Items of Interest, Losing Friends Edition
"I realize that this is no letter for you, and actually not one for me either."
Kat Rosenfield, How Culture Got Stupid. “Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But around the time Flynn’s breakout novel was breathing new life into the domestic thriller genre, a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction.”
Deanna Isaacs, Paint it sad. “In 2023, Chicago’s storied American Academy of Art—training ground for some of the nation’s most influential commercial artists—celebrated its 100th birthday. Last week, a statement posted on the Academy website announced that the college is closing, effective immediately. ‘The Academy regrets that, after more than 100 years, it lacks financial viability to continue operations,’ the unsigned statement said.”
Three Letters from Rilke. “I realize that this is no letter for you, and actually not one for me either. I long for you, dear friend.”
, The Age of Poetry. “Over the last decades, value shifted from art to artist…. The traditional artworld was slow to recognise, adopt and make use of this shift. Greater authenticity requires transparency, which runs counter to the interests of some in a notoriously opaque industry who behaved unethically and don’t want past actions revealed.”, Why the ‘words are violence’ argument needs to die. “Equating words and violence is a rhetorical escalation designed to protect an all-too-human preference which Nat Hentoff, a dearly departed friend and a great defender of freedom of speech in the 20th century, used to call ‘Free speech for me, but not for thee.’”Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Girl Disorder. “If the [anti-Israel] protests offer further evidence for the dimming of patriarchy, they also show how women’s growing dominance in social institutions introduces new and ambiguous power dynamics.”
Susan Baskin, From Shtetl to Pogrom. “In the winter of 1923, Ryback exhibited the series of 13 watercolors at his first solo show in Berlin. After seeing the exhibit, Rachel Wischnitzer, an art historian, published ‘On the Eve of the Pogrom,’ but nothing more. ‘There were more powerful works,’ she is quoted as saying, but ‘we did not have the courage to reproduce them.’”
Frances Brent, A Mistress of Simplicity and Disguise. Just as Delaunay lived her art, she also fabricated her life, often speaking about her childhood in Russia and Ukraine but leaving out her Jewish origins. In the shadow of the Dreyfus affair, it was not uncommon to avoid talking about such things in public. Like assimilated Jewish emigres after World War II, Delaunay didn’t tell her son Charles that she was Jewish until he was well into adulthood. She maintained this habit until the very end of her life, preparing for her first American retrospective at the Albright-Knox Museum.
Ellyn Gaydos, On Stones. “Her hands are not what you might expect of a stone carver—overwrought with muscles, ballooned into something like catcher’s mitts—but are toned and precise like those I’ve seen on welders. As she moved around her studio, considering a giant slab of granite that would become a customer’s sarcophagus, I noticed pink flowers and green leaves tattooed across her waist.”
Mattias Desmet, Yes, the Olympic Opening Ceremony Parodied “The Last Supper.” “The most remarkable thing is that the fact-checkers and woke enthusiasts did not see that the ceremony was indeed about The Last Supper. They mocked those who did see, calling them lost and misguided. The more someone is gripped by this kind of progressivism, the more he accuses those who think differently of madness.”
A.V. Ryan, Jill Nathanson: Beyond Color Field painting. “I have an experimental approach to color, to what colors do to one another and, like Goethe, find color to be endlessly surprising. Colors change one another and I use colors that are vulnerable to being changed. I find that colors can be sequenced to need each other, like musical chords. I work to set up a desire for a certain color that can move us across the picture.”
Glenn Loury, No College Will Teach You This. “The power of the dissident comes in his or her relentless affirmation of life by standing for the truth come what may.”
, Why Art Sucks Now. “Art which flows from self-respect, from the knowledge that respect exists and is possible to earn, holds itself, and the artist, to an external standard.”Anonymous Academic c/o
, How Woke Universities Demoralize Their Best People. “ Since 2020, my department has lost roughly a third of its faculty members. I have had conversations with numerous top staffers who are leaving or actively planning to leave. Enrollment is crashing nationally, especially among young men who increasingly reject woke politics. In most cases, people aren’t leaving because of cancellation threats, or antisemitism, or sillier things like Halloween costume controversies…. people are leaving because woke universities have become demoralizing to work and learn at, on a day-to-day basis.”Rosamund Urwin, ‘I’ve lost friends’ — is antisemitism rising in the arts? “A lot of people just don’t believe Jewish people when they say they have experienced antisemitism. I’ve had friends and colleagues rolling their eyes when I’ve said that I’m worried about it, especially in the past eight months. I’m a left-leaning liberal, I live in Hackney and work in the arts, and when friends tell me about their experiences of racial prejudice or as a queer person I believe them. Yet some friends and colleagues have totally dismissed me on this; because I look like a white British woman, they think I can’t possibly be experiencing prejudice.”
Opens tomorrow: “Don Voisine: Now Away” at Cove Street Arts.
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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003-20 by Marco Grassi. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
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.
If those responsible for the Olympics opening ceremony really didn't get what they were doing and how it would come across, then they need immediate psychiatric treatment for psychosis. If, on the other hand, they were deliberately offensive and blasphemous (which they would NEVER do with the "religion of peace"), then they're obnoxious, malicious purveyors of shock-tactics schlock.
Culture got Victorian, only with a hard leftist bent, and no, truth is definitely not the point--unless it's "my" truth as opposed to the actual truth.