“Through last year, the garage was used to service and show cars manufactured by Citroën, who agreed to leave the space as part of a deal brokered with the city of Brussels in 2015 that involved transitioning the garage into an arts institution. … When Kanal is completely renovated it will encompass not only a museum of modern and contemporary art, but also the collections of the local CIVA Foundation, as well as public spaces devoted to culture, education, and leisure.”
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Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.31.18
Berkshire Museum’s Murky “Transparency”: Parsing the Half-Truths in Its “Open Letter”
If this is transparency, we can only wonder what opacity looks like. The Berkshire Museum today posted an open letter to its community that is intended to show its “commitment to transparency, cooperation, outreach,” … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-05-31
Is It Useful To Be Afraid?
One reason we struggle with fear is that we’re simultaneously too primitive and too evolved for our own good. Our lizard brains are ruthlessly efficient: Signals speed to the threat-sensing amygdala within 74 milliseconds of the slightest hint of danger. This speed has, over eons, helped save us from extinction. But it’s also led to plenty of false alarms.
A Conservative War On Hip Hop?
The criticism levied at hip-hop from the right is a pointed indictment of black culture: Black people lost their way and this crude music was the culprit. It’s understandably popular because it feeds into the “pick yourselves up” rhetoric that downplays the oppression of black people while justifying it.
Those Famous Cultural Monuments That Fire Our Imaginations? They’re Often Much Different In Person
The great pyramids are surrounded by city. The Mona Lisa is thronged with crowds. The Leaning Tower and Stone Henge are underwhelming in person…
The Con Artist Who Used The Arts As A Glamorous Scam
Anna Delvey’s story is a kind of apotheosis of the “Instagram Effect,” where everyone projects a more perfect, happier life than they actually have via social media, and the envy generated becomes a kind of currency. Her Instagram life is stuffed full of deluxe signifiers and only rare flickers of actual sociality. The sense they cultivate is of a private and exclusive world. They are, in their arid glamor, both self-aggrandizing and kind of haughty, which is the air she projected according to copious testimony from her victims.
The Man Who Invented “Culture”
Burckhardt invented culture as we know it – not just the official “arts”, but any human activity that has symbolic meaning. Newspapers and their websites are still behind Burckhardt on this. Looking for articles about fashion and food? You’ll find them in “lifestyle”. Burckhardt saw these too as culture. Of course, so do we – it would just get hard to organise stuff if it was all classed in one big mix. But everyone knows today that clothes are significant cultural creations and that cooking is about meaning as much as flavour. The amazing thing is how clearly Burckhardt saw it 1860.
US Investigation Into Art Dealer Fell Apart After $450 Million Salvator Mundi Sale
The reasons had been building for months, but the clincher came when the collector, fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev, resold the “Salvator Mundi” for $450 million during last year’s fall art auction season, more than triple the amount he paid, one of the people said. Had the case proceeded, Rybolovlev’s windfall could have enabled the defense to claim that he wasn’t a fraud victim because he profited in the end.
The Radical Subversion Of ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’
“Today, four years after the series initially aired, telling stories about female survivors of sexual violence is more common, yet Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt still explores what it means to be a survivor in ways that are unique. …The explosion of angry women who are ready to shake up the status quo is a testament to a very real cultural mood. Yet the fantastic thing about Kimmy is how the show illustrates the ways that being a kind, feminine, do-gooder is just as badass as being a ball-buster … [and that] warmth, kindness and creativity are actually heroic attributes, rather than the relics of a girlhood that Kimmy never got to entirely experience.”
NEA Gets A New Head Of Its Dance Program
Prior to working at NEFA, Sara Nash managed the USArtists International grant program at Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She also worked as senior producer at Dance Theater Workshop (New York Live Arts) for more than six years, where she oversaw the international program, the Suitcase Fund, and developed residency programs for commissioned artists. Nash’s international experience includes working at Tanec Praha, a contemporary dance festival in Prague, and at the British Council in London.