Another measure for a work of art might be the range and violence of criticisms it attracts, along with their contradictions. — The Bauhaus: S/M/L
Maybe I’m just being sentimental, but I keep finding myself returning to the Bauhaus, now approaching its centenary. Much has been written here about the narrowness of current architecture and its instruction. I’m an outsider, yet I can’t help wondering if the field has followed the path of other arts into specialization and self-reference and self-interest, which is too often the case in my field, writing and the teaching of writing. What strikes me about the Bauhaus is the mix of influences. As I note:
“While Gropius wanted to revive the communal spirit of the guilds that built cathedrals in the Middle Ages, one is at a loss to find Christian tenets or iconography in the Bauhaus instruction or its work. The influences instead were esthetic and diverse, from Romanticism to Expressionism to Functionalism, as were the interests of the instructors, some of the most creative artists and architects of the time—Gropius himself, Mies van der Rohe, Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, and Breuer. Yet from this fertile mix came functional designs that speak with consistency and coherence that is still fresh today, works—a Marianne Brandt teapot, the Wagenfeld lamp, the Bauhaus building at Dessau itself—that remain objects of contemplation, abstract yet distinctive and very human, and inexpressibly transcendent, though we have yet to locate a place where transcendence might point.”
My full discussion here.
Legos are the only way I can make a model. What the model doesn’t show is all the time I spent trying to imagine the actual building, beyond my compromises, and the life there. I spent weeks studying blueprints and pictures, and also did much reading. I especially recommend Bauhaus, edited by Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend.
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I should give an example about the writing scene. Chad Harbach, novelist and editor of literary magazine n+1, discusses the major influences in writing now, MFA writing programs and the corporate world of New York publishing. A few quotes, which will sound familiar:
MFA programs:
“Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the '70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market."
NY publishers:
“Except at the very top, reputation in this world depends directly on the market and the publishing cycle, the reviews and the prizes, and so all except those at the very top have little reason to hope for a durable readership.
“The NYC writer knows that to speak obliquely is tantamount to not speaking at all; if anyone notices her words, it will only be to accuse her of irrelevance and elitism. She doesn't worry about who might read her work in 20 years; she worries about who might read it now. She's thrown her economic lot in with the publishers, and the publishers are very, very worried. Who has both the money to buy a hardcover book and the time to stick with something tricky? Who wants to reread Faulknerian sentences on a Kindle, or scroll back to pick up a missed plot point? Nobody, says the publisher. And the NYC novelist understands—she'd better understand, or else she'll have to move to Cleveland.”
Slate, “MFA vs. NYC”
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
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