Items of Interest, Germanic Berserker Edition
"No one standing before Duchamp’s urinal feels overwhelmed with emotion."
Sean Tatol, Gimmicks of Future Past. “An artist’s subjectivity is built, not granted, and that discrete process of development doesn’t need to be groundbreaking or anachronistic; it only has to find articulation within its own context.”
and , Scenes From The Literary Blacklist. “[W]e interviewed over a dozen writers whose work had been retracted for a variety of offenses—personal, political, perceived, and fabricated whole-cloth. Their editors, unable to countenance online outrage, alternately chose to A) rewrite the offending language, or B) “unpublish” the piece, with either minimal commentary or extravagant, self-flagellating apologies.”Catalina Gaitán, Wing Luke Museum executive director resigns months after staff walkout. “Some employees took issue with a panel from the Jewish Historical Society which started by saying, ‘Today, antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism,’ and said ‘pro-Palestinian groups have voiced support for Hamas’ on university campuses.”
Charles Hayward via
, The Will and the Deed. “It looks as though to-day we are at the beginning of a new era. Values are shifting and changing, in many ways coming nearer to an ancient order of things than once we would have thought possible. Work in farm and field has become once more of prime importance, so has the skill of the technician, the man with the trained hands. We are being compelled to live more realistically, to see money as of less importance than things, a token of barter of little worth unless there are the goods available for barter. We may feel indeed that the time is ripe for the revival of craftsmanship, for the craftsman can only be truly valued when things are truly valued, and when productive, creative work is put first in the scheme of things.”Shai Goldman, Tale of Two Academies. “I recall my surprise when, as we studied Rembrandt, our assigned readings focused on exploring how the Dutch master benefited from his homeland’s colonialist ambitions. At every possible juncture, the great thinkers and artists of our syllabi were put on trial, and they were always convicted.”
, The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty. “No one standing before Duchamp’s urinal feels overwhelmed with emotion because that moment alone has imbued their life with meaning. But of course, Duchamp never meant it to—he said that he made anti-art ‘based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste… in fact a complete anaesthesia.’ Because even a talentless hack can easily select a random object that is visually indifferent, Duchamp thereby eliminated the need for artists. He was ‘stripping each human entity of its distinctness and autonomy and turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and no judgment of its own,’ as Hoffer puts it. If Frankl had shared Duchamp’s indifference to beauty, then he would have probably died in the camps.”M.J. Koch, My French Teacher Was Beloved for 25 Years. Then She Was Asked About Hijabs. “‘I never thought that I would pay such a high price for practicing and teaching the skill of free and responsible expression and independence of mind at a school that I picked for its open-mindedness twenty-five years ago,’ Protopappas told me. ‘I have done nothing but serve this school.’”
J.D. Tuccille, Writers and Academics Applaud Brazil's Censorship in Open Letter. “It's not that it's surprising to see intellectuals endorse authoritarianism—many do so, more often than not. But it's disappointing to see their ranks include prominent individuals, including one who has a reputation as a civil libertarian.”
Brian Boucher, Philadelphia’s UArts Files for Bankruptcy After Sudden Closure. “The school’s closure came after the disastrous closings of other art schools, or at least their significant diminishments. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) will cease its degree-granting programs at the end of the 2024–25 academic year. (Ironically, UArts had planned to take on some former PAFA students.) In 2024, the 150-year-old San Francisco Art Institute filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The Vermont College of Fine Arts, Memphis College of Art, and the nationwide network of Art Institutes have also closed in recent years.”
Rachel Shalev, The Illustrated Hostage Diary of Amit Soussana. “Released after 55 days in captivity in Gaza, she tells the story of her beatings, torture, and sexual assault.”
Joel Kotkin, The Coming Strangulation of Free Speech. “[S]imilarly-minded progressives increasingly control what happens in our museums, while woke censors proliferate at large publishing firms on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps more remarkable, the journalistic profession itself, particularly at the elite level, largely follows a single orthodoxy that often defines its output. Although even in the past most reporters were not conservatives, the tilt today is extreme. By 2018, barely 7% of U.S. reporters identified as Republicans, and some 97% of all political donations from journalists went to Democrats.”
Joe Nocera, University Cancels Panel Because Author Is a ‘Zionist’. “The writer James Kirchick sounded the alarm bells on this trend back in May with an opinion column for The New York Times entitled ‘A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing.’ Kirchick wrote: ‘Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.’ He went on to list numerous examples.”
, Legends of the Fall. “Adolf Hitler was born in 1889. That same year, the German artist Franz von Stuck produced a painting of Wotan leading his wild hunt. Astride a black beast, wielding a sword, and trailed by what looks for all the world like a legion of mutilated corpses, the Germanic berserker rages across the sky. When we look at the painting now, we find that the god’s face looks strangely… familiar.”Out now: Craxton’s Cats by Andrew Lambirth. “An appealing picture book of cats depicted by John Craxton, one of the major figures of modern British painting, with an introduction and commentary by Andrew Lambirth, who knew Craxton well.”1
On now: “Ying Li: Weather Report” at Haverford College through October 11.
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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia” is an online exhibition representing the physical one in New York in June 2024.
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.
Someone, please buy me this book.
Sir you astonish me ~
How do you keep up with all these items? 😲🌪
"The Will And The Deed" could describe the aims of the William Morris circle or those of the albeit lesser informed late '60s/early '70s USA. Much came from the former. Not much from the latter. Both were short-lived. Both were reactionary. The former was beaten by manufacture, the latter by the march of fashion. They both missed the purest reason to make art: personal delectation. Philadelphia's UARTS... Good. Any more, art school is mostly fraudulent. Sandbox for borguois kids with daddy's (or your) money. You can learn art but you can't teach art. You can teach or impart certain kinds of seeing. I didn't comment on the other items because we already know how awful everything is.