I enjoyed speaking with @EconTalker about the piece @michael_nielsen and I wrote last year about progress in science: http://www.econtalk.org/patrick-collison-on-innovation-and-scientific-progress/ …. (Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/ ….)
Painting, sculpture, and musical composition, on the other hand, have become increasingly academic pursuits. Their practitioners have become lecturers, scholars, and critics. They spend less time mentoring individual apprentices, and more time teaching masses of undergraduates.
-
-
When artists become academics, the obligation to reduce their practice to a litany of rigorously justified abstract principles suitable for exposition to a broad audience tends to vitiate that practice by suppressing its crucial inarticulate and irrational components.
-
The less comfortable an artist becomes about acknowledging and embracing these "unjustifiable" but essential aspects of artistic practice, the more they tend to recede, leaving behind only formal abstractions which, though more readily "teachable," are relatively sterile.
- 5 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.