at The National Art Center. You can get off the subway right below the museum for easy access – they even sell entrance tickets in the tunnel leading to the main entrance. Why? Because Japanese young people, housewives and retirees flock to see block buster shows like this one.
Despite being there early, when I entered the first room of paintings, the crowd was already at least 15 people deep. Quite overwhelmed, I skirted around the edges and chose carefully what I wanted to line for. I was definitely impressed, but not so much by seeing these works in the flesh again, rather by the volume of spectators moving around the rooms in such orderly fashion, most with handheld lecture devices held tightly to their ears.
Post impressions? I wasn’t disappointed; I got to stand for sometime (during a lull) in front of some favorite works by Maurice Denis & Henri Rousseau. So today was just another art and culture experience in Japan…one that was just a little more on the culture side, that’s all.
The iPad has entered my life…and what a life it has become. I am a ‘paddy’ convert. I was contemplating buying a Kindle but held off because I had a hunch that the iPad with its wifi, email, internet capabilites would be worth having. When I heard I could load the Kindle app I was set on it.
It seems quite appropriate then that I am reading Here Comes Everybody on my iPad via the Kindle app. My browsing for the book on the iPad included previewing Clay Shirky on Youtube…oh how book shopping as changed.
For Fish it means becoming fluent in the fundamentals even before moving on to post-secondary education: understanding the grammar of intellectual, artistic and social practices so that one can participate in them, or at least understand them from the inside. Both commentators, like many others writing today, worry that in our results oriented regime, the study of history, literature and the arts is being compromised or eliminated in favor of narrow skills that fit into so-called objective tests. Instead of giving students the opportunity to have strong emotional and cognitive encounters with well-told stories, instead of helping them find their way to becoming absorbed in great works of art, we have drilled young people into thinking that effective reading and writing are techniques with measurable outcomes to be evaluated on standardized tests. A liberal education produces results, too, but they are less reducible to questions that can be answered by coloring in a bubble with a number 2 pencil.
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