Items of Interest, Totalitarian Technique Edition
"We must fight to win."
The Rijksmuseum, Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch. “The new high-resolution image of The Night Watch represents a major advance in the state of the art for imaging paintings, setting records for both the resolution and the total size of the image. The sampling resolution is 5 µm (0.005 mm), meaning that each pixel covers an area of the painting that is smaller than a human red blood cell.”
, If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention. “I simply want to posit one idea for your consideration: Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention. In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?”Jill Nathanson, Elul Reflections: Evening’s Garment. “This painting’s title refers to Psalms 104:2: ‘Let me praise Adonai, for You, Adonai my God are surely great, clothed in glory and majesty, wrapped in a cloak of light, You stretch the heavens like a sheet of cloth.’ The title also refers to the prayer before the evening Shema… “rolling light away from darkness and darkness from light…Barukh ata Adonai, who brings the evening’s dusk.” I picture this as a roll of immaterial cloth.”1
Richard Samuelson, Why Progressives Hate Israel. “[P]rogressive ideology has precious little room for Jews to remain Jews. That Jews are an ancient people with Judaism as their religion, and, in a sense, Torah as their Constitution and Israel as their homeland does not fit into the conventional boxes of political and religious analysis. As the majority of today’s Jewish residents of Israel are descended from other nations of the Middle East, not from Europe, telling them to ‘go back to Europe’ is a non-starter. And they can hardly go back to the diasporic settlements that kicked them out or, at the least, treated them as second-class citizens. Where else can they go but Israel? Yet that, too, is unacceptable because it means that two peoples have longstanding historical claims to the same piece of land, a reality that makes a mockery of progressive dreams of progress and perpetual peace.”
G. Patrick Lynch, A Conservative Free-Speech Rock Star. “Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that America’s foremost conservative defender of free speech is a fan of psychedelic rock and heavy metal—Black Sabbath specifically.”
Roy Price, America’s Cultural Evolution. “T.S. Eliot described culture as ‘all the characteristic activities and interests of a people,’ while Matthew Arnold saw it as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world.’ Tim Ferris offers a more practical definition: ‘the unwritten rules of how we do things here.’ Culture combines familiar social habits to establish certain methods of approaching problems, and also certain mental boundaries. Culture also shapes ideals and interactions by determining what is considered polite and appropriate, and what is understood to be admirable – for oneself, and for the nation. ”
Christopher Rufo, What’s At Stake in the Censorship War. “The bottom line is that Elon Musk’s fight for a free and open Internet is our fight. It is critical to preserve at least one platform capable of resisting the transnational consolidation of power and the censorship of its ideological enemies. We must fight to win, not only in Brazil, but everywhere.”
Kevin Gutzman, Painting the Revolution. “From an earlier point, John [Trumbull] inclined to art. He would, if allowed, have gone at the age of fifteen to study under John Singleton Copley, who was then making a name for himself as a Boston painter. The expense would have approximated that of going to Harvard. ‘This argument,’ Brookhiser quotes John, ‘seemed to me not bad,’ but the governor preferred his son go directly to Harvard.”
Blake Smith, Judith Butler vs. Judy! “The perennial desire that animates every delusional individual and every totalitarian ideology is to do away with such obstacles—history, body, the unthinkable diversity of real life—and replace them with the splendid coherence of fantasy. The melancholy of gender is a sulking over the fact of our having an unchosen history, body, and so on; the euphoria of gender identity is the willful forgetting that these obstacles are real, a forgetting that our contemporary ideologues of gender, Butler now foremost among them, seek to make universal and compulsory.”
F.A. Hayek on Censorship and the End of Truth. “The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed.”
, Reclaiming freedom in the arts. “There is a new set of blasphemy laws within the arts, and woe betide you if you speak out, deliberately, accidentally or if you are just perceived to not believe. The punishment is swift, brutal, total and in perpetuity; the punishment does certainly not fit the crime.”Anny Shaw, Largest Morandi exhibition in almost 20 years to open in New York. “Opening on 26 September, Time Suspended, part II will be presented in a beautiful 19th-century townhouse on East 63rd Street off Fifth Avenue (September 26 to November 26, by appointment only). As the title indicates, the New York show is a follow up to an exhibition De Luca had in his Rome gallery in spring 2022.”
, Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments. “Speech equals violence isn’t a new idea. It’s a very old—and very bad—idea.”, The Shift in Race Politics. “The wheel is turning.” , 10 Biggest Mistakes Lost Art Press Has Made. “We trusted a FedEx salesman as to what our shipping costs would be when we signed up with the service. In less than two months, the company’s shipping costs almost drained our cash reserves.”Earworm: Thot Squad featuring Sophie Hunter, Hoes Depressed (Left Cheerleader Remix) (NSFW).
On now: “Emily Nelligan: Early Drawings” at Alexandre Gallery through October 26.
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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia” is an online exhibition representing the physical one in New York in June 2024.
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.
Here's my latest earworm--which, as it happens, involves a depressed (well, dying) prostitute, of sorts:
https://youtu.be/2ldOBson0vw
Do note this is a live stage performance--there's no studio trickery here.