Rice University Campbell Lectures – serie

Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for?In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before.As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself.This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.

The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the enlightenment, a manifestation of European society's growing belief that the spread of knowledge, promotion of intellectual inquiry, and trust in individual agency were crucial to human development and the future of a rational society. But in recent years, encyclopedic museums have been under attack as little more than relics and promoters of imperialism. Could it be that the encyclopedic museum has outlived its usefulness? With Museums Matter, James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust and former president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, replies with a resounding "No!" He takes us on a brief tour of the modern museum, from the creation of the British Museum - the archetypal encyclopedic collection - to the present, when major museums host millions of visitors annually and play a significant role in the cultural lives of their cities.Along the way, Cuno acknowledges the legitimate questions about the role of museums in nation building and imperialism, but he argues strenuously that even a truly national museum like the Louvre can't help but open visitors' eyes and minds to the wide diversity of world cultures and the stunning art that is our common heritage. Ultimately Cuno makes a powerful case for the encyclopedic museum as a truly cosmopolitan institution, promoting tolerance, understanding, and a shared sense of history-values that are essential in our ever more globalized age.

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes - the absolute authority claimed for God over the world, for the holy scriptures over the faithful, monarchs over subjects, fathers over wives and children, men over women, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling "Will in the World", shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolute claims and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare's preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked: beauty, hatred, authority, and autonomy. He considers Shakespeare's challenge to the cult of featureless perfection, his sense of the inherent limits of murderous hatred, his awareness of the ethical ambiguity of power, and his doubt that artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, were at liberty to create without constraints of any kind.A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare's Freedom" is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

As a teenager during China's Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People's Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel "Waiting", completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature.Ha Jin's journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world - questions that take center stage in "The Writer as Migrant", his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin's own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov - who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing - are enlisted to explore a migrant author's conscious choice of a literary language.A final essay draws on V. S.Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie - refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration.Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin's mental library, "The Writer as Migrant" is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for?In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before.As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself.This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.