The signatories include art historians like Lucy Lippard and Hal Foster, and artists as well, in the wake of the final meeting of NY’s Mayoral Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. “These monuments are an affront in a city whose elected officials preach tolerance and equity. … We encourage the Commission to seize this opportunity to make a brave, even monumental, gesture that will resonate for generations to come, rather than a politically expedient fix that will be easily absorbed — and quickly forgotten — by the status quo.”
Tag: 12.01.17
The Orchestra Of Broken Instruments Shows What Happens When School Funding Gets Cut
Composer David Lang wrote the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra, and “more than 1,500 broken musical instruments have been sourced from the dusty corridors of the School District of Philadelphia, which has no budget to fix them.”
Restoring The Longest Painting In America
“The quarter-mile-long (0.4-kilometer-long) panorama toured the U.S. after it was completed in 1848. A section was featured at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. But the panorama deteriorated after so much traveling on wagons and trains, rolling and unrolling. Paint dried up and flaked off, and the panorama was put into storage.”
This Is What Happens When You Put A Price On Everything
“Arguments from economic rationality can obscure as much as they reveal. For if capitalism meant the transformation of land and lives into units of wealth-producing human capital, it also meant the transformation of sickness and death into a currency of wealth-reducing decapitalization. And this poses a question: wealth for whom?”