William Deresiewicz, On Not Drinking the Kool-Aid. “Wokeness flattens art, and it seeks to flatten our response to art. It wants us all to have the same response to any given work: outrage or disgust or solidarity or revolutionary fervor, as the case may be. Woke art (any art, under the aegis of wokeness) is not, in that sense, art at all.”
Julia Friedman, Poetic Justice: How an octogenarian artist defied curatorial bureaucracy. “Having accused an 85-year-old survivor of a Japanese internment camp of hate speech, the curators’ ensuing scramble to save face was tragicomic. Matt Stromberg’s comprehensive account of the exchanges between the Biennial curators, museum staff, the artist’s studio and his dealers reconstructs the drama that played out between the September 12th rejection and the opening of the Biennial two weeks later. Stromberg recounts the predictable shifting of blame between museum administrators and exhibition curators, the bid to secure a different work by Sakoguchi (declined), the attempts to go behind his back to obtain work from his dealers (unsuccessful), and finally a groveling email imploring the artist to re-enter the offending painting into the exhibition (denied).”
Blake Smith, The Freedom to Think Differently. “Shklar’s concept of ‘permanent minorities’ who understand themselves as such and therefore support liberalism to ensure genuine diversity represents the hope that Hobbes might be wrong. In a democracy tempered by not only by liberalism’s commitment to individual rights, but by certain liberals’ understanding that these rights are only meaningful in a society where a range of viewpoints and lifestyles are actually on offer, there might be a way to escape having to think of oneself as a member of a shrinking or growing racial or political bloc.”
Sapir Journal has devoted an entire issue to cancel culture.
Pat Lipsky, A Good Painter... for a Woman. “Meanwhile, fully clothed, I kept painting abstract canvases in my Wooster Street loft, not only ignoring what was going over in galleries and art magazines but also what Susan Sontag had called for, ‘an erotics of art.’”
Barry Schwabsky, Norman Bluhm. “An exhibition featuring half a dozen of Bluhm’s chromatically rich paintings, made between 1975 and 1978, might have caused a present-day viewer to wonder just why Bluhm became an outcast.”
RIP George Fifield.
Christopher F. Rufo, The “Stochastic Terror” Lie. “Conservatives and old-line liberals who still care about civil liberties must expose the scheme and work to dismantle the apparatus that supports it. The line of argument is simple: speech is not violence; statistical abstraction is not a substitute for evidence; and free-association fantasies cannot determine guilt.”
Nearly a hundred “deeply shaken” museum directors sign a statement regarding “several attacks on works of art in international museum collections” in “recent weeks” and publish it at the site of the International Council of Museums.
Elizabeth Amato, Bored Out of Our Minds. “Boredom, Gary argues, is a painful condition that has something to teach us if we will attend to it. The key to coping with boredom is to practice leisure so that we may confront boredom at its source—within ourselves rather than our environments. The good news is that we can change how we respond to boredom in meaningful ways. The immediate problem, however, is that the ways in which we have been taught to cope with boredom conceal from us the extent of our despair.”
Dana Gordon, Ab Ex lives. “Light glows from these paintings, and their wide expanses of dominant color grasp the viewer’s attention. But soon, broad and unfettered brushstrokes emerge as the most salient quality of Tint’s art. And what these brushstrokes—which are at once very wide lines and independent linear shapes—add up to is structure. Sturdy structure forms the heart of these paintings, but not just sturdy structure—exclamatory structure. The physical and emotional freedom of her brushstroke carries passion. The structure is the heart, the light and color are the soul, and the passion is the blood pulsing through it all.”
Brett Baker of Painter’s Table will soon have an exhibition at Elizabeth Harris. The catalogue essay by the painter is brilliant: “To aim for a more complete expression of reality is not at odds with abstraction. Reality in abstract painting exists where what is seen impacts the body physically, where space visually navigated can be felt.”
Items of Interest, Freedom to Think Differently Edition
"What Susan Sontag had called for." As if. Good for Lipsky. One can't stop such pronouncements from such quarters, but one can certainly ignore them, not to mention sneer at them. Still, one would think a card-carrying intellectual would have had greater self-awareness--what some people call modesty.