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The German Artist Who Uses Her Power To Change Things

Hito Steyerl, this year’s number one in the Art Review Power 100 list, is a filmmaker who also delivers hypnotic lectures and whose ideas influence many other artists and culture creators. “Her previous texts don’t become dated; her ideas keep circulating. …People take her work and build upon it. And she’s not afraid of the truth of her time. That’s important for generations that come after her.”

The 100-Year-Old Writer’s First Live Webchat

Diana Athill is just a few days from her centenary, but – despite some hand injuries that mean she can’t type into a computer – she’s going strong. “Seasoned Athill watchers won’t be surprised to hear that she is at work on a new book – a tale of upward mobility in England as demonstrated through her own family’s rise from country doctors in early 19th-century Yorkshire to wealthy Norfolk landowners. At the centre of the story is her great-grandfather, who was left £44,000 by a grateful patient at a time when doctors were not considered to be gentlemen and such a sum could buy a handsome Queen Anne mansion in a landscaped park.”

With The Purchase Of 21st Century Fox, A Leader Defines His Legacy At Disney

And wow, is this deal going to affect everything in Hollywood. “The film business has not seen significant consolidation in generations — perhaps not since 1935, when 20th Century Pictures and Fox Film merged to form 20th Century Fox, going on to deliver classics like ‘How Green Was My Valley,’ ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Wall Street.’ Now that Disney is a content colossus, analysts expect a wave of Hollywood mergers, as companies like Viacom, CBS, Sony, Lionsgate and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer look to gain scale.”

What If Everything About How We’re Trying To Understand Prejudice Is Wrong?

Well, at least everything about the “implicit” or “unconscious” bias tests that people are taking online, not to mention the “overcoming implicit bias” trainings that almost everyone in the corporate world has to take. “The forgiving notion of unconscious prejudice has become the go-to explanation for all manner of discrimination, but the shaky science behind the IAT suggests this theory isn’t simply easy, but false. And if implicit bias is a weak scapegoat, we must confront the troubling reality that society is still, disturbingly, all too consciously racist and sexist.”

The Arts Council Of England Claims Literary Fiction Is In A Freefalling Crisis

Even genre fiction can’t make up for the dramatic decline in reading. “It’s a much more unforgiving ecosystem for authors of literary fiction today. We inevitably end up with a situation where the people best positioned to write literary fiction are those for whom making a living isn’t an imperative. That has an effect on the diversity of who is writing – we are losing voices, and we don’t want to be in that position.”

Despite 11,000 People Demanding That The Met Remove This Painting, It Won’t – And Shouldn’t

Yes, this artwork can be read as problematic. Jerry Saltz acknowledges that, and then says a lot more: “Even in our rush to protect the innocent, curtail creeps, and assume the moral high ground, art can never abandon paradox. Unlike pornography, which we know it when we see it, Balthus throws us into a nether region of being unsure of what we’re seeing at all. Even if it’s only coy, that’s still not all that it is.”

Charles Dickens May Have Invented The Christmas Feast, But Many Of His Literary Food Sources Are ‘Unclean’ And Meant To Inspire Social Action

The morality of food is a battlefield now, and it was 150 years ago, when Dickens published A Christmas Carol, as well: “Dickens’s most abiding influence is his conviction that everybody has the right to sit down together and enjoy the same food. Crucially, the Cratchits’ Christmas was not part of any ecclesiastical or charitable space but enjoyed by a poor family in their own home. Dickens was challenging a culture that regarded food as necessarily exclusive. These are conflicts in a war for status and control, in which food is deployed to show that ‘you are what you eat.'”

A New Space For ‘Provocative’ Contemporary Art, Just Two Miles From Mar-A-Lago

Beth Rudin DeWoody, “who is president of the Rudin Family Foundations and on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hammer Museum, owns more than 10,000 pieces of art, including a vast array of work that is lyrical, artisanal and playful. But she has a special fondness for the big button-pushers that other collectors of her caliber might be more inclined to eschew. ‘I think art should be provocative,’ she said.”