been seen for 20 years, the entire classical repertoire could be placed online under a Creative Commons license.
How big is the core classical library? With 10,000 albums it would be almost certain that a requested work was available. How much would it cost to license 10,000 recordings for free Internet distribution? Most of the classical repertoire has been recorded by smaller labels in smaller countries. Most of these recordings are on analog tape sitting in vaults. They were distributed on LP record and are unlikely ever to be demanded in sufficient quantities to make distribution in a physical medium profitable (the artists of the 1960s and 1970s might have been talented, but they are not known by today's consumers). Probably an average of $500 per recording would suffice, resulting in a total cost of $5 million to establish the library, but the licensing costs might fall as the site became more popular. Because the site would have actual music, unlike any other classical music site in the world, it would be the most popular place on the Internet for classical music lovers. An organization such as the Cleveland Orchestra might decide that they wanted to promote themselves by having their recording of a particular piece be the canonical recording. It seems likely that eventually performance groups eager for ticket sales might pay to have their recordings in the library.

It's almost not a complete thought in this context, but brings up some very interesting possibilities, that I'm sure are not new, but they were new to me, so I'm "sharing".

Regretfully,we got cut short on time in Keo over the holidays,and never got a chance to connect with you or your folks, but such is life.

Brian

PS, I'll leave you with the chorus to a fairly recent song I wrote:

Things just go too fast these days,
Following the latest craze,
Pursuing goals and always wanting more.
More things, more stuff, it's not enough,
Missing diamonds in the rough,
You pass right by the thing you're looking for.

[Margaret]

I guess, according to him, we hedonists lose, then.