Category: issues

“The contempt of artists for critics is, of course, understandable. To create an artwork is to give the world a kind of gift, and no one likes having a gift rejected, or even inspected too carefully. … [Yet] once a work of art emerges from its creator’s study or studio, it becomes the possession of anyone who interacts with it, and therefore it is open to judgment: Do I actually derive pleasure and enlightenment from it? … Every reader or viewer or listener asks it, whether they want to or not. A critic is just a reader or viewer or listener who makes the question explicit and tries to answer it publicly, for the benefit of other potential readers or viewers or listeners. In doing so, she operates on the assumption that the audience for a work, the recipient of a gift, is entitled to make a judgment on its worth.”

“What quicker way to make ordinary people into heroes and villains than to turn the weather against them and destroy everything they know?” Science Speculative fiction novelist Anna North looks at how works of fiction are envisioning the all-too-real possibilities of what could happen to Earth and its people as the stuff humans have been putting into the air keep accumulating.

“The Innerbelt National Forest is the idea of Hunter Franks, a San Francisco-based artist who has been working in the Akron community since 2015. He plans to populate the freeway with potted plants, public seating, and programming meant to reconnect the two communities severed by the freeway 40 years ago. The project just received a Knight Cities Challenge grant, which is giving $15 million to projects in 26 American cities.”

Kenan Malik (a non-white writer, if you were wondering): “Appropriation suggests theft, and a process analogous to the seizure of land or artifacts. In the case of culture, however, what is called appropriation is not theft but messy interaction. Writers and artists necessarily engage with the experiences of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one. … [And] who does the policing?”

The new study from Giving USA reports that much of the increase comes from small donors and that donations to the arts, culture and humanities category grew by 5.1%, behind only environmental and animal-welfare organizations.

“Its history suggests that the midcentury intellectuals whose work filled the pages of these journals, brilliant though they were, should not have their status inflated to the point of distortion. Ironically, the same thing that made them important — their ability to participate in a seemingly world-historic conflict of ideas — was what compromised their integrity.”

“New York art patron Agnes Gund has sold a record-smashing $165 million Roy Lichtenstein painting to create a fund to help address mass incarceration in the United States. Some $100 million from that sale will establish the Art for Justice Fund, to be managed by the Ford Foundation, which aims to raise another $100 million over the next five years, partly from art sales. Gund has thus thrown down the gauntlet to other art collectors to unload their assets to address critical issues of social justice.”

“The institution, which opened a $150 million building on Independence Mall in 2010, laid off 12 staff members outright on Friday. Other positions, now empty, will not be filled; others will be made part-time or consolidated. All told, 18 of the museum’s 50 full-time staff positions will be eliminated.”

“Madeleine Rast became a supporter of the National Museum of Women in the Arts before it opened its doors in 1987, and she remained a loyal and generous donor throughout her life. But the California business professional, who died on Jan. 29 at 92, saved her biggest gift for last.”