Author Archives: Ben Miller

About Ben Miller

Benjamin Miller is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department of the CUNY Graduate Center, where he has completed all requirements for the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate program. His dissertation will use distant reading techniques to examine the dynamics of research- and discourse­ communities within recent doctoral-level scholarship in composition and rhetoric.

Posts by Ben Miller

Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic concepts”

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Ben Miller

On Thursday, November 21st, we’ll discuss:

  1. Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic concepts” and
  2. Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) and 5 Pointz

N.B. ALL students must post comments on the Sibley piece; you can reply to this post for that purpose.

Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Ben Miller

On Tuesday, November 19th, we’ll discuss

  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing, pages 83-155;
  • Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”; and
  • Gould, pages 137-155.

N.B. ALL students must post comments on the Nochlin piece; you can reply to this post for that purpose.

Frances Berenson, “Understanding Art and Understanding Persons”

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Ben Miller

On Thursday, November 7th, we’ll discuss Frances Berenson, “Understanding Art and Understanding Persons” and Peter Schjeldahl, “Shapes of Things.”

N.B. ALL students must post comments on the Berenson reading; you can reply to this post for that purpose.

Sleeping Beauty illustrations

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Ben Miller

To accompany your Sleeping Beauty readings and marionette performance, here are some illustrations produced by the renowned illustrator Gustave Doré for the 1867 edition of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales:

La Belle au Bois Dormant - first of six engravings by Gustave Doré

La Belle au Bois Dormant - third of six engravings by Gustave Doré

La Belle au Bois Dormant - second of six engravings by Gustave Doré

La Belle au Bois Dormant - fourth of six engravings by Gustave Doré

La Belle au Bois Dormant - fifth of six engravings by Gustave Doré

La Belle au Bois Dormant - Sixth of six engravings by Gustave Doré

 

All images by Gustave Doré [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Walter Benjamin

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Ben Miller

We’d like you to do something a little different for this reading, which we’ll discuss in class on Thursday, 10/31. Instead of posting questions online, post your comments and reactions before class – say, by Tuesday 10/29 – and read what your peers have written.

Then, come in to class with questions on which you’d like our discussion to focus.

You can find the reading, titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in the packet with Kramer’s “Classical Music and its Values.”

Pictures at an Exhibition

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Ben Miller

As you know, you’ll soon (Thurs 10/24) be attending a performance of the New York Philharmonic, including a setting of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Before you head there, here are a few resources related to that piece, to help you frame the experience:

kennedy center mussorgsky screenshot
1) For program notes to accompany a performance of Pictures at an Exhibition, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC put together a brief history. Among other things, they explain that the “pictures” were part of a show in memoriam of the artist Victor Hartmann, a friend of the composer, who died young. View the notes here: http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/
?fuseaction=composition&composition_id=2481.

hartmann pictures screenshot

2) Many of the images themselves have been lost, but notes were taken at the time as to what they looked like. Later historians have tried to collect what we do know and pair it with the images we still have from Hartmann. Here’s one such collection: http://korschmin.com/portfolio-view/viktor-hartmann-pictures-at-an-exhibition/. Click on the individual photos to enlarge them.

Anecdote of the Jar

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Ben Miller

Here’s the poem I read in class today, by Wallace Stevens; I brought it up in the context of John Cage’s “4:33” — the idea of an empty frame as a work of art. The text of the poem is copied here from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/3778.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

 

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

 

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1923, 1951, 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Source: Poetry (October 1919).

10/10 – Copland revisited, Kivy, and some more Sparshott

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Ben Miller

Week Seven continues with these texts, all of which you should now have:

  • “The Gifted Listener” from Music and Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1952, pp. 7-20.
  • Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression. Princeton University Press, 1980.  (selected chapters).
  • Francis Sparshott, “Aesthetics of Music—Limits and Grounds” (Parts 2 & 3,  pp. 51-98)

Because this is a heavy reading week, you get to decide whether to respond to these texts or those for Tuesday, which are in another post. Technically speaking, I believe groups 2 and 4 are responsible for kicking off the conversation this week by posting questions (in either place) — but if you have ideas or thoughts that you’re ready to post, don’t let the technicalities stop you!

See you in one place or the other,

Ben

10/8 – Copland, Kramer, Sparshott

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Ben Miller

Coming up on Tuesday, October 8th, a discussion of “Fall for Dance” and Gould pp. 137-157 will be informed by your questions and comments on the following pieces:

  • Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music, Chapters 1-3;
  • Lawrence Kramer, “Classical Music and Its Values”
  • Francis Sparshott, “Aesthetics of Music—Limits and Grounds” (Part 1, pp. 33-49)

Because this is a heavy reading week, you get to decide whether to respond to these texts or those for Thursday, which will be in another post. Technically speaking, I believe groups 2 and 4 are responsible for kicking off the conversation by posting questions (in either place) this week — but if you have ideas or thoughts that you’re ready to post, don’t let the technicalities stop you!

See you in one place or the other,

Ben

review of The Nose in the NYT

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Ben Miller

The Nose From left, Ying Fang, Barbara Dever, Sergei Skorokhodov, Paulo Szot and Adam Klein at the Metropolitan Opera House." class /> photo credit: Richard Termine for The New York Times The Nose From left, Ying Fang, Barbara Dever, Sergei Skorokhodov, Paulo Szot and Adam Klein at the Metropolitan Opera House.

For those who missed it, there was a review of Shostakovich’s The Nose — the opera we’re going to see — in the New York Times on Monday, written by James R. Oestreich.

From the lede:

William Kentridge’s 2010 staging of Shostakovich’s first opera, “The Nose,” was one of the Metropolitan Opera’s most acclaimed productions of recent seasons, and for a critic just catching up with it when it was revived on Saturday afternoon, it was easy to see why. With unflagging energy and unfettered imagination, it powerfully seconds both the irreverent zaniness of the Gogol story on which the opera is based and the teeming exuberance of Shostakovich’s music.

You can read the full piece here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/arts/music/in-the-nose-shostakovich-puts-music-to-gogols-tale.html?smid=pl-share

the blog is open!

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Ben Miller

Did you know? If you want, you can post about any art you see in NYC: just add a new blog post, and check the box for the “Around NYC” category. To add images or sound to your post, click the “Add Media” button above the edit box.

Looking forward to hearing more about your aesthetic adventures!

9/26 – Tolstoy

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Ben Miller

The reading for Thursday, September 26th is “What is Art” by Tolstoy.

Reply to this post with your comments and questions! Groups 1 and 3 are in the lead this week, so please do write in early.

9/24 – Williams and Cortazar consolidated

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Ben Miller

Hi, all! For Tuesday, September 24th, the assigned readings are these:

  • Gould, How to Succeed in College, pp. 74-105.
  • Herbert Read, “A Definition of Art”
  • Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary”
  • Julio Cortazar, “On Receiving the Ruben Dario Award”

Since some of you have already posted about Williams and Cortazar, I thought it might help to combine those posts here — both in preparation for Tuesday’s discussion, and as a model for Thursday’s.

Please feel free to add comments and questions here! To create a new thread, use the box at the bottom; to respond to individual comments, just click one of the “reply” links instead.

schedule for week of 9/17

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Ben Miller

Confused about who’s writing what, when? Here’s what we wrote on the board at the end of class:

Date

Readings involved

Post Questions

Comment

Talk in Class

Reflect after Class
Tues 9/17 Dewey and/or Anderson and/or Diamond group 1
(by 9/13)		 group 2
(before 9/17)		 group 3
(on 9/17)		 group 4
(after 9/17)
Thurs 9/19 Williams and/or Cortázar group 2
(by 9/17)		 group 3
(before 9/19)		 group 4
(on 9/19)		 group 1
(after 9/17

In other words, Tuesday’s class will be a catch-up / continuation of today’s, so if you’ve already done your blog task, you’re good to go. (Since there are no posts yet about Diamond, that can be an optional additional post — perhaps from the Reflect & Reconnect group, which in this case is group 4.)

We’ll begin moving the rotation forward for Thursday’s class. Group 2 will take the lead with Engage & Interrogate, posting early enough to give group 3 something to respond to.

Hope this helps!

Exhibit opening: Lo Studio dei Nipoti: Four Artists. September 12, 2013 through January 10, 2014

Posted on August 31, 2013 by Ben Miller

Reblogged from the Calandra Italian American Institute, a CUNY-affiliated intellectual and cultural center located in Manhattan

The Calandra Institute presents an exhibition by Lo Studio dei Nipoti (“The Studio of the Grandchildren”), a nonprofit artist collective for U.S. artists of southern Italian ancestry. The works featured here, by artists Nancy Agati, Cianne Fragione, Rose Michelle Taverniti, and Marisa Tesauro, represent an effort to engage with immigrant culture in the United States through the lens of the Italian-American experience while seeking to evoke realities of Italian-American life in their true range and variety.

Nancy Agati; eastwest; 2010; mica mounted to black paper, stitched, on pedestal; 30 x 44 inches

Cianne Fragione; Monasterace, now cat’s done mewing, bedroom’s touched by white moon; 2012; lithographic crayon, Conte crayon, graphite pastel, collage and oil on paper; 45 x 37 inches

Lo Studio dei Nipoti was founded as an online community in 2009 by Taverniti. In the summer of 2012, Lo Studio established a residency program in Monasterace, Calabria. This exhibition’s artists were among the first participants.

Agati is a sculptor whose structures refer to traditional cultural forms and Italian fine-craft traditions with their emphasis on high skill and careful finish. Fragione, a painter, revels in both the light of the Italian south and its distinctive indigenous forms, visible in decorative designs and church architecture. Taverniti works on drafting film, creating large-scale drawings that study the rich surface textures of centuries-old buildings in rural Calabria. Tesauro constructs sculptures that convey the complex textures of an ancient landscape — human and natural — in continual decay and renewal.

On view: September 12, 2013 – January 10, 2014
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9 am – 5 pm
Exhibition opening: Thursday, September 12, 2013, 6 pm
Artists’ talk: Tuesday, November 19, 2013, 6 pm

Working with Sources: there is a better way

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Ben Miller

For my inaugural post in the ITF Corner, I want to introduce you to Zotero, a bibliographic manager that lives in your web browser. What does that mean? With a single click, you can grab all the relevant citation information from a newspaper article, arts blog, flickr photo, academic database, google book, or just plain website — and for many databases, you can have Zotero automatically download a local pdf, too, so you can access it even without an internet connection . (Any other subway readers out there?) Then, when you’re ready to cite, creating a bibliography is as simple as drag-and-drop into any program or field that accepts text entry. There’s more to say, about tags and note-taking, full-text searching and in-text citations, but I’ll stop here to conclude as follows: this program will change your life. Watch the short demo video at http://www.zotero.org/support/quick_start_guide. You won’t regret it.

Welcome to the Class!

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Ben Miller

Announcements and updates will appear here.

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