Category: issues

Do Cuba’s Abandoned Arts Schools Hold The Key To Its Future?

“It is difficult to separate the history of the Cuban Revolution from the fate of the National Art Schools as they themselves were building revolutionary desire. During their abandonment, over the course of decades, nature returned. This time it was not the scenic nature of the old golf course, but the greed of vines, lianas trees, animals, and flooding.”

Can We Rewire Our Brains Not To Be Racist?

“According to the Implicit Association Test, most white Americans are biased against black people, as measured by the amount of time it takes them to associate positive words with images of black, compared to white, people. So how do you undo biases that are so ubiquitous that even very young children buy into them, yet so dark that few people will acknowledge them?”

Headphones, Headphones Everywhere – Are They Changing Everything?

“Certainly, headphones are an obvious method of exercising autonomy, control – choosing what you’ll hear and when, rather than gamely enduring whatever the environment might inflict upon you. In that way, they are defensive; users insist upon privacy (you can’t hear what I hear, and I can’t hear you) in otherwise lawless and unpredictable spaces. Should we think of headphones, then, as just another emblem of catastrophic social decline, a tool that edges us even deeper into narcissism, solipsism, vast unsociability? Another signifier of that most plainly American ideology: independence at any cost?”

How Pokemon Go Took Over The World In A Week (And What It Means)

“If Pokémon Go does represent a sea change in augmented reality, then it’s one that’s going to force us to rethink our approach to designed spaces, public and private. So many of the places people gather center on communal tragedy or reverence: funerals, war memorials, religion. What do you do when someone whips out their phone to catch a Geodude at the Holocaust Memorial? Or, as is apparently already happening, Auschwitz? Games, with the weight they bear—of play, of fun—might have once seemed inappropriate for those places. But now those places are squares on the game grid.”

The Term “Modernism” Gets Thrown Around A Lot. But What Does It Actually Mean

“What remains unresolved — at once exciting and haunting — is a central paradox in the field. Scan the program of any recent conference of the Modernist Studies Association, the titles of articles published in Modernism/modernity, or the monographs published in the field (at least a half-dozen presses have initiated series in modernist studies in the past decade, with more coming), and one will similarly find “modernism” endlessly modified by prefixes.”

There Is Badness In The World. We’re Closer To It Than Ever. How To Deal With It?

“Social media makes the joy, suffering and anger of millions of people feel like our own. That is empowering and overwhelming. Social media also gives us the illusion that we can be effective merely by talking or feeling. The technology of this new form of mass communion has probably developed faster than our emotional capacity to process it. We do, however, have a tried and true method of communion with other people, the past and things that are foreign or unsettling to us: These include art and literature and honest colloquy, in which people speak not for victory but for truth and understanding.”

Some Countries Support Artists Directly (But There Are Tradeoffs)

“Whether or not artistry is a formal profession in the eyes of the state, and what states do or don’t do to support that profession, reflects different agendas within different political systems. While the American model mostly distributes public funding for the arts indirectly, via tax deductions for nonprofit organizations and their donors, many other governments provide substantial direct support to individual artists.”