Author: Matthew Westphal

Protesters Demand That ICA Boston Cancel Dana Schutz Show Because Of ‘Open Casket’ (Which Is Not In The Show)

Evidently believing that Schutz hasn’t been punished enough for having shown her painting of the murdered Emmett Till at the Whitney Biennial, a group of activists wrote in an open letter, “The institution will be participating in condoning the coopting of Black pain and showing the art world and beyond that people can co-opt sacred imagery rooted in oppression and face little consequence … Please pull the show. This is not about censorship. This is about institutional accountability.”

Anger At Black Actor Getting Booted From ‘Great Comet’ To Make Room For Mandy Patinkin

This week it was announced that Patinkin would make a now-rare appearance on Broadway, starring for three weeks in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. To accommodate Patinkin’s schedule, the producers cut short the contract of the actor currently playing Pierre, Hamilton alumnus Okieriete Onaodowan (“Oak”). Some fellow minority actors are denouncing the cast change on social media.

Ousted Met Museum Director Thomas Campbell Lands Next Gig: Getty Rothschild Fellowship

“Thomas P. Campbell, who last month ended his tumultuous tenure as chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been chosen as the second recipient of the Getty Rothschild Fellowship … The fellowship supports scholarship in art history, collecting and conservation, offering art historians, museum professionals or conservators up to eight months of research and study at the Getty in Los Angeles and Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England.”

The Essential Michiko Kakutani Reader

“Below are highlights from Kakutani’s tenure at the Times – her reviews of major novels and autobiographies, her obituaries and appreciations, her profiles and essays. Together they represent a vigorously led life of the mind, a crash course in contemporary literature and a tour through the zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium.”

Turin’s Big New Tate Modern-Style Arts Complex Set To Open With William Kentridge And Tino Sehgal

“After Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof and London’s Tate Modern, the trend for converting industrial buildings into contemporary art spaces looks set to continue in the northern Italian city of Turin. The Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR), an H-shaped complex of 19th-century railway repair workshops covering an area of 35,000 sq. m, is due to reopen as a privately funded ‘arts and innovation centre’ on 30 September with a trio of site-specific artists’ commissions and two weeks of free concerts.”

The Strange Tastes Of Bookstore Shoplifters (Kierkegaard And Wittgenstein?)

Sure, thieves make off with expensive coffee-table books and textbooks, but, says the manager of the London Review Bookshop, “Our most-stolen authors, in order, are Baudrillard, Freud, Nietzsche, Graham Greene, Lacan, Camus, and whoever puts together the Wisden [Cricketers’] Almanack.” One booklifter who got caught said as he was escorted from the store, “I hope you’ll consider this in the Žižekian spirit, as a radical reappropriation of knowledge.”