Word: arts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Regarding student practice of the creative arts at Harvard, the less said the better. Apart from the very competent student orchestras who provide an audible museum of long-dead and mostly romantic composers, the picture is dismal. I attended a number of undergraduate theatricals and they were all terrible. The Lampoon and the Advocate are significantly worse than even most English university papers (and they are pretty bad!). Journalism on the other hand, which requires a mentality antithetical to that of the creative artist, flourishes. The Carpenter Center has made a noble attempt to get the visual arts...
...will not go into a detailed criticism of the arts since Harvard's weaknesses are well known, and, I believe, generally accepted. Harvard has always maintained that the creative arts as a full-time occupation do not belong within a university. In this it conforms to universities in other parts of the world. If Harvard also excluded other professions, Law, Medicine, Business, etc., then there would be some justification for excluding artists. But, on the contrary, the professional schools have an enormous impact on undergraduates: in my years in Cambridge, it was an impact that far outweighed the 'liberal arts...
...need hardly add that a humanist like myself does not consider history a science but an art and views the obsession with theory to the detriment of facts as an attack on true history by outsiders from the scientific camp. And I will leave out of consideration the fact that most students who major in the humanities are not actually required to study any history...
Take a student who has never been to Italy, never really seen, let alone looked at Italian art, never read any Italian literature, hasn't the vaguest notion about the mind-bending complexity of Italian history. Don't tell him who Lorenzo de Medici was, or make him read the Florentine historians, but instead make him read Lopez's theory of the relation between economics and culture in the Renaissance. Then make him read what some scholar said about some other scholar's interpretation of Lopez. Then ask him for his opinion about the Renaissance. This is the scenario...
...people who turned out for a party honoring Louise Nevelson got a twofer. It was the famed sculptress's 80th birthday, and she was also being saluted by New York's Municipal Art Society as a champion of urban art. Nevelson steadfastly refused to blow out the 80 candles, saying, "Let them burn and burn and burn." They...