Further to this, readers may be interested in Philosophy and Literature’s gone but not forgotten Annual Bad Writing Contest. The rules are simple enough:

The Bad Writing Contest attempts to locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from actual serious academic journals or books.

The winning entries are, alas, not quite so clear. This, from 1997, is Professor Rob Wilson, writing in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, a collection of essays published by the University of Minnesota Press and edited by Richard Burt:

If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.

The publisher’s blurb informs us that the purpose of the book quoted above is to “seek a deeper understanding of what ‘censorship’, ‘criticism’ and the ‘public sphere’ really mean.”

There’s more, of course.  (h/t, Stephen Hicks.)

Over at Carnal Reason, Pwyll has some rules of art appreciation.

I developed my first rule of art while studying a purported work of art on display at the University of South Florida. The work consisted of a beat to hell La-Z-boy style recliner. It was cloth covered, or once was. The cloth was trashed, at least one spring was sticking out. The thing was probably ugly when new, and time had not been kind to it. It looked like it must smell bad. I examined it closely, searching for some sign of deliberate modification, a hint of an artist’s hand. I saw nothing not attributable to abuse, neglect, or decay.

I was with a young lady who asked me what I thought. I proposed a thought experiment. Imagine someone died and left you an old and neglected property. You find an object in the garage. The question is whether that object is a work of art. If your first impulse is to wonder whether the county land fill will accept the object, then with high probability that object is not art.

My second rule of art was born in an art gallery in NYC. On display was a brand new galvanised steel garbage can. In it was a cinder block. A rope was tied to the block, and to a hook in the wall, in such a way that the garbage can stayed tilted, but did not fall over. My second rule of art: anything I can reproduce in under fifteen minutes with materials available at a hardware store is not art.

I will not recount the disgusting details of the Aliza Shvarts episode at Yale. If you have not heard about it, you can get the details straight from the source. Ms Shvarts has inspired my latest rule of art: anything which appears to be hazardous medical waste, or the product of a sewage system malfunction, is not art.

The mention of sewage naturally brings to mind the towering works of Wim Delvoye and Michelle Hines, whose names may not be familiar to newcomers. Delvoye is perhaps best known for his x-rays of blowjobs and for creating Cloaca, a machine that generates artificial shit, and which the artist describes as “a highly pungent comment on the folly of human achievement.” Ms Hines is remembered, no doubt fondly, for her apparent hands-on production of a single, continuous turd measuring some 26 feet in length. Readers with a sturdy constitution can click here to see Ms Hines in action, as it were.

Never let it be said this site neglects the finer things.

Update:

In the comments, Georges offers the following:

There are two different qualities: impact and resonance. Impact is about grabbing the audience’s attention by any means necessary. Resonance is about leaving something lingering in their consciousness afterwards.

Exactly. There’s a difference between shock and awe. And between wonderment and tedious disgust. Righteous deconstruction and ludicrous parroted theory are poor substitutes for being captivated by beauty. Another guide to art appreciation might be to ask the question: Does this object make me wish I could make something beautiful? Or: Does the world of possibility feel bigger as a result, or has it actually shrunk?

Theory is cheap, in every sense, and easy to reproduce. Talent is not.

Zoe Williams, whose search for radicalism was mentioned yesterday, previously thrilled us with her discovery that “hoodie” is in fact a “sleight-of-hand” and a “sinister” racial code word. The list of hitherto innocuous words that now, apparently, hold terrible racist significance continues to grow. Allah (pbuh) highlights an article by David K Shipler, who, like Williams, possesses some kind of racial Spider Sense and can detect heinous racist intent where none was thought to be.

[W]hen his opponents branded [Obama] an elitist and an outsider, his race made it easier to drive a wedge between him and the white, rural voters he has courted. As an African American, he was supposedly looking down from a place he didn’t belong and looking in from a distance he could not cross. This could not happen as dramatically were it not for embedded racial attitudes. “Elitist” is another word for “arrogant,” which is another word for “uppity,” that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.

As Allah notes,

If you take this tool seriously, there’s quite literally no good-faith way to accuse a member of a minority group of being snobbish or condescending. Every road through Shipler’s copy of Roget will lead inevitably back to “uppity,” no matter how circuitous the route may be.

It is, as ever, fascinating to watch people tilting their heads, squinting and bearing down quite hard until they can see just about everything through the unreliable lens of identity politics – a gift bestowed upon them by others, very often educators, with similar paranormal talents.

Further to our epic discussion on notions of default gender parity, here’s Christina Hoff Sommers on the prospect of quota-driven, “gender-balanced” and non-competitive science.

Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT. “It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.” This viewpoint explains the constant emphasis, by equity activists such as [Donna] Shalala, [Debra] Rolison, and [Kathie] Olsen, on the need to transform the “entire culture” of academic science and engineering…

When the women-in-sports movement was getting underway in the early 1990s, no one suggested that its success would require transforming the “culture of soccer” or putting an end to the obsession with competing and winning. The notion that women’s success in science depends on changing the rules of the game seems demeaning to women – but it gives the equity movement extraordinary scope, commensurate with the extraordinary power that federal science funding would put at its disposal…

[Virginia] Valian is intent on radically transforming society to achieve her egalitarian ideals. She also wants to alter the behavior of successful scientists. Their obsessive work habits, single-minded dedication, and “intense desire for achievement,” not only marginalise women, but also may compromise good science. She writes, “If we continue to emphasise and reward always being on the job, we will never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better scientific work.”

Valian may be a leader in the equity-in-science movement, but she is not an empirical thinker. A world where women (and resocialised men) earn Nobel Prizes on flexi-time has no relation to reality. Unfortunately, her outré worldview is not confined to women’s studies. It is a guiding light for some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions… In 2001, the National Science Foundation awarded Valian and her colleagues $3.9 million to develop equity programs and workshops for the “scientific community at large.” Should Congress pass the Gender Bias Elimination Act, which mandates workshops for university department chairs, members of review panels, and agency program officers seeking federal funding, Valian will become one of the most prominent women in American scientific education.

Please, read it all.   

Of course, what matters is that men and women of comparable skill and motivation compete fairly for employment. Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined by whether or not gender parity results, since we have no solid basis on which to say that gender parity should be the meritocratic outcome. On what basis could one determine that there “ought” to be a particular ratio of male and female mathematicians, engineers or oil workers? At what point and on what basis – besides political dogma – could one determine that a particular gender is sufficiently “represented” in any given vocation? Yet these are the assumptions of much of the research mentioned above, and of those who wish to “correct” who is interested in what. The belief that, magically stripped of all external influences, the male and female population should be roughly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – a belief; a prejudice, if you will. And not, it seems, terribly scientific.

Update: Mary Jackson has more.

Theodore Dalrymple on the mellifluous flummery of Rowan Williams.   

British intellectual life has long harbored a strain of militantly self-satisfied foolishness, and the present archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a perfect exemplar of the tendency. In an interview with the BBC on February 7, the archbishop said that it “seems unavoidable” that some aspects of sharia, or Islamic law, would be adopted in Britain: unavoidable, presumably, in the sense in which omertà seems unavoidable in the island of Sicily…

Rarely does philosophical inanity dovetail so neatly into total ignorance of concrete social realities: it is as though the archbishop were the product of the coupling of Goldilocks and Neville Chamberlain. Those more charitably inclined point out that the archbishop is an erudite man, a professor of theology who reads in eight languages and who was addressing a highly sophisticated audience, employing nuanced, subtle, caveat-laden arguments. He was not speaking in newspaper headlines, nor did he expect to make any headlines with his remarks.

Charity is a virtue, of course, but so is clarity: and it is the latter virtue that the archbishop so signally lacks. He assumes that the benevolence of his manner will disguise the weakness of his thought, and that his opacity will be mistaken for profundity.

Over at B&W, Ophelia Benson also trawls through the verbiage.