If you’ve come this far in your academic life, it would be a miracle indeed if
you didn’t know what a Reading Comprehension passage looked like—in fact, the
aforementioned Dick and Jane was probably your first taste of one
way back in elementary school. But there are still a few things worth pointing out
to get you acclimated to LSAT-style Reading Comp, so let’s take a quick tour through
the following passage to establish some terminology. Note that this is a standard
passage; three of the four Reading Comp question sets you see will be based on a
long passage like this. The other question set will accompany a pair of shorter
passages on the same topic, a format we’ll cover in a special section later in the
chapter. Don’t worry about reading the passage in depth or answering the questions
at this point—we guarantee you’ll get more than your fill of “Mumford on Art” before
long.
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Common to most interpretations of the role of art is the |
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notion that art correlates directly with the environmental |
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characteristics of its period of origin. If we understand |
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technology not only as a practical set of techniques and machines |
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but also as an evolving dominant ideology of the modern age, it |
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follows that we should witness an infiltration of technology into |
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art not just in terms of the tools and processes at artists’ |
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disposal but also in terms of technology’s influence on art’s |
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place within society. The latter supposition has been explored by |
| (10) |
American writer and critic Lewis Mumford during various stages of |
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his prolific career. |
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Mumford posited an integrative role of medieval art |
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corresponding to the unity of life characteristic of this |
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pre-technological period. Medieval citizens, he argued, did not |
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attend the theater, concert hall, and museum as activities unto |
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themselves as we do but rather witnessed a fusion of music, |
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painting, sculpture, architecture, and drama in unified religious |
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ceremonies that incorporated people into the shared social and |
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spiritual life of the community. Integral to this phenomenon was |
| (20) |
the non-repeatability of the experience—live musicians, specially |
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commissioned scores, unique paintings and sculptures, and |
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inimitable speakers filling incomparable cathedrals with |
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exhortation and prayer. Everything in the artist’s repertoire was |
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brought to bear to ensure maximum receptivity to the political, |
| (25) |
social, and religious teachings at the heart of this medieval |
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spectacle. |
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Mumford further speculated that the mass production of text |
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and images from the sixteenth century forward ultimately |
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disrupted the unity exemplified by the medieval experience, and |
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with it the role of art as a testament to and reinforcement of |
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that unity. He believed that modern communication technologies |
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encourage the fragmentation of time, the dissociation of event |
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and space, and the degradation of the symbolic environment via an |
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endless repetition of cultural elements. The result is the |
| (35) |
oft-commented-upon “alienating” experience of modern life. |
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A new aesthetic orientation emerged to express this new |
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reality. Art turned inward to focus on man’s struggle against a |
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bureaucratized, impersonal, technological civilization. Mumford |
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readily admits that the dissociation of the artist from communal |
| (40) |
obligations greatly expanded the realm of artistic possibilities; |
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freed from its integrative purpose, art was set loose to traverse |
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previously inappropriate realms of psychology and individualism |
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in startling new ways. However, the magnificent innovation born |
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of this freedom has been somewhat hindered by art’s |
| (45) |
apprenticeship to the dominant force of the technological milieu: |
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the market. Out of necessity, money has replaced muse as |
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motivation for many artists, resulting in the art world of today: |
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a collection of “industries,” each concerned with nothing loftier |
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than its own perpetuation. Mumford testified admirably to a unity |
| (50) |
of art greater than the sum of its parts. Despite modern art’s |
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potential, it is reasonable to infer the converse: that the |
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individual arts of our technological landscape are diminished in |
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isolation. |
The “passage,” of course, is the long, fairly complex story consisting of four
paragraphs. Notice the line numbers to the left of the paragraphs; these are
sometimes mentioned in the questions to direct your attention to a specific part of
the passage. As mentioned, passages are usually somewhere around 450 words in length
and usually contain three to five paragraphs, although you’ll occasionally come
across a passage with two.
The “question set” usually consists of five to eight multiple-choice questions
that follow the passage—in this case, questions 1–5. Unlike in Logical Reasoning,
where each question usually has its own passage, all the questions of a Reading Comp
set are based on the same passage. As in Logical Reasoning, each question contains
five choices, and we’ll discuss how to distinguish the correct choice from the
imposters.
Before moving on, let’s check in with the directions, so you’ll never have to
waste time with them again.
Notice the same caveat that we discovered in the Logical Reasoning directions:
the admission that some choices may seem pretty darn close, but only the
really, really right answer will get the point. Again, this
highlights just how close some of the wrong choices may sound, which makes it all
the more important to learn the subtle distinctions that set the credited choices
apart. We’ll get to all that shortly, but let’s begin at the beginning with the real
beasts of this section, the passages.
