Items of Interest, This is Not a Drill Edition
"The events of recent weeks have brought home an ugly truth."
Thomas Floyd, Fewer people are going to movies, theater and museums, NEA study shows. “The number of respondents who reported visiting an art museum or gallery shrank from about 24 percent to 18 percent, while those attending craft fairs or visual arts festivals declined from about 24 percent to 17 percent.”1
Charles C.W. Cooke, The Woke Code of Morality Was All Nonsense. “[B]eneath the extended game of Calvinball that is contemporary wokeism, there has never been anything more substantive than grubby self-interest. When selling their wares, the peddlers of America’s byzantine speech codes have cast themselves as the enlightened reformers of a rotten status quo. In truth, they are the precise opposite.”
, How Progressives Killed American Theater. “[The fate of American theater] hews so closely to classic Greek tragedy that it’s as though Fortune used Aristotle’s Poetics as a handbook in crafting the institution’s demise.”2, Birch Haiku.Armin Rosen, The DEI Complex Will Never Protect Jews. “This week, I called or emailed over a dozen equity divisions at prominent colleges and universities to ask whether they had released any statements, held any events, or created any new programming for Jewish students since the Hamas rampage of October 7 and the wave of campus unrest that followed. The answer is no—of course not.”
Jacob Howland, The Campus Peril to Western Civilization. “The events of recent weeks have brought home an ugly truth: far from equipping students to preserve and extend civilization, American universities—especially elite ones—have been teaching them how to destroy it.”
, Unscheduled off-topic brain dump about localism: a pseudo-manifesto. “The people with their finger on the pulse are leaving the social net and openly predicting its imminent collapse.”, How Academics Destroyed Academia. “You will recall that some years back, when I publicized the fact that Tommy Curry, a black radical on the philosophy faculty at Texas A&M, openly hated whites and speculated publicly that many might need to die for the cause of black liberation, the Chronicle Of Higher Education wrote a big piece about it painting me as the bad guy for noticing and objecting. Now ‘higher education’ has given birth to a generation that took the teachings of dirtbags like Tommy Curry to heart — and are pleased as punch to see Jews get their heads chopped off and Jewish babies turned to ash, for the sake of ‘liberating’ Palestine. Chronicle that, you assholes.”
Alex Olshonsky, Hamas Killed My Wokeness. “Zooming out, it has become clear to me, and devoid of the Israeli-Palestinian context, there’s a dark reality: Our Western culture is riddled with ambient antisemitism.”
J.B. Shurk, End Fiat Money, End Forever Wars. “In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, the gold standard was thrown overboard within a few weekends. In order to finance wars, the world resorted to deficit spending and paper money. Had the gold standard not been given up, the war would not have lasted more than a few months. Instead, it lasted more than four years and ruined most of the major economies in the world and left millions dead in its wake.”
Jonathan Winslow, After Academic Freedom. “Like liberal democracy, academic freedom is dualistic—entailing a ‘liberal’ claim about protecting the individual’s rights and a ‘collective’ claim that a certain group of people should be able to govern itself… The standard American model assumed that funders, politicians, and the public—not the faculty—were the real threats to the independence of mind and liberty of speech that good research and teaching demanded. These assumptions no longer hold.”
Pierre d’Alancaisez, The art world is eating itself. “In light of all this, the bully’s unwavering claim to moral righteousness is staggering. The unquestioned truth of the art world activists is that all Republicans are white supremacists, Brexiteers are scum, and punching a TERF is god’s work. No matter how many challenges these echo-chamber convictions have faced from election results, the law or sheer empirical reality, disagreeing with this mob’s progressive tenets is the fastest way to exile.”
and , The Great Betrayal. “‘I started to see these intelligent, educated people, whose mission is to make our system better for people of color, suddenly posting all this anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian stuff,’ Rose said. ‘I’m not changing my values, but screw the allyship.’”Melanie Notkin, The rise of the underground free speech groups. “A vibe change is coming. Friends in New York are now pushing back on topics like gender ideology and identity politics. My dates are pleasantly surprised to meet a woman who subscribes to the same Substacks and podcasts as they do. I’ve been engaged in this space since 2015 when a friend invited me to a private Facebook group, a Viennese-style salon, where members participate in open discussions around social, cultural and political issues, without fear of being attacked for their opinions.”
On now: “Jon Imber: Mother, Father, Child,” through November 25 at Alpha Gallery.
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We are 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.
For the math-challenged out there, a drop of 24 to 18 percent is six percent relative to the whole, but it’s 25 percent relative to itself. This is a huge plunge.
I’m not deep into podcasts but Clifton’s appearance on the
is worth your time.
A series of fascinating articles as usual. As a tenured "academic" at a regional public institution, I think a lot about right-wing charges of all the radical woke indoctrination that allegedly occurs on college campuses across the United States. How innocent, unsuspecting youth are supposedly duped into uncritically accepting, and then parroting, a series of postmodern ideological positions that are, at their core, Marxist and totalitarian, or gender queer, or whatever.
I know there is a danger in seeing one’s experience of the world as being the default condition for everyone else, but if there is a cabal of crazy academics hell bent on destroying America by co-opting the youth (ya know, like heavy metal musicians did in the 70s and 80s, wink, wink) I've never seen it. Most of the academics I know are aging Gen Xers like myself, and are liberal and progressive in a "1994 Bill Clinton" sort of way. A far, far cry from the "trans-groomer" caricature portrayed by right leaning media.
What has changed drastically in the nearly two decades I've spent in academia are the students themselves. They don't need to go to Harvard to "get woke"; they come in that way. It's not middle-aged professors dragging students to the fringe left, it’s the students leading the faculty and the administration over the cliff. Higher ed is afflicted with the same transactional mentality that has infected every area of human endeavor and the kids are the customers, and they're always right, right? If anything, many faculty I know -including myself on occasion- are afraid of their students.
It’s the same mechanisms that convince a kid from suburban England to go join ISIS and fight for the caliphate, or make some shut-in loser think he deserves to get laid because he has a penis, or a preteen girl think she actually should have been born with one: social media. The algorithms that govern everything “the kids these days” (and everyone else) are consuming, prioritize loud and crazy. And because the currency and legitimacy of anyone on social media is tracked in likes and up votes and hearts, the crazier the better, which just promotes more loud and crazy. Sanity, clam, rational debate, and arguments backed up by fact just don’t play well online. Just look at the comment section of City Journal.
Today’s teens and early twenty something’s have grown up with a phone glued to their hands. They, like most of the population at this point, have been steeped in loud, angry and crazy and it has distorted their picture of reality in so many areas it’s hard to keep track of. My grandmother once told me that in high school she had basically three career options: cook, nurse, or secretary. Despite being a great cook, she hated cooking, and she didn’t want to bathe a stranger, so secretary it was. By contrast, I have students who think that the scourge of sexist oppression has never been worse than it is today…..huh? They didn’t get those ideas from Professor McTenure-Track, they got ‘em from whatever nut they’ve been watching on TikTok at 2am.
There’s only one solution as far as I can tell: Thunderdome.
Numero uno: Art is a luxury. Institutions, or societies, that attempt to inculcate an entitlement attitude in serious artists are simply wrong-headed and do them no favors. High art, high culture, is aristocratic, supported by an elite, organized around kinship and a shared belief system. See, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, ancient Greece, Confucianism, Shinto, Voodoo, etc.
Numero duo: There is no art community. Outside of the ever-more politicized curatoriat, professional artists are entrepreneurs attempting to make a living in a competitive market.