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| Hearsay: |
Reader Glen urges us to share NEA head (and poet) Dana Gioia’s commencement address to the graduates of Stanford. He urges these fledgling adults to seek challenge along with fun in their entertainment. Hopefully not all of them were buried under iPods while texting their friends in other rows and jamming away with their thumbs on PS2s.
Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.
I have a reccurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo’s incomparable fresco of the “Creation of Man.” I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam’s finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.
When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn’t trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?
Don’t get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.
But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.
Copies of Mr. Gioia’s books were on sale in the lobby after the address.
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June 27th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
And nothing about the Sistine Chapel is trying to sell us on an idealized vision of Christianity, right?
June 27th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
andrew: right…if you go deaf to metaphor. At some point we need to separate “persuade” and “advocate” from the commercial “sell” if only because a commecial sell-job isn’t part of the transaction it encourages.
C
June 28th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Chris: right…no “tithing” or even outright fees charged for baptisms, communions and other ecclesiastical services ever took place in Renaissance churches–no earthly transactions involved whatsoever.
June 29th, 2007 at 5:46 am
I saw this over at Metafilter. [see link above] One of the depressing side-topics was the reaction of Stanford grads at having Gioia as the graduation speaker. Many of the comments from Stanford students revolved around the fact that few people knew who Gioia was, and that since students’ families had spent all that money on their childrens’ education and were flying in for the ceremony, they deserved someone better-known, i.e. someone they could brag about having at the ceremony, like Bill Clinton. The actual content of the speech was beside the point – “anybody can give a speech” was a common reaction.
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
The commencement was held in a mammoth stadium. There was no “lobby,” nor any books on sale.
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:13 am
If celebrity is all that matters, why not select Paris Hilton to deliver the commencement speech?