Agkleinman, I really enjoyed your response. Jones’ review is revealed by you as a facile misrepresentation of what Ryoji’s work, in collaboration to CERN really set to do. Which is rather ironic, because Jones himself attacks Ryoji with sentences like “The insight that cutting-edge science is weird is not really an insight. It is also probably not the point of the Large Hadron Collider.”
The idea of overspecialization and the atomization of knowledge is a very profound threat to culture in general. Contemporary Mathematics for instance has found ways for specialists in multiple branches to be able to break their traditional boundaries. It is not rare anymore to find Topologists trying to solve Singularity problems. On the arts however, and perhaps this is particularly relevant to Vancouver, Canada, where I am based, Professionalization has been a profound threat to the integrity of the local art community. In Canada, artist run centres have traditionally voiced non commercial, experimental, and other forms of artistic practices that would not have been embraced by larger institutions. What we have now basically is a system where bureaucracy has taken over: Cuts in government funding, and a proliferation of higher level education programs for curatorial studies have created a situation where in fact, for most artist run centres to become competitive in securing grants or philanthropic donations, they must basically hire curators that are professionalized in dealing with the bureaucracy required. These so called “artist run centres” might have artists in their board, but the majority of them are run by professionalized curators, and while many are afraid of the implications of this, we are yet unsure what the ultimate consequences of the uber profesionalization of the art world