cheers, Dwarfish.

However, in a side note, that article from which you quoted really freaked me out. The possibilities for those jammers in silencing contact in criminal situations…maybe it’s just cause I’m in law school and think about crime all the time, but it just gives me the willies.

I don’t disagree with the description of a right brained person, though I think I also have the capacity to be detail oriented and am oriented towards words and langague, which are listed on the left brain side of things.

I don’t buy it. Honestly, I don’t really get what people mean when they say there has been a “decline” in arts and culture these days. What can it even mean to have a cultural decline? I’m not trying to sound uber-relativist (which, caveat, I kind of am), but we all have culture and belong to a multiplicity of cultures. I suppose if you only define “culture” as arts paid for and enjoyed by the rich, with highly complicated themes and style, sure, maybe now is not the most prolific time for that. But I utterly fail to see how a painting of God directed towards and paid for by a rich people in Italy is any more culture than a Pepsi logo. I personally think a Pepsi can in the hand of God on the Sistine Chapel would be kind of awesome. A kind of parallel imagery between the controlling patronage which stifled the creativity of Renaissance artists with the corporations that control the images with which we are presented today. In fact, a quick wikipedia search (at a finger’s touch, I am an expert in Renaissance painting! What a remarkable culture!) will show you that the Sistine Chapel did in fact contain such “ads” in Michelangelo’s inclusion of the symbol of his patron’s family, the acorn, a symbol which likely would have been as ubiquitous to Renaissance audiences as the Pepsi circle or the Nike swoosh is in our times.
And jumping off that, call me biased to my times, but I think we are currently in a pretty exciting period for the arts. If anything, technology and the internet are expanding the ways in which understand how to express our ideas and creations. While it may not be the same as going to Italy, I can view and image of the Sistine Chapel anytime I choose, an unthinkable access to anyone below a certain income in times past. Art is now accessible in such a variety of ways to such a variety of people. What I think makes people uncomfortable is that we can no longer really tell where the art ends and “the other stuff” begins. Anyone at anytime can create works and find viewers for them, perhaps even less burdened than at any other time by economic incentive. And I’m not trying to say that the volume is creating “better” art, but it’s certainly changing the way we think about how art is produced and who has the ability to produce and receive it.
Now as for the last part of the speech, her discussion of why there is a decline in the arts, is kind of precluded by my failure to buy into her primary assumption that there actually is a decline in culture. However, I believe that the idea that intellectuals and artists talk in their own lexicon is partially true. There are definitely times when I’m having a conversation about literature or art with someone with a similar background and another who does not have that background will be like ‘Qua?’ But I don’t really think that’s turning people away from art. It just means they are turned away from a particular type of critical thinking and appreciation. And I’m just not all that stressed by it.