Items of Interest, Has Edition

"The Free Press alone has 25% more paid subscribers than the Dallas Morning News."

Mario Naves, Postcard to Athens, 2022, acrylic on panel, courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Tevi Troy, Why Universities Target Jews. “The current situation facing some Jewish students on college campuses, and the Jewish reaction to these trends, evokes a disturbing historical parallel. Nations that have antagonized Jews, and have seen Jews flee in response, often were experiencing a deeper rot and corruption. History is littered with nations, from Imperial Spain to Czarist and then Soviet Russia to Nazi Germany, whose underlying problems were worsened by government-sponsored scapegoating and driving away of Jews. Persecution of the Jews did not always cause those nations’ decline, but it was a signal that it was coming.”

Albert-László Barabási, Why do some artists become famous?

Curtis Yarvin

, A techno-pessimist manifesto. “The deleterious effect of technology on human quality is seen all across the bell curve. Technology is harmful to elites because it eliminates the difficulty and danger of the ‘moral equivalents of war’ that are essential to the mature psychology of the normal human male. Technology is harmful to non-elites because it eliminates all the ways that they can be useful to themselves or others, and turns them into useless mouths.”

Kim Uchiyama, Beyond time: Brice Marden’s last paintings. “Marden’s lines feel like journeys undertaken deliberately and then reconsidered, slowly feeling out their parameters and then recursively turning back on themselves to revise prior movements. Nothing is lost in this accretion – all becomes part of the act of making.”

Lee Smith, The Global Empire of Palestine. “Łobaczewski… argued that what he called macrosocial evil is the function of pathologically evil individuals. They disguise their true ambitions for power, wealth, and notoriety behind ideology, using terms like ‘social justice’ which are vague enough to convey the righting of wrongs, to animate social movements united by grievance. Inside these movements, genuine psychopaths and those who adapt most easily to a pathological order rise to positions of power and influence. Evangelizing on behalf of deviant and destructive causes and desecrating, or criminalizing, what is true, beautiful, and natural, in turn lays waste to social structures, institutions, industries, entire nations.”

CSS Wrapped: 2023! “Now, every modern browser supports container queries, subgrid, the :has() selector,¹ and a whole plethora of new color spaces and functions. We have support in Chrome for CSS-only scroll-driven animations and smoothly animating between web views with view transitions. And to top it all off, there are so many new primitives that have landed for better developer experiences like CSS nesting and scoped styles.”

Alexander Adams

, Watery Terror: Ivan Aivazovsky and the Marine Sublime. “In 1842 J.M.W. Turner wrote a poem extolling Aivazovsky’s skill, preceding even the Armenian’s 1843 London exhibition.”

Michael Shellenberger, Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions. “It is true that life in the United States remains far from the worst of totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. But major institutions of cultural and political life are being led by people who not only hold pseudoscientific, racist, and irrational ideas, but also demand that those ideas be held and acted upon to the point of censoring, excluding, and punishing the pursuit of accurate, scientific knowledge, information, and policies in ways very similar to what past totalitarian regimes did, and to widespread cultural and political effect.”²

Helen Dale, Dissolve the Universities? “I live in a country that once had institutions many times richer (in relative terms) than Harvard, Penn, or MIT. And in four short years—1536 to 1540—all of them had passed into history. Attempts to revive them at the highest level less than 20 years later failed. I speak, of course, of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. As with the monasteries, if Harvard annoys the people of your country enough—especially your wealthy elites—then its 50-billion-dollar endowment will not save it.”

Marek Bennett

, Solstice Sketchbook. “Just a few sketches from a midwinter solstice meetup with Dissident Muser Franklin Einspruch ~ It’s good to gather & make art together during this dark pause between the years.”

Wilfred Reilly, Academic Bias and Censorship Are Huge Problems, and We Can Prove It. “It really does not matter why censors want to stop the dissemination of essential knowledge…. Actual Spanish Inquisitors were, quite probably, mostly deeply pious and conventionally ‘good’ men. But, most of them believed that the sun revolved around the Earth, and they simply had to be removed from the intellectual landscape of their era so that knowledge could truly flourish.”

Public

, It’s Time To Save Civilization From The Pathocratic State. “[I]ndependent publications like Public, Racket, and the Free Press are growing while legacy media publications fail. After losing $100 million this year alone, the Washington Post offered early retirement buy-outs, and many took them. The Los Angeles Times eliminated 74 newsroom positions this year, which is 13% of the total. It is unlikely that even the biggest names who have left the Washington Post will find much of an audience for their banal state propaganda on Substack. The Free Press alone has 25% more paid subscribers (75,000) than the Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, and New York Daily News.”

Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, Why We Must Defeat Censorship Culture. “Lukianoff points to polling showing people on the Left above a certain age (45 and older, and to a lesser degree, 30 and younger) are still strong on freedom of speech. Millennials, he laments, are ‘possibly kind of a lost cause.’ But among Gen Z, Rikki insists, there’s a feeling that something is wrong, that cancel culture is inhospitable to youth.”

Charles Lipson, Code red: DEI is in the ICU. “The rising resistance to affirmative action and race-based discrimination will have a crushing impact on DEI programs. It will reach well beyond universities to affect corporations, non-profits, and government agencies at the city, state and federal levels. All of them have similar programs. All are at risk.”

John Goodrich, Alley's Bay Parking Lot, Beals Island, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches, 2023, courtesy of the artist

On now: “John Goodrich, The Color's the Thing: Recent Paintings” at Bowery Gallery, through January 27.

Coming soon: “Mario Naves: Gratitude and Expectations,” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, January 6 - February 17.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

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.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard, to be published by Allworth Press on January 23. More information is available at the site for the book.

1. “For almost 20 years developers asked for a ‘parent selector’ in CSS. With the :has() selector that shipped in Chrome 105 this is now possible. For example, using .card:has(img.hero) will select the .card elements that have a hero image as a child.” Baruch HaShem, finally.

2. NB: “The final element of counter-Wokeism must be the creation of new institutions, including new universities, think tanks, and newspapers.”