Salons Are On
And the print shop is open. Paid subscribers rejoice!
After some technical and logistical contemplation, The Dissident Muse tech team has figured out how to host Dissident Muse Salons. We will hold them on Jitsi, which can provide Clubhouse-like functionality through a normal web browser. Invitations will be sent to paid subscribers via Substack chat. I’ll leave a link to a protected Jitsi call in the chat. We’ll keep this audio-only, so don’t change out of your studio grubbies on our account.
Our first salon will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, March 5, at 6 PM Eastern. The opening topic, not that we have to stick to it, is my essay “The Virtual Critic: A Thought Experiment” from 2020, published in the AICA-USA Magazine and archived on my site if you’d prefer not to read it in white on Clown Nose Red. This is germane to my roundtable discussion, “Artists Are the New Institutions,” which will take place on Saturday at the Transcultural Exchange in Cambridge.
All paid subscribers at the monthly, annual, or Muse tiers will receive invitations to salons. Monthly and annual subscribers receive 20% off in the Dissident Muse Print Shop. Muse subscribers receive 60% off (I just raised the discount).
In related news, the Dissident Muse Print Shop is open. It includes risos, white-line woodcuts, the Vegetable Gardener mokuhanga, and the Maenad Suite screenprints from Regarding Th.at. Paid subscribers can request a discount code from dissidentmuse@proton.me.
I’ve been reading over the history of the salons of Gertrude Stein, Natalie Clifford Barney, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, A’Lelia Walker, the Marquise de Pompadour, and Marie Thérèse Geoffrin. We owe wide swaths of art history to magnificent hostesses. I don’t hope to equal such triumphs online. But in 2025 they may not be possible in person either, so we may as well make the attempt.
Paid subscribers are supporting a goodly portion of my professional life, almost comparable to my regular writing gigs. You’re also helping art to happen. I have a new egg tempera to post tomorrow, and I’m able to accept an upcoming art residency in the Annapurna Sanctuary thanks to supporters such as yourself. If the combination of skeptical cultural commentary and intellectual deep dives into art that appear at Dissident Muse Journal are not, strictly speaking, unique, it doesn’t have many equals. I think we—literally the plural you and me—are doing something of potential significance here. I’m grateful for your involvement at any level of support that you can manage.
Content at DMJ is free but paid subscribers keep it coming. They also have access to Dissident Muse Salons, print shop discounts, and Friend on the Road consultations. Please consider becoming one yourself and thank you for reading.
Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.