A FAIRly Important Announcement

A grant from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism will go toward founding the Dissident Museum.

David Curcio, Rodeo Clown (Bed Head w/ Valium), embroidery, 6.5 x 8 inches, 2023, courtesy of the artist (source)

The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism has announced the inaugural recipients of its FAIR in the Arts Grants, and I’m pleased to say that I’m among them. FAIR has accomplished important work to articulate alternatives to the CRT/DEI paradigm, so we can perfect a more just society while honoring the humanistic order.

The grant is to fund the first exhibition of the Dissident Museum, which will be an online¹ curatorial effort with an emphasis on artists who are undervalued in the current cultural environment. From my application:

I deliberately leave the details of the designation of “undervalued” open to account for the protean nature of the disapproval that emanates from the broader cultural environment, but the policy is meant to protect free expression, artistic autonomy, the valuation of art for its own sake, and creative accomplishment, from an art world that seems increasingly overrun with a political attitude that would absorb all other efforts into itself.² The Dissident Museum intends to feature a great variety of work, not only that which might be seen as transgressive in some way, but it will afford an opportunity for such work to be seen and contemplated in cases that it achieves an evident level of excellence, even if it would not be tolerated or deemed worthy by the field’s ideological guardians.

Said exhibition will be “David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.” It will feature the embroidered works of David Curcio, a Massachusetts-based artist and the author of Smash Hit: Race, Crime, and Culture in Boxing Films, published this past September.

This is a major milestone for Dissident Muse, presaged by the publication of its first book, Backseat Driver. It constitutes a pivot from cultural criticism to cultural production. I’ll continue at the former, but increasingly I’m going to be occupied with the latter, and Dissident Muse Journal will reflect the shifting emphasis. In the immediate term, I don’t think that I can keep up with current events and the art calendar while I’m promoting Aphorisms for Artists, working toward a solo exhibition later this spring (details to be announced), and educating myself on the technical stack that I’m engineering for the Dissident Museum.³ Longer term, much of what I criticize at DMJ would be best countered by ignoring it and doing something else.

I believe that I’ve made my case over the last couple of years that the institutions have developed blights, some of which will prove withering unto fatality. (If yesterday’s post doesn’t convince you of that, then nothing will.) While admirable people are trying to reform them, I’m more interested in producing the alternatives.

Too, if I’m correct about our being in the postcritical era of art, then there are not compelling reasons to continue to commit to criticism beyond my personal enjoyment of the form. Instead there’s a need to build art communities at a sufficiently reduced scale that values can be shared among their members. That’s where you come in, because Dissident Muse intends to be one of those communities. Its effect will be tiny, but it will be engaged with the real, which is its own reward. If you’re an artist, art writer, or curator and would like to be involved with Dissident Museum programming, please get in touch. If you’re not already a paid subscriber to Dissident Muse Journal, this is a good time to become one—it will in essence make you a patron of the Dissident Museum.

Thanks to everyone who supports Dissident Muse in any fashion. Good things are coming your way.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in. For future titles, see the ASBC schedule.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon or B&N.

1. And one day, perhaps, meatspace.

2. This is tricky, I realize, because all artists feel like they’re undervalued. Chuck Close felt undervalued, as he related to Wil S. Hylton in 2016, as if it were typical for semi-quadriplegic septuagenarians to receive so much female attention that you think your wheelchair is “some sort of funny babe magnet,” or for your paintings to fetch seven-digit sums. In addition to the grandiosity (to which I’m no exception), any artist can point to extant if not necessarily legitimate cultural reasons why his work is receiving less attention than it might. Bottom line, this is mostly going to be a judgment call on my part, but dedicated readers should have a sense of my priorities.

3. Which includes Rocket, Typescript, the Schema.org vocabulary, the International Image Interoperability Framework, and eventually, the InterPlanetary File System. A lot of people don’t realize that I hand-coded the content management system for Delicious Line from scratch in CherryPy, Javascript, PostGIS, and XSLT, with output tailored to Schema. In certain respects Delicious Line was a last gasp of a dying genre; in others it was years ahead of its time. As for why I’m not working in the programming field, see previous note about grandiosity.