Items of Interest, God Is in a Cloud Edition

"It is the Canon that questions, that controverts, that contradicts itself."

Elizabeth Johnson, Cemetery Balloons, oil on canvas, courtesy of Gross McCLeaf

Jonathan Anderson, Leaps of Faith. “In pursuing these various lines of inquiry, however, Masheck transgressed some affinities and commitments of his readership. Writing in 1993, thirteen years after leaving Artforum, he admitted that his ‘only real disappointment as editor was the cynical derision that met any religious reference,’ which was especially contemptuous in response to those articles.”

Corbin K. Barthold, Livelier Than You Are, Whoever You Are. “This is not a ‘diverse’ curriculum, desperately as some would like to call it that. On the contrary, it is a narrow, stunted, parochial one. You could say that College Prep has ‘decentered whiteness.’ But all the school has really ‘centered’ in its place is predictability and conformity. It is the Canon that questions, that controverts, that contradicts itself.”

Robert Busek, Robin DiAngelo Smears The Sistine Chapel Because She Wants To Destroy Western Civilization, Not ‘Antiracism’. “When I’m doing a presentation, I use a lot of images; you may be surprised that the single image I use to capture the concept of white supremacy is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. God creating man, you know, where God is in a cloud and there’s all these angels and he’s reaching out and he’s touching, I don’t know who that is, David or something, and God is white and David’s white and the angels are white, like that is the perfect convergence of white supremacy, patriarchy, right?”

John Thornton, Remembering Philadelphia’s More Gallery. “From the 1980’s through the turn of the millennium, the More Gallery was the best art gallery in Philadelphia. I had a teaching job a block away at a now defunct art school and would take students over there to see the consistently incredible exhibitions. And I’d always grab the show card, take it home, and throw it into a box. Eventually I bought a painting and the gallery started mailing me the cards. I started making movies about artists in 2009, years after the More Gallery closed. But as I look through my pile of cards, I feel compelled to share my memories of a place that deeply affected my visual imagination.”

Monica Harris

, Rediscovering the Meaning of Diversity: Lessons from Generation X. “For Gen Xers, who are now in their 40s and 50s, the state of race relations can seem mystifying. We were taught that everyone should be judged as unique individuals, irrespective of their immutable characteristics. Now we’re told that this kind of attitude is, itself, a form of racism. It’s as if we spent our youth climbing the mountain that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned the night before he was assassinated—then, just as the peak came into view, we tumbled backward. Quietly, we wonder: It seemed like we were heading in the right direction. What went wrong?”

Joshua T. Katz, A Tale of Two Statues. “Whatever you may think of the issues, it says something remarkable about the state of the country that a commemorative statue erected in this millennium and unveiled with no controversy whatsoever at a ceremony at which Princeton’s eighteenth and nineteenth presidents (Harold T. Shapiro and Shirley M. Tilghman) spoke should already be subject to the progressive juggernaut. It is impossible not to wonder who—and which artistic representation of whom—will be the next target.”

David Thunder, Censorship Literally Cannot Work. “The fact is, there is no expert class whose views automatically deserve preeminence and immunity from criticism. If we accepted that such a class existed, we would have to reject the dominant understanding of the scientific enterprise as the presentation of evidence-based hypotheses susceptible to public refutation and correction within the scientific community. For under a regime in which certain individuals can unilaterally censor what they deem ‘false or misleading’ information, the opinions of the censors are effectively shielded from public challenge, correction, or refutation by their peers. And this is the very antithesis of science and rational inquiry.”

Suzy Weiss, The Art World’s Enfant Terrible Runs for Senate. “Simchowitz says that one of his homes was recently robbed, twice, and that a homeless man used the entry area of one of his galleries as a toilet. He told me it reminds him of his childhood in South Africa.”

Opening soon: “Elizabeth Johnson: The Cost of Sleep,” at Gross McCleaf, March 7-30.

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