Items of Interest, Anomalous Edition
"Free speech is not a divisible concept."
Digby Warde-Aldam, Why art biennales are (mostly) trash. “In practice, however, biennales are becoming increasingly homogenized — at least in Europe. In Malta, I got the sense that the organizers had visited the last couple of big biennial art exhibitions and used them as a template for how theirs should look. That the last handful I visited, in France, Germany and Liverpool, seemed almost identical to each other and indeed to this one, does not speak volumes for their wisdom.”
Brian T. Allen, Getty Says ‘Hands Off My Bronze,’ but the Court Sides with Grabby Italians. “Don’t back down . . . and don’t give it back. That’s my advice, Italian-style, to the Getty, which is facing calls from the European Court of Human Rights to return its priceless ancient Greek bronze sculpture to the Italians.”
The editors of Tablet, Not in Our Name. “Free speech is not a divisible concept. Either everyone is free to say what they want, no matter how noxious others find it, in order to create and sustain the free market of ideas—or else speech isn’t free.”
, There Are Two Sets of Rules for Speech. “The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.”Jason Garshfield, American Universities Are On A Death Spiral, And We Should Help Them Along. “An ideologically committed economic libertarian would oppose any public funding of higher education on principle. My sympathies are with this camp, but one does not even need to share this view to appreciate my argument. For those who take a more pragmatic approach, the question becomes a straightforward, if not always simple, one of cost versus benefit. And by any standard, the great universities of this nation no longer provide us anything like the sort of benefit we would expect for our collective investment.”
Michael Brennan, Ron Milewicz’s Thoreauvian sensibility. “His landscapes, all very finely painted, embody a kind of wisdom that comes from years of study and deeply internalized consideration. His lines are as finely woven as the strands of flax in the linen on which he sometimes paints.”
, We've memory-holed the madness of lockdown. “Viceroy is a single 13-minute shot featuring Kat Chamberlin mopping the floor with her daughter’s hair, while they were shuttered indoors during the Covid lockdowns. It is both troubling and mesmerising... The camera circles round and round the same wooden floor, over the same objects, which take on ever stranger and more unsettling intensity. By the end, watching it (coincidentally) in a Brooklyn hotel room, I felt a desperate need to go outside—just to reassure myself that I still could.”Lorenzo Tondo, Plato’s final hours recounted in scroll found in Vesuvius ash. “Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato – who was known as a disciple of Socrates and a mentor to Aristotle, and who died in Athens around 348BC – retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests.”
Jennifer Galardi, Winning the Culture Through Stories. “Those who stand firm in traditional values and mores will never gain ground in the culture wars until we manage to improve the craft that progressives have seemed to master. Conservatives may be armed with facts, stats, and policy, but we are low on ammunition when it comes to the art of inciting the passions within the world of entertainment and popular culture.”
C.J. Hopkins, Fighting Monsters. “We are all, by the time we realize we exist, the products of programming, ideological conditioning. I believe it is the job of artists to undo that, or at least to marginally interfere with it. That’s what art, and artists, did for me. They introduced me to my mind. My programmed mind. They forced me to think, and to see, and listen. They taught me to question, to pay attention. They dared me to deprogram my mind, and provided me with the tools to do it. OK, sure, some mind-altering drugs also helped, but it was artists that introduced me to those drugs. Then they introduced me to the monster I’ve been fighting.”
, Feuilleton 5: Notes on Canon. “The concept of ‘stuck culture’ is often said to be the result of artists and promoters not being willing to take risks; we are, it is claimed, living in an age hostile to the idea of artists taking chances and venturing into territory which might offend…. But without dismissing these explanations—and without discounting the complex ways that creators and artists have been hurt by the invasion of hyper-techno-capitalist practices and economic models into the arena of cultural production—I would like to propose that the ‘stuck culture’ phenomenon can also be considered as a problem of efficiency. Perhaps our culture-making engines are simply too efficient and that is what is causing culture to be stuck.”Scott Bunn, Anomalous.
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The next entry of the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel. For more information see the ASBC calendar.
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, B&N, or Goodreads.
Regarding the madness of lockdown, unless and until those responsible are made to answer for it, which seems highly unlikely, just talking about how bad it was will make little difference. And by the way, don't think that the perps are especially sorry, or that they'd never do such a thing again.