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I read this evening that M.I.T. is suing Frank Gehry over a building on their campus called the Stata Center. One of my favorite television programs, This Old House, profiled the cartoonish complex during last season’s East Boston project. I remember thinking at the time, “this place is bizarre and inconvenient”, with office supplies falling behind file cabinets that didn’t touch the slanted walls.

The suit alleges that the Stata Center is plagued by drainage problems and dangerous accumulations of snow and ice. Forgive my ignorance, but doesn’t the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have any engineers?

It serves them right as far as I am concerned. Walt Disney Concert Hall has received good reviews from people I know, and its design is certainly distinctive, as are many of Frank Gehry’s other museums and public spaces, but he seems to me to be marketing novelty over utility with many of his inhabited structures, to wit, the “Dancing House” in Prague and the Gehry Tower in Hannover. I hope the judge in this case laughs in the faces of M.I.T.’s lawyers and dismisses the suit. They should have known better.

If you’ve been wracking your brain lately trying to determine just what is the stupidest idea ever, wrack no more, for I have found it. It it summarized in Daniel Levitin’s October 26 New York Times op-ed entitled “Dancing in the Seats”.

Music can be a more satisfying cerebral experience if we let it move us physically. When we hear a chord we like in works by Sibelius or Mahler, our brains want to shout out “Yeah!” When an orchestra builds the timbral mass in Ravel’s Bolero, we want to break out of our seats and dance and show how good it feels. Stand up, sit down, shout, let it all out. As the managers of Lincoln Center contemplate renovations, I say rip out some of the seats and give us room to move.

Yes, Mr. Levitin’s thesis is that music, since the dawn of time has been inextricably linked with dance and jubilation, ergo, it seems unnatural to sit quietly with our hands crossed while listening to classical music in concert. “Most of us would be shocked if audience members at a symphony concert got out of their chairs and clapped their hands, whooped, hollered and danced — as people would at a Ludacris concert. But the reaction we have to Ludacris or U2 is closer to our true nature”, writes Mr. Levitin, seemingly with surprise. Defecation is closer to my true nature, so would that make it okay at a concert?

Mr. Levitin’s op-ed is littered with so many illogical statements it is astonishing that it was published in a major newspaper. His entire irrational argument, however, seems to be rooted in one faulty premise:

Music and dance have also always been a communal activity, something that everyone participated in. The thought of a musical concert in which a class of professionals performed for a quiet audience was virtually unknown throughout our species’ history.

That may be so, but novels and chess and open-heart surgery were virtually unknown throughout our species’ history. That doesn’t mean that the societal conventions that we have established vis à vis those activities are invalid. Cavemen painted pictures at Lascaux in the Paleolithic era, 16,000 years ago. It wasn’t until relatively recently that we hung paintings in public museums. Does that mean we should allow children to take crayons to the walls of the Uffizi? Of course not.

The facts are these: there are some activities for which our culture has prescribed standards of acceptable behavior; classical music is an inherently cerebral art which often requires considered attention be paid in order to appreciate its subtleties.

There is an overwhelming body of music that has been written with the expressed intent of inspiring dance. Enjoy it in whatever way makes you happy. But Sibelius and Mahler–just to cite Mr. Levitin’s examples–didn’t write dance music. Even Ravel’s Bolero–even Ravel’s La Valse–were composed as concert music, to be listened to by an audience seated quietly in chairs, tapping a foot, perhaps. Those gentlemen never imagined that people would one day be able to enjoy recordings in their own homes. For you dancing, hooting-types, shout your hearts out in privacy. But when you’re at a concert, keep still and shut the hell up.

Saturday morning Mrs. Hill and I awoke before dawn and sleepily drove ourselves downtown to stand in line for the fall Friends of the Alachua County Library book sale. Twice a year the FOL hold this sale in their big warehouse on Main Street to raise money for the public library and get rid of the thousands of donated books. It’s such a big deal that people come from far and wide, especially collectors and dealers who intend to resell what they buy. It has been over a year since I braved the FOL sale, since other commitments prevented me from attending. But this year the sale fell on a Saturday after payday, and so it was that we were in line by seven o’clock in the morning.

Our goal was to be in front of the guys who grab all the CDs regardless of title or artist, solely to resell elsewhere. That turned out not to be an issue this time, however, since these fellows failed to materialize at all, and, in any case, there were no legitimate classical music CDs save one EMI disc of Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Mahler Symphony No. 9. I purchased it.

I also purchased several art books, including one of the Uffizi Gallery, which Miriam and I toured in 2001 in Florence. I also got something I had been wanting for a long time, a book of Klimt. One of the music-related books I got is very interesting: a dictionary of musical themes, in which countless pieces of classical music are broken down into their various motifs, written in notation. That will be very helpful. We also got scads more of the great travel guides published by DK. They are generally over $20 new, but they are all $5 or less at the FOL sale, which still makes them among the more expensive titles there. Most hardcover books are priced below $2.50.

Miriam had her eye on several paintings in the poster and print tent, all of which, it turns out, were painted by the same fellow. Everyone that passed the tent before the sale opened remarked about them, particularly one featuring a devil and two goats, and another with a beehive. It seemed certain that these would be the first to go, especially when there was one man who was really talking them up to his friends and family. But what baby wants, baby gets, and, indeed, Miriam walked out with those four pictures, which now await suitable wall space to be hung.

The check-out line had grown astonishingly long by ten o’clock, and my arms were near broken from carrying such a heavy box of books. But we made it out of there with our booty, and I went off to work.

I am as sympathetic to the suffering of others as anyone, and I certainly don’t begrudge people their right to due process under law. That said, however, I am increasingly annoyed and displeased to read about claims on looted art by descendants of former owners.

This issue really came to my attention in a profound way several years ago when someone came forward with a claim that they were the rightful owner of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a stunning painting by Gustav Klimt, and one of Austria’s greatest visual treasures. The claimant, Maria Altmann, was the niece of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Viennese family who owned four other Klimt masterpieces: Adele Bloch-Bauer II, Apfelbaum I, Birkenwald, and Häuser in Unterach am Attersee. Altmann sued in the United States, where her case against Austria went all the way to the Supreme Court. She won, and Austria turned over the paintings, which, naturally, she sold, splitting up a priceless collection that had been the pride of the Schloss Belvedere. Adele Bloch-Bauer I was sold for an estimated $135 million and placed in the Neue Gallerie in New York. The rest sold at auction to anonymous bidders, and, in spite of Ms. Altmann’s hilariously insincere wish that the paintings remain on public display, they are now stashed away in private hands.

So I read this morning that heirs of a prominent Dutch art dealer are now claiming ownership of 225 paintings and two tapestries by Dutch, Flemish and Italian artists now hanging in museums in the Netherlands.

I do not deny that World War II wrought countless injustices, and that Nazi scum looted many works of art which now reside in public galleries throughout the world, though mostly in Europe. But should we draw the line somewhere for those claiming ownership of irreplaceable treasures? The war ended over 60 years ago, and these works of art have been on public display for generations now. When you consider that what those making claims really want is money, I find it hard to be sympathetic. They are not seeking the restitution of some family heirloom. The governments and museums who now posses this disputed art should investigate these claims, and, if it is deemed prudent, they should pay a fair sum of money to the claimants. But masterpieces of art belong to humanity, and that works now hanging in museums for all to enjoy might end up on the wall of some crooked Russian billionaire, or crazy Japanese businessman, is a notion that should offend anyone who loves that which is beautiful.

On Thursday’s edition of All Things Considered, Nate DiMeo addressed an issue that has been bothering me for years, namely the dearth of fine arts programming on television. He specifically refers to A&E and Bravo, two networks that were once devoted to ballet, classical music, opera and the visual arts. I can distinctly recall watching a complete Carmen on Bravo, and DiMeo mentions a Bernstein-conducted Fidelio in prime-time on A&E.

But that was then. “A&E” used to stand for “Arts and Entertainment”, but I noticed a while ago that they have modified that to “The Art of Entertainment”. “Breakfast with the Arts” is history, and their nightly installments of Biography are a thing of the past, though, even before they disappeared altogether they had shifted exclusively to portraits of celebrities. With the rise of “reality” television, both of those networks–as well as TLC, Discovery and others–reverted to pointless, inexpensively-produced garbage.

What I find a little hard to believe about DiMeo’s report is the idea that fine arts programming was a victim of its own success. I am not saying that nobody watches the more intellectually-challenging fare, but if something is going right, it seems unlikely that a TV network would change it. Now, if the argument is that these shows were more expensive to produce, and, thus, didn’t generate as good a return on the investment, well, I’d believe that. The Metropolitan Opera is apparently having considerable success with their high-definition simulcasts in movie theaters. But I’d be interested in seeing how many are tuning in to the telecasts on PBS. For that matter, I’d love to see how many people are watching any of PBS’ wonderful edutainment. I have a feeling I’d be disappointed.

Meanwhile, cable networks continue to move toward nearly identical programming. Look through your program guide and you’ll see the same movies over and over again on several channels. Even The History Channel is showing movies that you could see any night on TNT or TBS. We used to have the luxury of two commercial-free classic movie channels, but AMC sold out. I think the trend is for television networks to abandon their original focus in favor of the cheap and common. That’s bad news for fine arts programming.

Meanwhile, it should come as no surprise that the two channels I know that do broadcast serious music and programs related to the visual arts, Ovation and Classic Arts Showcase, are nowhere to be found on the Cox Cable lineup.