Arts Advocacy Day revisited

When it took place about six weeks ago, Arts Advocacy Day may not have registered with all the people for whom a job and a home have suddenly become unattainable needs. 

In fact, the annual event co-organized by Americans for the Arts may not have registered with anyone much at all outside the national arts community, because so many Americans still regard expressive pursuits as frivolous, elitist self-indulgences unrelated to a normal life.  And they are so wrong.

I hope some of them will take a few minutes to learn how essential the arts, and creativity in general, are to the healthy mental and emotional development of children, to the mastering of brain skills none of us can live or work without, to culturally and thus economically vital communities, and to the formation of strong and lasting personal bonds.

I hope they’ll listen to the testimony of artists such as Wynton Marsalis and Linda Ronstadt and find out what music gave them as children and as adults. (Cleveland, Ohio, readers will be especially interested in Marsalis’s story about the late Bob Bergman, who used to be the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and who taught Marsalis how to think about, and look at, images.) With their art, they have earned livings, won fame, enriched lives and have since invested their skills and knowledge in helping others benefit as they did when their families sang together or because someone handed them an old guitar to play with. 

That kind of gift can’t be left to luck. It has to be offered to all as part of a standard education and a normal community life, or Americans will become less than we can be – a people of stunted imagination, limited ability and small heart.

Science of tomorrow today

The annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is under way today through Friday in  Reno, Nev., where 1,500 talented students from over 50 countries have converged to demonstrate their scientific skills, research and innovative ideas and compete for $4 million in scholarships.  The top three winners will receive $50,00 each.

Our creative future is in the making out there at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. The fair, a program of the nonprofit  Society for Science and the Public, has been around for 60 years and is the largest student science competition in the world. It also draws the best – many of the young participants already hold, or are applying for, patents.

Check out blog entries and videos about the fair and young scientists’ ideas here.

It’s Friday! Creativity drumline!

Live fast, die shallow?

Interesting research about how humans develop a sense of morality has come out of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute this spring. 

A study issued in April found that feelings of admiration and compassion, two prerequisites for a functioning moral compass, develop only with time and reflection -  the very process our hyperpaced digital culture discourages. Apparently, the human brain can quickly register information about other people’s physical pain without it having much emotional impact, but to absorb and appreciate another person’s virtues or social pain  requires a few more seconds. The effect lasts longer, too. 

The implication is that, the more we get our information from the stream of  news briefs on TV and the internet, the less likely we are to completely experience the emotions we need to feel in order to develop moral principles and make sound moral choices.

This sounds like corroboration of the suspicion many of us have had that, when heavily used, electronic media distance us emotionally from one another – one,  because we directly interact with each other less, and two, because those media expose us to a torrent of intense information about physical pain (crime news, true-life and fictional violence, accidents and disasters) that eventually numbs our ability to empathize with suffering. 

Read more about the study here.

Architecture award goes to amphibious opera house

Most of the world resists changing anything more significant than its socks. But for some reason, we make an exception for buildings, among the costliest and longest-lasting of human creations – and the wackiest. 

Frank Gehry ’s creations have lately been the favorite example of outer-limits architecture. But Snohetta, an Oslo, Norway-based firm, has a pretty singular imagination of its own: It was announced Tuesday that the company has won  the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Award 2009 and 60,000 euros for its Oslo Opera House, home of the Norwegian Opera and the National Ballet, featuring an auditorium that’s half under water.  Opened in April 2008, the opera house has a roof that slants like a white marble beach running down to – and underneath – the waters of the Oslo Fjord.  You have to wonder if, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House outside Pittsburgh,  the edifice of art will turn out to be a leaky teepee. Here are some views of its exuberant facade and interiors:

Energy Department gets creative with EFRCs

Here’s some happy innovation news for anyone wondering what’s next  for the environment and the economy:  The U.S. Department of Energy announced last week that it will invest nearly $800 million in 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) to develop clean fuel technologies.

And not just new ways to use solar, wind and other clean, renewable energy sources, but also ways to rid the planet of the bad effects from the fossil fuels we’ve relied on too long.

The funding is going to universities and research centers all around the nation, with particular concentrations in California and the Northeast metropolitan corridor. Some of them, such as Caltech and MIT, you could have predicted. But institutions in Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona and other fly-over states  have also won money for their projects, which range from developing polymers and other novel solid materials for converting sunlight to electricity to exploring ways of storing carbon dioxide geologically.  

This sounds like money well placed. It will lead to science and design that will generate new products, jobs and an improved economy; support education; lead to a cleaner Earth and healthier people; and save the U.S. and other nations from dependence on other nation’s fossil-fuel supplies.  Seven key effects at one blow.

And there’s another one: collaboration. The EFRC has prompted groups of universities – even deadly sports rivals - to pool talent and work together. At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, for instance, chemistry professor and project leader Thomas Meyer will join forces with other UNC departments and counterparts at Duke University, North Carolina State, North Carolina Central and the University of Florida to develop solar fuels from photovoltaic technology.     

 Thomas Meyer

Meanwhile, work is going ahead in the for-profit sector on smaller wind turbines for individual buildings that were mentioned in Geniocity.com’s Wind of Change project two weeks ago as one of the cutting-edge ideas in the alternative-fuels industry.

Jazz aftermath

Some other people’s takes on the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival: the New York Times‘ Jon Pareles on the music and the mood;  Rolling Stone’s view of the fest’s rock-and-roll; and the Times-Picayune’s Jaquetta White on the size of the crowds JazzFest drew in this recession year.