Category: issues

“The prospect of ‘necessary’ art allows members of the audience to free themselves from having to make choices while offering the critic a nifty shorthand to convey the significance of her task, which may itself be one day condemned as dispensable. The effect is something like an absurd and endless syllabus, constantly updating to remind you of ways you might flunk as a moral being. It’s a slightly subtler version of the 2016 marketing tagline for the first late-night satirical news show with a female host, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee: ‘Watch or you’re sexist.'”

It is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

To the extent that the cultural-appropriation police are urging their targets to respect others who are different, they are saying something that everyone needs to hear. But beyond that, they can plunge into doomed tangles. American popular culture is a mishmash of influences: British Isles, Eastern European, West African, and who knows what else. Cole Porter committed no wrong by borrowing from Jewish music; Elvis Presley enriched the world when he fused country-and-western with rhythm-and-blues.

While the self-proclaimed Resistance debuted with vibrant-pink mass action, the most-distinctive cultural creations that have accompanied it so far—at least in the rapid-response popular mediums of music and TV—haven’t been so fired up. Nor have they been, to use the clichéd dismissals that plenty of political art readily invites, shrill or didactic. Instead, the general drift has been in the spirit of Jeff Rosenstock’s album: self-questioning, tentative, conciliatory, emotional. It is, for better or worse, the art not of a revolution but of a failed revolution.

In most universities nowadays — and this seems to be true almost everywhere — academic staff find themselves spending less and less time studying, teaching, and writing about things, and more and more time measuring, assessing, discussing, and quantifying the way in which they study, teach, and write about things (or the way in which they propose to do so in the future. European universities, reportedly, now spend at least 1.4 billion euros [about 1.7 billion dollars] a year on failed grant applications.). It’s gotten to the point where “admin” now takes up so much of most professors’ time that complaining about it is the default mode of socializing among academic colleagues; indeed, insisting on talking instead about one’s latest research project or course idea is considered somewhat rude.

“Are museums, in fact, the appropriate place for storing these gigantic homages – not even to the Civil War itself – but to the Jim Crow movements that fueled their commissioning and erection on state capitol grounds, university commons, city parks and other places of power in the early decades of the 20th century? We would argue that the ‘put them in a museum’ response to Confederate memorials reflects a misunderstanding of what museums are for – and an effort to sidestep conversations that we really need to have.”

It’s not just sushi and ramen and anime and Marie Kondo. “‘Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future,’ as the author William Gibson wrote in 2001. ‘The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.’ … But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the ‘normal’ milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold. Seventeen years later, America has finally caught up.”

“I think that watching theater is a lot like watching a national championship in that a production, win or lose, is filled with best efforts and spontaneous heroics, and jumping to your feet is a natural response to those valiant exploits. Standing puts actors and audiences on equal footing as partners in a shared experience, where we can finally face each other out of character and out of the darkness, respectively, for a moment of mutual admiration.”

To date, KCUR has confirmed pop writer Tim Finn; photographers Allison Long and David Pulliam; enterprise reporter David Frese; and editors Tod Palmer, Greg Branson, and Michelle Smith, among the layoffs.