Items of Interest, Eternal Dissident Edition
"The problem is the transition, not the destination."
Charles C.W. Cooke, The White House Has Never Had the Power to Police Speech. “The First Amendment’s protection of the progenitors of ‘misinformation’ is not an esoteric loophole or a marginal technicality or the remnant of a bygone era. It is not vestigial, or contingent, or the product of a quirky mistranslation. It is one of the foundations of our society.”
Frances Brent, Zoya Cherkassky, Hero-Tyrant. “The missile fire, in fact, afforded no problem, though it was fitting backdrop for the fireworks often aroused by Zoya, whom Haaretz called ‘Israel’s eternal dissident.’ Her recent show, The Arrival of Foreign Professionals, which ran from April 8 through June 3 at the Fort Gansevoort Gallery in New York, is combative and tender, humorous and accusative, piercingly observant and masterfully composed.”
Katherine Kornei, Why Miró’s Yellows Have Lost Their Brilliance. “[S]ix samples — from the degraded paintings, the palettes and the tube of Cadmium Yellow Lemon No.1 by Lucien Lefebvre-Foinet — all exhibited poor crystallinity, the team found. That means that the cadmium and sulfur atoms aren’t perfectly interlocked in their usual hexagonal arrangement, said Daniela Comelli, a materials scientist at the Polytechnic University of Milan and a member of the research team.”
, Anarcho-Capitalism Isn't Crazy, Just Ahead of Its Time. “If you claim that anarcho-capitalism would be a complete disaster for humanity if were tried today, I agree. But the problem isn’t that anarcho-capitalism fails to provide good incentives, or that the system ‘logically’ collapses in gang warfare. The problem is expectations. Moving from stable democracy to stable anarcho-capitalism is like moving from stable dictatorship to stable democracy. Shifting expectations is very hard; but the problem is the transition, not the destination.”, Welcome to The Eternally Radical Idea! “Free speech, although many of us are lucky enough to have grown up in a time in which its value was largely taken for granted, is a deeply counterintuitive idea from the point of view of most of human history. It will be opposed by the forces of conformity, and it rubs up against the censorial inclinations of human nature from now until the end of human civilization. That’s why it must be fought for and explained with each new generation.” , David Jones, Distributism & the Benedictine Option. “There are many instances of vanguard artists stepping out of civilisation into the primitive. Be it Gauguin and Laval in Martinique, Picasso in Gósol, Matisse in Tahiti, Pechstein in Palau or a dozen others artists, we can recall modern European men going to the well of barbarous backwardness in order to drink of its invigorating water, only to discover it tainted by colonial microbes – the religion, clothing, education, laws, consumer goods and other appurtenances of the West. An associated practice is going to a less developed part of one’s own country to immerse oneself in the simple life. Gauguin and Denis treated Pont Aven as their artless backwater, where the girls still danced in traditional bonnets and no one read the Paris papers.” Willis, Being Woke Was Awful For Me. “People in Boston are crazy.”1Michael Prodger, Aryan Idol. “If you ask me which woman in the history of art I would go out to dinner and spend an evening with, the first would be Uta from Naumburg Cathedral.”
, Goth music for happy kids: a dreampop primer. “Who wouldn’t want to bathe themselves in the glorious jangly guitars and multilayered crooning of the best dreampop tracks? For those adventurous enough to give the genre a try, much good quality music awaits.”Out now: David Curcio, Smash Hit: Race, Crime, and Culture in Boxing Films.
Opening soon: “Object Matter: A Philanthropic Exhibition Benefiting the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts,” October 7—November 26, 2023, curated by Scott Bennett, catalog essay by Alex Grimley, at Caldwell Gallery Hudson. Featuring Stephen Achimore, Bob Alexander, Charity Baker, len bellinger, Scott Bennett, Berrisford Boothe, Mary Breneman, Paula De Luccia, Camilla Fallon, Martin Hoogasian, Darryl Hughto, Barry Katz, Jeffrey Kurland, Noah Landfield, Ronnie Landfield, Joel Longenecker, Jodie Manasevit, Mark Milroy, Lauren Olitski, Rebecca Purdum, Mark Raush, Susan Roth, Sarah Sands, Sandi Slone, Elizabeth Snelling (above), Kate Stewart, Francine Tint, Ann Walsh, and James Walsh.
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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.
Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.
This is around 36:10.
Thanks Franklin! Honored
Though we'd need a translator, the woman artist from history I'd most like to have dinner with was less a visual artist than musician: Hildegard von Bingen. She wrote and composed 100s of songs and compositions, was the abbess of the convent, and frequently challenged the conservative leadership in the Vatican.