“And yet, sales were down from years past—last November’s postwar sale, with just a few more lots, netted $331.8 million, indicating a drop of 16 percent. But that auction was considered a disappointment, and if you compare Tuesday’s sale to that of November 2014, which brought in $852.9 million over 72 lots, you’d see a two-year dip of 67 percent. The market contraction continues apace.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
As A Wave Of Women Artist Shows Open, We Have To Ask…
Is this “woman artist” stuff a good thing? (Was Jackson Pollock a “man artist”?) Elaine de Kooning once recalled a party where she and another painter, Joan Mitchell, were asked, “What do you women artists think … ?” Mitchell interrupted, “Elaine, let’s get the hell out of here.” That pretty much sums up some people’s feelings about all-women exhibitions. Let’s blow this ghetto! We can’t win here.
Seattle’s EMP Museum Changes Its Name… Again
First it was Experience Music Project. Then it was the acronym EMP, then Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (“EMPSFM” for short-ish), then EMP Museum. Now the institution founded by former Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen in 2000 and designed by Frank Gehry is becoming the Museum of Pop Culture, or MoPOP.
So The Arts Are Progressive?? Study Finds Big Gender Gap In Pay In The Arts
“Specifically, they found the mean annual income for male artists was $63,061, compared to $43,177 for their female counterparts. After further crunching the numbers, they report that a variety of factors that could influence income — including age, education, one’s specific artistic discipline, and the number of hours worked — only accounted for about one-third of that difference.”
Artists And The Non-Arts Audience – A Different Kind Of Conversation
“For the artists to figure out a way to be in a conversation with this audience — a whole community of new eyes — is really exciting. Navigating that common space and figuring out what can be done to engage with this crowd while also what can be done to make things happen outside of that space.”
Is This True? There’s A “Renaissance” In Cultural Journalism?
“It is a notably upbeat claim, especially when compared with the hand-wringing that typically accompanies talk of public intellectuals in America, who seem always to be in the act of vanishing. The few who remain pale in comparison to the near-mythic minds that roamed the streets of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, when rents were cheap, polemics were harsh, and politics were radical. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. What happened? Intellectuals who couldn’t survive as freelance writers — and as New York gentrified, who could? — became professors. By the 1960s, few nonacademic intellectuals remained. Careerism and specialization gradually opened up a gulf between intellectuals and the public. The sturdy prose of Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe gave way, by the mid-90s, to the knotted gender theorizing of Judith Butler and the cult-studies musings of Andrew Ross.”
The Inexorable Decline Of Arts Criticism Is Picking Up Speed
Bill Marx looks at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times’ cutbacks in arts coverage: “Too many of today’s arts editors and reviewers embrace a lilliputian vision of arts criticism, a crabbed sense of its possibilities. I teach a class at Boston University on writing arts criticism, and can testify that most of these wanna-be critics have not read any reviews that date earlier than 2000.”
What The Canada Council Has Decided To Do With The Doubling Of Its Funding
The Justin Trudeau government announced that the Council’s government allocation would double. But instead of just giving the country’s major arts groups more money, the Council will diversify. The council has been talking for at least a decade about doing more to reflect the changing nature of art-making in an increasingly diverse Canada.”
Zadie Smith’s New Novel Explores Dance As Universal Language That Transcends Race And Time
She clings to the possibility that dance is a universal language, one that can transcend race, sex, class, and even time. She is fond of a story of Fred Astaire begging Michael Jackson to teach him to moonwalk, musing that “a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.”
Robert Fulford: A Culture That Marginalizes Humanities Becomes The Poorer For It
“Traditionally, the humanities (history, literature, art, philosophy, etc.) have provided a place for broadening life in the democracies. Today universities have become a site for a bitter struggle between no-nonsense job training and the grander possibilities of the imagination.”