Items of Interest, I'll Just Leave This Here Edition
Items of Interest, I'll Just Leave This Here Edition
"Don’t you have to at least show up at your office and pretend to work?"
Paul du Quenoy, Mountaineer Blues. “Consider West Virginia University, for example, which recently announced major budget cuts to cover a $45 million deficit. The university seeks to save some $75 million by eliminating 32 of its majors and programs of study and 169 faculty members, or some 16 percent of the total…. The general chatter among the professoriate holds that WVU’s fate—and worse—is the wave of the future, not an aberration.”
FIRE Second Letter to West Virginia University, August 18, 2023. “Dear President Gee: [The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression] is disappointed to not have received a response to our enclosed July 27 letter concerning recently added requirements to faculty appointment letters mandating that they ‘accept and encourage change that is for the greater good’ and to ‘avoid conduct that reflects adversely on the image of the University.’”
, I’m no Old Master, nor are you. “I was thinking about myself as an artist rather than thinking solely about the art, and real art comes about when one abandons the self and submits oneself to the imperatives of the picture and conveying meanings or values.”Jeremy Sigler, About Those Amy Winehouse Paintings. “I quickly gathered that Jeremy was some kind of gun for hire in the niche field of art criticism—he was an expert in art and therefore had the power to assign value to works and to help dealers, auction houses, and collectors make money. Jeremy’s writing could, prior to auction, seriously inflate or deflate a work’s price.”
, Tolerating Intolerance: The Free Speech Paradox. “Free speech that advocates against free speech is philosophically self-negating.”, Tenure Is a Total Scam. “Don’t you have to at least show up at your office and pretend to work? No no no! Plenty of faculty visit their offices weekly, monthly, seasonally, annually, or once in a blue moon. Officially, you’re supposed to have office hours, but you can Zoom those if students yearn to talk to you. Which few do.”Barry Brownstein, Hayek Helps Us Understand Why People Are Losing Their Minds. “What makes us human, our minds and our powers of reason, do not exist separately from our social environment. When others descend to madness, we might be complacent, believing we can retain our powers of reason; yet Hayek’s insights prompt us to reconsider our certainty.”
Clayton Fox, The Toxic Gentleness of the American Theater. “In an attempt to weed out real abusive scumbags—and no doubt there have been many—all danger, all tension, all sex, has been sucked out of the room in favor of ‘safety.’ The result is a theater that is flat. So it’s no surprise that even three years after lockdowns, theaters are hemorrhaging cash.”
Out now: Holly Lynton, Bare Handed.
On now: “Francine Tint: Listening to the Sublime,” through September 30 at M Fine Arts Galerie. Tint will also be having a show at Upsilon Gallery September to October.
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During the week of September 11 we will begin an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy soon.
Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.
Oh, American theater's problem is not gentleness but weakness, an enervating and self-defeating attempt to reflect a world that does not exist but theoretically should, according to certain au courant views. Of course, all sorts of views now rejected were once au courant and also aggressively promoted (and enforced) by all sorts of would-be Illuminati. Alas, delusion (and worse) is always with us.