Items of Interest, Shouting Fire Edition

"Yeah. Whatever, as you know, dialectical materialism."

Philip Gerstein, Beyond the Idea of Rightdoing and Wrongdoing, 30 x 24 inches, oil stick, acrylic, pigment, and mixed media on birchwood panel, 2018, courtesy of the artist

Greg Lukianoff

, The Latest Victims of the Free-Speech Crisis. “It seems to me that the only major difference between the past few weeks and the past decade has to do with who is finally acknowledging the problem. People who once claimed that cancel culture doesn’t exist—or that it’s really just ‘accountability’ or ‘consequence’ culture—are lamenting the issue now that they agree with the group suffering the consequences.”

Bert Oliver, Love Really Can Thwart Tyranny. “Art and literature are not enemies of reason – they are partners in the quest for knowledge. And in the quest for wisdom and for love, one might add. This insight is invaluable at a time when imagination as well as reason should be enlisted in the struggle against tyranny.”

Hilton Kramer, Does abstract art have a future?¹ “Given this checkered history, in which so many gifted people have said so many foolish things about abstract art—and we haven’t even mentioned the openly declared enemies of abstraction—why does one feel compelled to raise the question of its future yet again? I think there are several good reasons for doing so. One is that by any objective measure, the place occupied by new developments in abstract art on the contemporary art scene—what we see in the galleries and museums and read about in the mainstream press and in the art journals—by this measure, the place occupied by new developments in abstract art is now greatly diminished from what it once was.”

Kay S. Hymowitz, Geniuses Behaving Badly. “Bad men, great art. My Florentine tour guides understand this perennial paradox in a way that often seems lost on many Americans today.”

Alex Perez, The Fight for the Future of Publishing. “The new dogma, industry insiders told me, is two-pronged: books should advance the narrative that people of color are victims of white supremacy; and nonblack and non-Latino authors should avoid characters who are black and Latino—even if their characters toe the officially approved narrative. (White authors who write about black or Latino people oppressed by white people have been accused of exploiting their characters’ trauma.)”

Alexander Adams

, Art critics v. the intellectual artist. “The public spats between the critics and artist continued for years and led to Kitaj leaving London permanently, relocating in California to be close to his adult son, partly spurred by the death of his wife Sandra. Kitaj became understandably bitter. His critical standing has been tarnished since then. Neither side came out of the affair well.”

Corbin K. Barthold, The “Shouting Fire” Pretext. “Common is the pundit or politician who says, ‘I strongly believe in the First Amendment, but… ,’ and then uses the second half of the sentence to embarrass the first.”

Michael Shellenberger, The Censorship-Industrial Complex, Part 2. “Many insist that all we identified in the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files, and the CTIL Files were legal activities by social media platforms to take down content that violated their terms of service…. But the First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government ‘may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish,’ and there is now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that.”

Suzy Weiss

, He’s Got $250 Million to Spend on Communist Revolution. “It gets complicated, this type of thing. ‘I grew up in a world where everyone’s kissing your ass for something you didn’t do. And it’s the same thing when you’re super fucking rich.’ She describes her father, Julian [Schnabel], as ‘really charming, and super generous and totally annoying and fucked up at the same time.’ She sighs. ‘Yeah. Whatever, as you know, dialectical materialism… there are always opposites.’”²

Jackson Greenberg, The Un-Conscientious Objectors. “I was sent to this school because of its reputation in the arts. I’m grateful for the opportunities I had to learn and write music at a young age, which laid the foundation for my career now as a composer for film and television. But even back then, my parents and I had the sense that something was going sideways educationally in these spaces.”

Opening soon: “Unforced Order: Paintings by Jo Ann Rothschild and Philip Gerstein,” starting December 8 at LICHTUNDFIRE.

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We are (I promise) 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.

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.

1. 2002.

2. Julian Schnabel’s daughter Stella is the current partner of a New Hamsphire-based multimillionaire communist with even bigger daddy issues than hers. Fergie Chambers is developing some kind of revolutionary compound in the Berkshires and is so pro-Hamas that he has called for “making people who support Israel actually afraid to go out in public.”