Items of Interest, People Who Understand Each Other Edition
"A staff member taunted me with a machete."
Zachary Small, Amid Challenges, Small New York City Museums Are Closing Their Doors. “[Laura] Mattioli, the Center for Italian Modern Art’s founder, said that changes at foundations had made it harder for her small institution to apply for grants. After the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, she said, many grant-making organizations appeared to require that exhibition proposals include elements of diversity and inclusion. She said themes of social justice were more prevalent in American art than in modern Italian art, making it difficult for her museum to compete for funding.”
Jonathan Stevenson, Kim Uchiyama: Life in space. “A great asset of abstract art is its capacity to accommodate in a single picture phenomena that don’t readily fit together in real life and make some kind of sense out of them. There are as many ways to exploit that capacity as there are artists. In her solo show “Loggia” now on view at Helm Contemporary, comprising three large pieces and several smaller ones, Kim Uchiyama distills visual tropes of nature – water, shoreline, forest, desert, and more – into configurations of color that project an idealized but grounded spatial relationship between outside and inside, broadly construed.”
Shabbos Kestenbaum, Harvard’s Golden Age Turns to Mud. “[A]lthough the reports found that a Jewish student was spat on, an Israeli student was asked to leave class as her nationality made classmates ‘uncomfortable,’ another Israeli was assaulted at the business school, a staff member taunted me with a machete and challenged me to debate the Jewish involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Harvard didn’t acknowledge these incidents publicly or failed to address them for months.”
Rabbi David Wolpe, My Year at Harvard. “The New England Protestant roots of Harvard shaped a picture of the Jew that is now bolstered by students from the Middle East where antisemitic tropes are imbibed with one’s mother’s milk.”
Brian Boucher, Brauer Museum Shutters Amid Deaccessioning Controversy. “‘The O’Keeffe and Hassam paintings are not conservative,’ noted the petition in bold type, since O’Keeffe was a Modernist and Hassam an Impressionist. But, the petition continued, Brauer inappropriately convinced the committee that administered the funds to depart from the stricture to buy only conservative works.”
James Lord, Sartre & Giacometti: words between friends. “‘Pardon me, but I’ve often seen you here, and I think we’re the sort of people who understand each other. I happen to have no money on me. Would you mind paying for my drink?’ That was the kind of request Alberto could never have refused. He promptly paid for the stranger’s drink. A conversation ensued, and it did seem that the two men were the sort of people who understood each other. Twenty-five years later it would be worth recalling that their friendship had begun with such an optimistic assumption. The man who made it was Jean-Paul Sartre.”
Daniel J. Solomon, Why I Quit My Academic Union. “Despite my affinity for the labor movement… I recently resigned my UAW membership, and, with the help of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, filed an informational brief explaining that the union’s strike endangers the safety and rights of Jewish workers like myself. If I have become the ‘scab’ and ‘stool pigeon’ reviled in the songs of my childhood, it is because my former union has embraced anti-Israel activism.”
Daniel Miller, Pierre d’Alancaisez, and Adam Lehrer, Dialogue: The Future of the Art World. “One reason for such aesthetic malapropisms is that the liberal art world muscles in on all politics. From Trump to climate change, its ideological priorities change faster than artists evolve aesthetic responses. The other cause is the progressive expansion and diversification of artistic sources. As the art world machine rapidly sucked in non-Western traditions and the once-excluded Western voices, balancing their aesthetic novelty with even the recent canon became impossible.”
Steven M. Teles, Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors? “[C]onservatives and academic leaders may need to move simultaneously, with academic leaders committing to costly, visible signals of openness and conservatives accepting those signals and amplifying them rather than receiving them skeptically.”1
Thomas P. Balazs, Art over Man: The Roger Waters Test Case. “It’s not just that I still want to be able to listen to ‘Comfortably Numb’ and (attempt to) play ‘Wish You Were Here’ on my ukulele without feeling like I’m celebrating a Jew hater. I want to believe that the art we create is superior to the people we are—that when we create art, we are our best selves, better than the self we are outside of art.”
Barry Brownstein, Danger Ahead: Why Antisemitism Is Likely to Grow. “Closed societies are doomed to failure until critical inquiry from within is welcome.”
Mitzvah of Interest: Stand with Jun in His Time of Need.
Kinky Friedman, Rest in Peace.2
On now: “Ying Li: Paper Trails,” at Pamela Salisbury Gallery through July 21.
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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard. 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.
I think most universities should be destroyed, but this is an intelligent argument from someone who wants to save them. The proposed remedies are so unlikely to see implementation that he may have argued implicitly that they can’t be done, but here you are anyway.
His live performance of “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” is a reminder of how things used to be. “Thank you for being an American.”
"Grant-making organizations appeared to require that exhibition proposals include elements of diversity and inclusion." So what about art as such? Don't ask. No need to. It's NOT about that.
RIP Kinky