Items of Interest, Invitational Edition
"A certain amount of fearlessness is required for practical wisdom to be, in fact, wisdom."
Aidan Harte, Oil, art and the perils of patronage. “At the fag break during life drawing class, I once mentioned that my dream patron would be a dictator — some tinpot megalomaniac with artistic aspirations and a bottomless treasure chest. His Excellency would commission me to line the boulevards of his freshly-renamed capital with gilded statues: winged victories by the score and a dozen heroic chaps on horses. I wasn’t fussy about my generalissimo’s politics just so long as he was solidly ensconced, with all his enemies shot or safely locked in the gulag. God forbid I should get halfway through casting my colossal Soldier of The People and hear that some disgruntled mob had stormed my client’s palace and strung him up by the ankles.”
Luke Lyman, A studio visit with Elizabeth Higgins. “She quotes Milton Glaser: ‘Art is art when it brings you to attention.’ I wonder aloud if she thinks this means her art is confrontational, a term artists and critics love of late. She thinks for a moment, and eventually responds, ‘No. I think it’s invitational.’”
Emma Camp, A College Fired a Professor for Showing a Painting of Muhammad. Now, It Could Lose Its Accreditation. “While organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have long argued that it is a contractual violation for private colleges to violate free speech and academic freedom, when they also make explicit promises of such protections to prospective students and faculty, the theory is largely legally untested. However, in this case, FIRE may have found a way to hold Hamline accountable.”
Alex Morey, Hamline hiding critical Twitter, Facebook posts amid blasphemy ban controversy. “Universities cannot claim to foster a culture of free expression when they’re sanitizing their social media feeds and shutting down discussion on important campus issues. What message does it send to students and faculty about tolerance for dissent if the university is busily scrubbing criticism from public view?”
The Muslim Public Affairs Council, Statement of Support for Art Professor Fired from Hamline University. “As a Muslim organization, we recognize the validity and ubiquity of an Islamic viewpoint that discourages or forbids any depictions of the Prophet, especially if done in a distasteful or disrespectful manner. However, we also recognize the historical reality that other viewpoints have existed and that there have been some Muslims, including and especially Shīʿī Muslims, who have felt no qualms in pictorially representing the Prophet (although often veiling his face out of respect). All this is a testament to the great internal diversity within the Islamic tradition, which should be celebrated.”
Zadie Smith, The Instrumentalist. “We of Tár’s generation can be quick to lambaste those we call (behind their backs) ‘the youngs,’ but speaking for myself, I’m the one severely triggered by statements like ‘Chaucer is misogynistic’ or ‘Virginia Woolf was a racist.’ Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: ‘Is it interesting?’ Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fit, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analyzed, just like anything else. Whereas if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying.”
Joel Kotkin, Can Capitalism Save Hollywood? “The vast overproduction of arts majors has flooded the market and made access to jobs more dependent on personal connections. Costing an average of $100,000 each, MFAs may be overwhelmingly left-wing, but they are also poorly compensated, with salaries paying on average just $67,000 annually. This creeping credentialism presents a powerful barrier to working-class entrants, notes the Guardian. Today, unabashed “nepo babies” increasingly dominate, while opportunities shrink for those lacking the proper bloodlines or expensive credentials.”
Heather Mac Donald, Strategic Charitable Giving. “To the extent that a classical music organization does parrot antiracism bromides and accuses itself or the profession of bias, that organization is accelerating classical music’s demise. Classical music’s presence in the culture at large is already marginal. For most young people it is an alien, if not repellent, idiom. Teaching young people to see this sublime tradition through the trivializing lens of race and sex will provide the coup de grâce.”
John Sailer, How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities. “The upshot is that the entire experience of higher education—from earning a college degree to seeking a career in academia—now requires saturation in the principles of DEI.”
Bradley C.S. Watson, Institutional Capture: It Can Happen Here. “The absence of even traces of the critical moral virtue of courage impedes the development and exercise of other virtues, including intellectual ones. Courage is required not simply for acting but for thinking. Prudence or practical wisdom, in other words, knowing what to do in fraught circumstances, presupposes courage. A certain amount of fearlessness is required for practical wisdom to be, in fact, wisdom, as opposed to the consolation of ‘prudence’ that masks cowardice — the unwillingness to look risk in the eye and think rather than blink.”
Robert Chappell, Madison Indigenous arts leader, activist revealed as white. “Since at least 2017, Kay LeClaire has claimed Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cuban and Jewish heritage. Additionally, they identify as ‘two-spirit,’ a term many [sic] Indigenous people use to describe a non-binary gender identity. In addition to becoming a member and co-owner of giige, LeClaire earned several artists’ stipends, a paid residency at the University of Wisconsin, a place on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force and many speaking gigs and art exhibitions, not to mention a platform and trust of a community – all based on an ethnic identity that appears to have been fully fabricated.”
, What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround? “If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.”On now: “Unstructured Play: Katie Bell, Sofie Ramos, Estefania Velez Rodriguez and Joseph Dolinsky,” through February 11 at Below Grand.
Thank you Franklin for including Unstructured Play in your publication!!!!
Thank you for doing this, Franklin...very important!