Items of Interest, Founder's Weekend Edition
"For gardeners, therefore, grown institutions are, on the whole, more effective and held in higher esteem than invented ones."
Richard Whittaker, City Arts Funding Skipped Established Arts Organizations. Will They Survive? “Arts groups, most of whom could not afford professional grant writers, were fighting with an unclear rubric and no guidance on the scoring matrix, especially when it came to diversity. Groups with a majority of members from historically underserved ethnic or racial groups got full marks; those focusing on LGBTQ or disability issues, half marks; and groups that lacked sufficient diversity got a zero. However, that was never made clear to the applicants.”
Gregory Conti, A More Practical Argument for Free Speech. “When we debate the desirability of free speech, we should keep in mind what we’re comparing free speech to. And what we are comparing it to, if we do not accept the utopian indulgences of would-be censors, is a predictably malignant culture.”
Liel Leibovitz, Radical Ick. “I consider myself a deeply conservative person, and I am a practicing Jew. Yet I’ve long admired the soixante-huitards, the spirited young Marxists who, in May of 1968, launched Paris into turmoil to protest capitalism, consumerism, and imperialism… I wondered, is my warm regard for one generation of radical and hostile rejects a mere aesthetic preference?”
The Brooklyn Eagle, 3 charged with hate crimes for defacing, vandalizing homes of Brooklyn Museum execs. “Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced on Monday that a woman and two men were named in a 25-count indictment in which they are charged in connection with anti-Semitic incidents in Brooklyn Heights and Boerum Hill and in Lenox Hill in Manhattan. The defendants allegedly targeted members of the Brooklyn Museum’s board of directors who have Jewish-sounding names and did not target two board members who do not have Jewish-sounding names.”
Brian Lee Crowley, Why We Need Gardeners. “Those who think of society more as a garden than a machine might be called ‘gardeners.’ They see humans as autonomous beings whose choices and actions allow the unfurling of their character over time, not as dials to be twiddled. For gardeners, therefore, grown institutions are, on the whole, more effective and held in higher esteem than invented ones. Gardeners in nature are mindful of the fact that while they certainly wish to put their stamp on their garden, they are very far indeed from being in total control.”
, The preservation of fire. “The significance of this major memorial (commissioned only a few years after the 2020 riots and targeted iconoclasm) was not lost upon attendees, some of whom had publicly campaigned for preservation of public statuary. Not least, Howard himself had declared himself in favour of retaining existing monuments. Now his own contribution is ready to find its home in the national capital, surrounded by august and iconic monuments.”Katya Kazakina, The L.A. Art Scene Was Booming. Why Are Galleries Suddenly Closing? “Stefan Simchowitz, who closed his four spaces and consolidated everything on a private campus in Pasadena, said he estimates that top-tier galleries are seeing a 25-percent drop in revenue; on average, it’s a 35-to-40-percent decline, and the really weak players are down 50 to 70 percent.”
David Lewis Schaefer, A Prudent First Amendment. “Jonathan Turley’s The Indispensable Right comes as a breath of fresh air. Without denying the indisputable fact that social media platforms have magnified the spread of false information and lunatic conspiracy theories, Turley echoes the traditional, liberal view that the best, if not the only, remedy for it is the freedom to provide true information, without supervision from any ‘referees.’”
Alex Grimley, Francine Tint: In Dialogue With Helen Frankenthaler. “While Frankenthaler often made pictorial allusions to landscape, as in the woodcut Japanese Maple (2005) included here, Tint’s paintings offer a more oblique engagement with the natural world. Color and light—or color as light, more specifically—are primary subjects of her work. In Airlift (2024), a painting remarkable for its clarity and lucidity, a streak of radiant orange, as bright as the raw canvas surrounding it, seems to materialize from the surface itself, casting its immersive glow upon the other colors in proximity.”
Louise Perry, Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button. “Modernity may be inherently self-limiting, not because of its destructive effects on the natural world, but because it eventually trips a self-destruct trigger. If modern people will not reproduce themselves, then modernity cannot last. One way or another, we’re going to return to a much older way of living.”
Pierre d’Alancaisez, The end of art critics. “Who, then, dares to believe that some works of art are better than others? There is a vast space for critique between the Kantian, disinterested judgment embodied by Greenberg, the contradiction-seeking Adornian negative dialectics championed by Rosalind Krauss, and the Derridean, deconstructionist approach practised by artist-critics like Donald Judd. Yet when Camille Paglia tried to reanimate critique with a dose of Nietzschean judgment in her sweeping art historical journey in Glittering Images of 2012, her fellow critics weren’t having it.”
Ending soon: “Bill Scott: Two Decades” through Saturday at Hollis Taggart.
Starting soon: “Ying Li: Weather Report,” November 15 - December 21 at Gross McCleaf Gallery.
This weekend is Founder’s Weekend in Philadelphia. My panel this evening is full but other events this weekend are still open. Hope to see you there. The ASBC reading of Art Can Help will be delayed somewhat due to the excitement.
Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.
Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art Can Help by Robert Adams. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
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.
As for art critics, the key issue is not professional ones. What matters most is that all who care about art be their own critic, always and without fail, based on personal taste, understanding and judgment. People who need to be told what art to like and why they should like it are not only missing the point but probably wasting their time. They should pursue something they can connect with directly.
I don't believe in "belonging" to any party. I don't identify as a member of any party. To me, politics is basically voting for or otherwise supporting the lesser evil, or the most rational choice. In other words, it's about going with what makes the most sense to me in the relevant circumstances.