Teju Cole takes note of Taryn Simon’s work, and makes marching orders for our time: “We don’t turn to history because it is demonstrably relevant, and we don’t look at art only because it is monumental or beautiful.”
Tag: 11.29.16
Oops! One Of Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dogs Got Smashed To Pieces At Art Basel Miami
“‘It just fell out of the display,’ said Ally Shapiro, one of the few collectors who witnessed the incident and snapped the above iPhone photo. ‘The girl standing next to it had it cleaned up in five seconds.'”
Arena Stage Launches Program To Develop 25 New Shows About Politics And Power (Oddly, That’s A Rarity In D.C.)
“Although the notion may sound like a no-brainer – presenting plays in Washington about the effect of decisions reached in the White House or on Capitol Hill – in actuality, there has long been a reluctance on the parts of many theaters here to concentrate too much on political topics.” Now the District’s leading resident theater is aiming to change that.
New York’s Middle Class Galleries Are Being Squeezed Out
“So where does that leave the middle class, those galleries in Chelsea and on the Lower East Side that have been around long enough to be somewhat established, but still have to sell enough to make rent? Now, they have to deal with a perfect storm of gallery-killing factors: a market cooling from top to bottom, plummeting prices for onetime hit artists who minted money for mid-tier galleries just two years ago, the chokehold of fair booth prices, skyrocketing rents in neighborhoods where buying a building is unthinkable.”
William Christenberry, 80, Photographer Who Captured Alabama’s Lushness And Decay With A Kodak Brownie
“The small photographs for which he became renowned evoke a vanishing world populated almost solely by dilapidated buildings, rusting automobiles, advertising signs, graves and vegetation growing out of control.” As historian and former NEH chair William Ferris put it, “What Faulkner has done in his fiction, Christenberry has done in his photography.”
British Army To Form New Unit Of Monuments Men And Women
The looting and destruction of art, architecture, rare manuscripts, and ancient heritage by ISIS (among other evildoers) has moved the U.K. Ministry of Defence to set up a present-day version of the heroic archaeologists and art historians (don’t you love that phrase?) who saved and identified countless treasures at the end of World War II.
What Makes So Many Sex Scenes In Literature So Bad? Let The Bad Sex In Fiction Award Guy Tell You
“Unlike bad sex, which is often obviously recognizable, bad sex writing can be hard to define … When describing sex, [spokesperson Frank] Brinkley says, authors feel moved to put a strain on language they wouldn’t ordinarily.”
1000 Prominent Canadian Artists Petition Government To “Fix” The Business Of Creativity
They argue that despite their creativity and innovation, many of them are being squeezed out of a marketplace that monetizes digital distribution without fairly paying content creators: “The middle-class artist is being eliminated from the Canadian economy. Full-time creativity is becoming a thing of the past,” the letter says. “The carefully designed laws and regulations of the 1990s were intended to ensure that both Canadian creators and technological innovators would benefit from digital developments. We hoped that new technology would enrich the cultural experiences for artists and consumers alike. Unfortunately, this has not happened,” the letter continues.
Reinvent Canada’s CBC Model? What A Cranky Idea!
“The idea that CBC television and radio is a frivolity, sucking up vast amounts of money to make bad TV and irrelevant radio, is the position of a small number of well-off cranks in Toronto and Montreal, aided by a number of other cranks who, one imagines, stave off personal wretchedness by ceaselessly pointing out that the CBC gets funding to make TV and radio, while they don’t.”
What It’s Like To Be A Political Cartoonist Who’s Regularly Charged With Sedition
A Q&A with Malaysian cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Ulhaque, known as Zunar, who’s facing nine charges of sedition (so far), and up to 40 years in prison, for cartoons about the country’s embattled prime minister.