Just because Hollywood made a film about it does not mean that "The Girl with a Pearl Earring" is now the greatest Vermeer, evah. Even if it was Scarlett Johansson. It was a mediocre film not worthy of it's subject. It wasn't even worthy of Scarlett Johansson, who spent most of the film trying to look innocent and sultry at the same time.
It's not even close. I personally find it a bit off-putting myself. Give me "A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window", "The Music Lesson", The Kitchener Maid", "The Geographer"-- yeah, pretty well any other Vermeer painting, except for the "Study of a Young Woman", which I also find off-putting.
It is really depressing to read this story in the New York Times about two impoverished Philadelphia high schools who were rivals at football and who were forced to merge because of declining enrollments and public debt. The New York Times, who should know better, thinks this is a feel-good story because the two schools together produced a football team that could win.
It is not unusual at all to see articles in the U.S. press about how important it is to have schools and universities and colleges so that there can be football. The Times notes that the coach of the football team mentioned academics once. And the writer keeps trying to insist that the football success has some bearing on other apple-pie issues like school violence, attendance, and just how wonderful these poor, mostly black kids can now feel about themselves.
Personally, I think the schools in the U.S., at all levels, should give up the academics entirely and do the only thing they are really good at: exploiting children for adult gratification. It's the coaches and parents, who turn out in droves for the matches, who are driving this process, living their own competitive ambitions through their children, and their children who pay-- the football players at King now have to do year-round weight training. Isn't that great? Wow! What self-discipline and ambition and drive! Oh-- and maybe he'll do his homework too, but who the what cares?
Doesn't the New York Times care about the academic performance of this school? Of course it does. Then why this exuberant account of the success of big bad dudes crashing into each other? What does that have to do with the mission of a school, with the students' social lives, with poverty, with inadequate funding for the arts, with math and english and science and music and drama and poetry and history and philosophy?