성균관대

In virtually all its manifestations, the American wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin.

Seen as the frontier, it is a savage world at the dawn of civilization, whose transformation represents the very beginning of the national historical epic.

Furthermore, the dream of unworked landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living – urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die.

Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves no place in which human beings can actually make their living from the land.

Perhaps the most significant problem with the media hyperbole concerning cloning is the easy assumption that humans simply are a product of their genes – a view usually called “genetic essentialism.” Television hosts and radio personalities have asked whether it would be possible to stock an entire basketball team with clones of Michael Jordan.

In response, philosophers, theologians, and other experts have reiterated wearily that, although human behavior undeniably has a genetic component, a host of other factor – including uterine environment, family dynamics, social setting, diet, and other personal history – play important roles in an individual’s development.

Consequently, a clone produced from the DNA of an outstanding athlete might not be interested in sports. What’s more, the cloning issue reveals the way in which the mass media foster attitudes of technological and scientific determinism by implying that scientific ‘progress’ cannot be halted.

Of course, many scientists share these attitudes, and, too often, they refuse to accept moral responsibility for their participation in research that may contribute to human suffering.

The camera is the means by which we stamp ourselves on everything we see, under cover of recording the Wonders of the World already wonderfully recorded by professionals and on sale at every corner bookshop and newsagent. But what use to us an illustrated book of perfect photographs?

What use to show our friends, back home, postcards of the Taj Mahal, the Coliseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa since ? No temple is of interest without our faces beside it, grinning. Most amateur photographers show no interest in the world as it is, only in the world as it ideally should be.

For example, you want a picture of the Real Morocco- a scene as old as time. Unfortunately for you, a glassy modern building edges up to the mosque; behind the minaret television aerials spike the sky; beside the camel two Moroccans in unsuitable Western suits stand discussing business.

So you must stand and twist your camera, hold it up sideways, shift your position so that the little yellow lines just clear the building, just cut out the aerials and the telegraph wires, just exclude the business men while retaining the rest.

And when all these alien elements have, for a precious moment, been obliterated, click. There, the Real Morocco. That is the summit of the amateur photographer’s art-total unreality. The World As It Isn’t.

The managing director in a client company booked two of his middle managers on a team building seminar. This prestigious event was held in the opulence of a posh Manhattan hotel. The attendance fee was not much under $1,000 apiece, so the direct cost was over $2,000, plus the opportunity cost of their time.

He had singled them out because they were both keen on and normally receptive to the idea of self development, they were hard workers and high flyers, and he wanted to send a clear message to them about how pleased he was with their performance.

When he handed over their tickets, he received a response that could generously be described as lukewarm, and the only feedback he had from them after the event was that it had been ‘all right.’

When he probed further, he discovered simmering resentment which could be paraphrased as ‘We head up two of the best and smoothest functioning teams in the place. Why pick on us? What have we done wrong?’

Hardly able to credit such ingratitude our man went off in a huff and with the silent resolve to be less generous in the future. What went wrong? A major part of the answer is a’ ‘. It is not a question of pandering to egalitarianism. It is common sense.

This approach is no more than a special case of the general principle: Where possible, involve everyone who is going to be affected by a decision. We operate in an age where is, or should, be, part of the fabric of work.

This case shows that no matter how unfair it seems, it is a terrible mistake to think that it can be bypassed just because we are doing something ‘nice.’

An interesting aspect of graphic symbolism is the extent to which individual variations in letter formation can reliably be interpreted. The term, graphology which refers to the psychological study of handwriting, has been practiced for over a century.

It was the French abbot, Jean Hippolyte Michon, who first set this branch of scholarship in train. Graphologists claim that careful and detailed analysis of an individual’s handwriting can reveal important information about individual’s personality and can indicate, for example, whether they are suitable for a particular job or not.

In recent years they have been employed in several professional contexts and in forensic science, where questions of handwriting identity and imitation are critical.

The subject plainly has the scope for scientific development, as variables such as letter size, shape, angle, line direction and consistency of stroke all lend themselves, in principle, to precise scientific description.

_______Graphology has suffered from skepticism generated by its popularity at agricultural shows and seaside resorts, where characters are described and fortunes foretold on the basis of little more than a scribbled signature.

The subject has also been heavily biased towards the famous or infamous, discerning the basis of success in a signature – but without objective controls.

The nation has lived with TV for more than 50 years now. We are not, as it was once predicted we would be, fantastically well-informed about other cultures or about the origins of life on earth. People do not remember much from television documentary beyond how good it was.

Only those who knew something about the subject in the first place retain the information. Documentaries are not what most people want to watch anyway. Television is at its most popular when it celebrates its own present.

Its ideal subjects are those that need not be remembered and can be instantly replaced, where what matters most is what is happening now and what is going to happen next.

Sport, news, panel games, cop shows, long-running soap operas, situation comedies – these occupy us only for as long as they are on. However good or bad it is, a night’s viewing is wonderfully forgettable. It’s a little sleep, it’s Entertainment; our morals remain intact.

The box is further neutralized by the sheer quantity people watch. Of course, some programs are infinitely better than others. There are gifted people working in television. But seen from a remoter perspective – say, for hours a night veining for three months – the quality of individual programs means as much as the quality of each car in the rush-hour traffic. 

The first time it appeared it did not seem possible: a poster promising new school equipment for those children who collected labels from the cans of a certain brand of baked beans.

It seems that things are now so bad in the aftermath of public sector spending cuts that a multi-national company was inviting us to eat our way to our children’s education facilities.

If the state no longer proposes to provide, perhaps God has disposed the commercial hearts of giant business to find a way of doing so and making money at the same time. Yet this is a marketing revolution.

The moral overtones of selling on the basis of making penny-pinched mothers aware that the more beans they buy, the better their children’s school facilities will be, are something new. Recently, there has been a shift in attitudes among the multi-national themselves.

They have begun to admit, rather than hide, how powerful they are as a social force. Now they are tending to set up departments within themselves, such as the ‘Division for International Social Action’ at General Motors, or Shell’s recently formed committee to take care of social responsibility for the company.

Conscience is beginning to make commercial sense. The baked beans poster campaign, though, raises questions which could shift marketing out of psychology and into domination.

This campaign – coming at a time when everyone is pressed for money as unemployment rises and the value of earnings evaporates in inflation – adds the element of guilt. If you do not spend the money, your child may be deprived at school.

The fine arts in India depended on royal patronage – by the maharajah and nawabs of India princely states – well into the 20th century. After independence in 1947, the country’s few industrialist families became the most important collectors, but the field remained as insular as their privately held companies.

Over the past 10 years, India‘s economic boom created a new class of affluent, salaried professionals, particularly in technology companies. “The collector base has really increased,” says a curator and art consultant in New Delhi. “There were more corporate executives with greater disposable income.”

.” But this new burst of demand rapidly pushed up prices and attracted speculators, generating a frenzy in India similar to the ones that engulfed the U.S. and European markets. Artist, too, developed unrealistic expectations.

“Everyone wants to be Damian Hirst overnight,” says one Mumbai gallery owner. Buffeted by the global economic crisis, India’s art bubble has defeated, with some pieces fetching just a quarter of what they once sold for.

But art-world insiders say that’s not bad thing. The collapse has driven out both the investment-driven buyers and those artists who succumbed to the temptation to produce derivative work simply because it sold well. The quality is coming back into collecting.