Category: issues

Over the stretch of a millennium we see the impact of previous weather cycles—periods of extreme cold, of drought, of floods, of time when the Thames froze over—and the impression made by such momentary oddities as meteors or rainbows. In past centuries, these might be read as signs from God: tokens of punishment or reminders of the need for fortitude. By the later 19th century, Hardy could use the rain that falls on a grave as a pointer to nature’s indifference; an indifference that is there, too, in the “Time Passes” section of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The meaning of English weather changed as the English themselves changed.

“Olympic medals for the world’s best art seems an odd thing to revive, but a brave and no doubt well-intentioned Canadian organization is bringing back the idea of an international art competition nominally tied to or modelled on the Olympics. They hope to hold the International ArtsGames in Montreal in 2018.”

“Workers arrived bearing concrete, propaganda banners and metal scaffolding. They smoothed concrete over the names of victims, wrapped ‘Socialist Core Values’ banners around the main exhibition hall, placed red-and-yellow propaganda posters over stone memorials to the terror, and raised scaffolding around statues of critics of Mao.”

“Readers called the alleged scoop an intrusion into the life of one of the world’s most influential female writers. Some were afraid it would stop Ferrante from ever writing again, saying the story had been driven by the ego of the reporter and the New York Review of Books.” (The alleged author is identified in this article as well.)

“Fifty-two percent of the books challenged or banned in the last 10 years feature so-called “diverse content”—that is, they explore issues such as race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental illness, and disability.”

“The American theatregoing public doesn’t even know about what it isn’t allowed to see.”

“Art just can’t be reduced to a commodity good. We also know that artists and creative placemaking have to be at the core of what we’re doing to rethink our economy in West Virginia.”

“Numerous studies in behavioural psychology show how our individual conviction of what is true or right quails before the massed pressure of our peers.”

African-American artist Damon Davis on the work of Kelley Walker: “I sat in the audience listening to this man meander on and on to the crowd, interjecting the occasional art term like ‘form’ or ‘color,’ but never once giving the slightest explanation for why he used over-sexualized images of Black women and traumatic images of Black men being brutalized by police and dogs. … Now, what if I took pictures from the Holocaust and smeared cream cheese on them and threw them in a frame, and then told you it was a critique of capitalism and an exercise in color and the form of the contemporary modernist landscape?”