Items of Interest, Discursivity Edition
"It’s always strange when life imitates art."
David Jager, The Jews of Venice. “Ruth Patir, Israel’s chosen artist, had wanted to present work that addressed her conflicted feelings surrounding the Oct. 7 attacks. In her videos, ancient regional fertility idols, many of them broken and fragmented, are brought to life through computer animation. They march through the streets, a surreal procession meant to signify grief, rage, and shattered motherhood. But her message was not welcome. According to ANGA, no Israeli artist can show art without being complicit in Israel’s military actions.”
Michael Prodger, X scandal. “Accounts vary, but it was either Picasso or Matisse who tracked it down and commented: ‘Here it is: the phallus!’ They merely confirmed what many visitors already thought. The police were called, [Brâncuși] was made to remove the piece ahead of a visit from the Prime Minister (‘You could not march the Minister past a pair of balls,’ as one of the organisers put it), and Princess X became a succès de scandale.”
Henry Mance and Harriet Agnew, After Baillie Gifford, who is ‘clean’ enough to fund the arts? “Activists managed to target an asset manager that invests much less in fossil fuels than most of its peers. They succeeded in reducing funding for literary festivals (not fossil fuels or arms companies). The whole arts sector is already struggling from years of public funding cuts, lacklustre philanthropy, cost inflation and Covid. If Baillie Gifford isn’t clean enough to fill the gap, who exactly is?”
Craig Simpson, Museum withheld images of African mask that ‘must not be seen by women’. “This effort to ensure that women do not see the mask follows a suite of policies aiming to ensure ‘cultural safety’ with regard to taboos around secret ceremonies, human remains, nudity and gender roles.”
, Below the Funk. “It’s always strange when life imitates art–a building decorated with flames and clouds of thunder snow eventually succumbs to the real disaster of being engulfed in fire. During the blaze a dispatcher claimed they overheard someone on the scanner shouting ‘you can’t put a price tag on the Old Pink Flamingo.’”Alan Jacobs, Yesterday’s Men. “The assurance with which [Northrop] Frye announced these and many other correspondences granted him an aura of authority that many readers found irresistible. And such authority was much coveted by humanists who felt outclassed (and greatly out-funded) by the scientists and engineers who had recently won the Allies the war. Frye had become a founder of discursivity, the leading humanist scholar of his time. His belated Viconianism ruled the day—until it didn’t.”
Clifford Asness, Capitalism Is the Real Target. “It is obviously not Arab civilian deaths motivating the protesters; they are happy to ignore those in Syria, Iraq, and most anywhere else noncombatants are being slaughtered…. The root cause is the far left’s worship of failure and a concomitant hatred of success and merit—an anti-free-enterprise, anti-Western, anti-progress, anti-prosperity dogma married to a love of power and control regardless of the consequent deprivation and despair that always follow when such ideas achieve control of societies. It’s a civilizational autoimmune disorder, in which healthy organs are attacked as if they are foreign objects or threats (and in which cancer is intentionally nourished).”
Francesca Aton, New York’s Center for Italian Modern Art Is Permanently Closing Its Doors.
Theo Farrant, Pompeii archaeologists uncover incredibly rare blue room with stunning frescoes of female figures. “The stunning blue-ground walls are decorated with female figures representing the four seasons and allegorical representations of agriculture and pastoralism, according to experts.”
Mark Shanahan, ‘It’s torn our community apart’: Rift deepens over Portland Museum of Art expansion plan. “Maine State Historian Earle Shettleworth… believes the museum invented a phony argument to get what it wanted.”
Jim Geraghty, The Modern Creative Class Isn’t That Creative. “I’d argue that when characters are created with ‘representation’ in mind, they’re just about destined to be boring because they aren’t allowed to be too flawed. If, for example, you make your television series’ first and usually only gay character a kleptomaniac, someone out there will loudly complain that your series is portraying gays as kleptomaniacs.”
, Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul. “Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t.”Blake Smith, Why the Western Rebellion Against the Jews Produces Bad Art and Bad Politics. “Our contemporary challenge, Kristeva argued, is to learn to transgress rightly, tactically, unsystematically—and to know how and when, having broken taboos, told shocking truths, and overcome the rule-bound torpor of hypocritical do-good-ery, to reassume our responsibilities to each other in a common world. Whenever we fail in either direction, by clutching at deadening norms or thrashing too unthinkingly against them, we risk, in her account, not only making bad art or doing bad politics, but falling into the murderous antisemitism that she found at the heart of Western culture’s fraught relationship to every either/or, every binary whose tensions we lack the strength to bear.”
N. S. Lyons, The Foundation of American Folly. “The Ford Foundation’s history of funding radical, even openly violent, racial identitarian groups extends back far earlier than the 2010s. One could even say that the foundation helped invent American identity politics as we know it today.”
Julia Friedman, The Perfect Trifecta. “Over the last month, three apparently unrelated events have demonstrated that art featuring female nudity will get noticed regardless of its aesthetic bona fides or authorship. It does not matter if it comes from a prankster who stages ambush interviews for social-media consumption, a feminist whose earnest work is displayed in museums, or an OnlyFans model hijacking a public interactive installation. They all attracted plenty of attention across mainstream, independent, and social media, because female nudity (who knew?) is a highly effective attention amplifier.”
Eric W. Dolan, Neurocognitive study shows how negative biographical details influence art perceptions. “Recent research has revealed that learning negative information about an artist can change how we perceive their artwork, both emotionally and cognitively. Regardless of how famous the artist is, negative biographical details affect our emotional responses, aesthetic judgments, and even the neural processing involved in viewing their work.”
Wyant College of Optical Science at the University of Arizona, Diffractive Chocolate. “Turn ordinary chocolate into an edible optics demo that shows how diffraction works.”
Available: The Bridge, a limited-edition hand-colored print by Nick Lamia.
Starts tomorrow: “Jill Nathanson: Chord Field” at Berry Campbell Gallery.
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I more and more frequently wonder if the "arts" wouldn't be far better off if all public funding were ended. Perhaps, rather than wringing our hands at a decline in funding, we should celebrate. Name any significant art more than 50 years old that could attribute its success to public money.
And of course I can't avoid noting the utter disaster that has become "art" in the last half century. Shutter the museums (while returning all the stolen loot to respective countries), disband the "art" councils in every state and lay off the staff of all art-related nonprofits! And for good measure, close every university art department. When the smoke clears, Art may thrive once again.
Academia neither wants nor intends to reform significantly, though it might deign to fake it better for cosmetic purposes. It is, simply, corrupted, or rather perverted, and the matter is both wide and deep. Of course, delusions of both intellectual and moral superiority and presumed entitlement do not help.