Word: arts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...coincidence that most Europeans don't know that Harvard is a university, but think it is simply the Business School. For through the Business School Harvard has had an enormous impact on Europe, speeding up the destruction of the traditional society and culture on which European art depends. It is ironic that as an institution it has done so much to attack what it has always claimed, with flowery rhetoric, to defend...
These weaknesses in the presentation of European art would not be so serious if it were not for the fact that Harvard partakes of the general, worldwide confusion about art and what to do with it. For the artist his work is an approach to reality that is both different from, and entirely independent of other ways of knowing; science, language and so on. He believes, in the words of Ruskin, "that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people...
...fact that the humanities are neither vigorously pursued nor defended at Harvard--except as fodder for the Social Science harvester--is compounded by the illusion that art as a mental discipline is less demanding than science. To begin to appreciate 14th century Italian painting requires at least a thousand hours of visiting galleries plus several hundred more of reading and studying; about the same is required to master differential equations. The average Harvard undergraduate when he sees a painting flashed up on the screen no more appreciates it than a non-mathematician understands algebraic topology. The trouble is that...
...European art of the more or less distant past, be it Dante or Giotto, Proust or Mondrian, cannot be properly appreciated without a great deal of study and contemplation. Harvard undergraduates in general do not think the art important enough to be worth the effort and devote most of their time to economics and biology. The faculty do little to convince them they are wrong...
PHILIP SWAN graduated from Harvard in 1977 and was born in England. Since then he has been living in Italy studying Italian history and art and teaching English in a private school...