Should we care if art doesn’t reach the people who might learn something, reconsider a point of view, or see the dangers of a current value or belief?
Category: issues
The Kennedy Center Honors Have Been Politicized. It May Be Difficult To Restore Their Place
“The Honors may be governed and selected by a nonprofit institution occupying a national memorial, but they are what passes in this country for knighthoods for the performing arts: the highest-profile awards bestowed for lifetime achievement in popular and high culture. Now that the culture wars have intervened, stoked by a president who has alienated many artists throughout the nation, one wonders whether the political taint will be so easily removed.”
Richard Florida’s Creative Class Problem
After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich.
Cambridge University Press Knuckles Under To Pressure From The Chinese Government
This is not great: “In a letter made public on social media on Friday, the editor of the journal, Tim Pringle, said Cambridge University Press had informed him that the authorities had ordered it to censor more than 300 articles related to issues like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and the Cultural Revolution. The publishing house’s site risked being shut down if it did not comply with the request, the letter said.”
The NYT’s Holland Cotter: Don’t Destroy Confederate Monuments
The resident art critic says to move them instead. “My reasons are pragmatic. When you find yourself at a crime scene, you don’t destroy evidence. You preserve it for the prosecution. In the case of images like this, the prosecutor is history, and the trial may be a long one, stretching far into the future, with many witnesses called. Rush to judgment and drastic action should be resisted.”
Why The President’s Arts And Humanities Council Quit As A Group
Kal Penn: “It became clear that the government became inoperative under this particular presidency. A lot of the work and the agencies have been frozen. There’s a big waste of taxpayer dollars. We had hope, but the president made comments that quite literally were in support of the domestic terrorists. It’s one thing to say you want to serve the programs you were appointed to serve, regardless of politics, but after a certain point . . . we just don’t want our names attached to this in any way.”
Decay Of Our Culture Comes When We Decline To Celebrate Humanity’s Best Accomplishments
“We allow our great cultural institutions to fall into disrepair and disrepute because, as we strip them of their reverential traditions and their arduous canon, we also strip them of our reasons to cherish them. We call them before the tribunal of public opinion to justify their very existence, as if we can no longer see through the smog to the heights of Parnassus, lonelier than ever because we have forgotten that it is even there. We attempt to chain the Muses to the machinery of our modern malaise, as if we do not remember that they exist to show us the way to transcend that malaise, to find our way home again, by way of that steep and difficult climb, to the bosom of art and learning.”
Juha, For 1,200 Years The Hero Of The Arab World’s Favorite Jokes
“[The] wise old fool, [with] his long-suffering donkey … has been a part of local culture for centuries – and has proved useful to Arab jokers and satirists right up until the modern day.”
Members Of President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities Resign En Masse
“Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions,” the letter states. “We took a patriotic oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.”
Spectacle Of Hate: What We Can Learn From White Supremacists’ Long And Careful Cultivation Of Their Own Aesthetic
“The alt-right’s Tiki-torch, khaki-pants parade on Friday night has birthed many a ‘Hitler luau’ joke.” Yet, explains Rebecca Onion, white supremacist groups in the US, especially the two incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan, have a long history of deliberately making their physical appearance silly and using that silliness to help them get away with mayhem and murder.