Let’s see. Last week two orbiting satellites collided in space, and yesterday two nuclear subs collided in the Atlantic. Not to worry. Nothing bad really happened in either incident. (Bloggers were suggesting launching a giant vacuum cleaner to suck up satellite debris.) Meanwhile, most committed environmentalists don’t think any of this if very funny. They warn that collisions like these are leading us toward catastrophe — or at the very least to a 21st-century in which trash is deadly.

When I was a small girl, my family visited an historic pueblo in New Mexico, where I learned about “kitchen middens.” These are what’s found in the covered-over dumps of household trash from previous civilizations, preserved for centuries in mounds of earth. Middens are to archaeologists what tree growth rings are to arborists — silent evidence of long ago events. By carefully studying the layers ...

When Mary MacNaughton, director of the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, in Claremont, CA, sent me an email last spring saying she wanted to do a retrospective of my work, I was ecstatic. A retrospective! Wow. This is every artist’s dream. It means you’re important!

OK, maybe that’s delusional, but at least you’re someone. No, not that, either. But it does mean this: You get to see — all at once — what painters never get to see otherwise, or can see only in sequence, or in their memory — a life’s work. A retrospective will demonstrate my development, which I hardly ever think about except when I say, “I used to do that.” And it will validate, however fleetingly, this strange activity to which I’ve dedicated my life — the uncertain, anxious business of painting.

The show will open in 2010. Last...

More than a year and a half ago, in “A Pedagogical Straightjacket,” an essay that appeared in The Chronicle Review, I lambasted outcomes-assessment practices in higher education. Having headed my department’s Outcomes Assessment Committee since its inception several years before, having thoroughly studied countless examples of assessment-based accountability models — drawn from across disciplines and from a wide variety of colleges and universities — and having been one of the main players in constructing the rubric for outcomes assessment in my department, I had come to the conclusion that outcomes-assessment practices were, at best, misguided and, at their worst, detrimental to higher education itself.

Since writing that essay, I’ve nevertheless faithfully fulfilled the mandate of my university and my...

Move over Mary Wollstonecraft and all the fierce feminists who followed your lead. Forget those long-ago battles to establish the moral equality of men and women, or women’s suffrage, or even the recent battles over equal pay for equal work. Today we have a brand new kind of women’s rights—21st-century women’s rights. In the new era, a single, 33-year-old unmarried mother who already has six children under the age of seven, and who lives with her bankrupt mother, has the right to apply the marvels of science to have herself artificially inseminated, and grow eight babies in her womb.

Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to octuplets last week after having had in vitro fertilization, apparently sees nothing wrong with any of this. Her mother says she “loves children” and had artificial insemination...

I was in an angry mood when I wrote my last post on the Brandeis decision to shut down its Rose museum and sell off the collection. I notice commenters on Eric Banks’s post on the Rose are even angrier than I was, however. Lots of us who believe in the value of art — for its own sake, and for the sake of culture — are not about to go easy on Brandeis. The Rose wasn’t an ordinary museum — it was a star, burning on its own. Running it cost Brandeis no more than a few pennies. How could a university get away with this maneuver?

Now, however, I’m feeling the winds of schadenfreude softening my anger. On Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green directs us to Tom Lentz, the director of the Harvard Art Museum, who said, “it’s going to take a long time...

Now that the initial hue and cry over Brandeis University’s decision to close their Rose Museum and sell its art is dying down to a dull, depressing hiss, consider the probable outcome should Brandeis refuse to change its mind. After settling a couple of lawsuits, the university will sell what it can of the Rose collection. Even if the sales are concluded at deflated prices, they’ll probably yield enough money for Brandeis to claw its way back to the top of its financial hole.

Here’s the important part. Say Brandeis recovers financially after the sales. Say it suffers no long-lasting impact from the affair — no loss of prestige, no drop in alumni donations or college application numbers, no shunning of the university by important scholars or visitors. Say a few years down the road nobody cares, or even remembers, that Brandeis’ fancy undergraduate studio building once housed an...

Rose Art Museum (Photo at The Boston Globe’s site)

In my last post, I blogged on Brandeis University’s shocking decision to close its renowned Rose Art Museum and sell off the entire collection. By shutting down the museum, Brandeis found a way to get around those pesky AAM (American Association of Museums) deaccessioning rules. Now President Jehuda Reinharz is saying the university might not sell off all of the art after all — only some of it.

In an email (posted on Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes) sent by the president’s office to those questioning the Brandeis decision, Reinharz said, “I would like to reiterate the point that has been made in public releases from the University, specifically that Brandeis is not lessening its commitment to the creative and visual arts. The Rose will be...

“Liberal Arts Without the Art” (from Flickr user Mike Licht)

On Monday, Brandeis University announced it would sell off the entire collection of its 48-year-old Rose Art Museum and shut it down. Like colleges and universities everywhere, Brandeis is suffering steep losses in its endowment, and the university faces a $10-million operating deficit. By any standard, the Rose is a first-rate museum, with a collection of more than 6,000 works that concentrates on modern and contemporary art. Its collection was built from donations of works of art and money specifically given to the museum. It includes critical works of art by such prominent giants as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. In theory, the collection could bring as much as $300-million or $400-million at auction; in practice, given the current art market, that figure is doubtful.

The art...

Reading fellow Brainstormer Mark Bauerlein’s ruminations on what’s happening to books, as well as the plight of reading in general, I followed a link, suggested by one of his commentators, to Robert Darnton’s sobering essay “Google & The Future of Books” (in the February 12th issue of The New York Review of Books). Darnton, a professor at Harvard and director of the Harvard University Library, is a renowned expert on the history of books and, as his essay reveals, he unequivocally embraces the Enlightenment idea that the spread of knowledge is a very good thing.

Darnton discusses Google’s recent settlement (subject to court approval) with a group of authors and publishers who had sued Google for digitizing books and then posting them for free on the...

Democracy (“rule by the people”) and “high art” (art for refined audiences) make an unhappy fit. On a few rare but thrilling occasions, however, they happily come together like bees and honey.

This helps explain why some people (including me) flinched just a tiny bit after learning that the inauguration quartet that included the incomparable Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman had synched their performance. We thought we’d witnessed one of those special moments where hard-core mass democracy and supremely high art had momentarily become comrades. Instead, the high-art part turned out to be a tad fake. It wasn’t exactly full-blown fraud (like the kind that resulted in the pop band Milli Vanilli losing its 1989 Grammy), but by being synched the performance lost its aura of authenticity. The subtle, responsive ...