Trevor Paglen, Blue #3 (Chelsea), detail. C-print, 2016 Stories about architect Louis Kahn‘s legendary tenacity and unwavering devotion to an idea fill the biography of his life by Wendy Lesser, You Say to Brick. Iconic and larger than life, complex while also doggedly singleminded, Kahn is an ongoing symbol of art that comes from relentless […]
Art/Politics
E) All of the Above
Dewey Square in Boston on October 15 On the topic of art and political activism (discussed in my earlier post here): Susana Viola Jacobson, consummate artist and critic, left the following response to that piece. Her thoughts were too good to not share. Very thoughtful piece. I wrestled with this divide for years and finally […]
- Art/Politics
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Both/And
October 15 march and protest in Boston Aligning the work you do with the passions of your heart is not a given. My partner Dave worked for decades before he finally found a way to integrate his professional life with his personal desire to make the world a better place. (His organization, ReachScale, creates public/private […]
Yanking the Chain
Portrait of Eleanor Heartney. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. Eleanor Heartney, art critic and author of Art & Today as well as monographs on Liza Lou, Kenneth Snelson and Roxy Paine among others, has written a short but hard hitting piece on artnet that asks many of the tough questions not being addressed in […]
More on Museum Expansion
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston I just found a spunky rebuttal to the much-discussed article by the Times’ Robin Pogrebin about the recent era of museum overbuilding. Pogrebin’s article is referenced in yesterday’s post, and anyone who has read her piece should also read through Lee Rosenbaum’s article on CultureGrrl, Not Dead Yet: Museum Building […]
You Tell ‘Em, Michelle
Michelle Obama spoke at the ribbon cutting for the opening of the new American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “First Guns” as some like to call our beautifully appendaged wife of the Prez, is as gracious in her remarks here as she is in so many other settings. Face it, during the last […]
Arts Funding, Take 3: Learning from Springsteen
If this topic is worn thin for you, then pass by this posting. I continue to be heartened by the dialogue that has resulted from the arts funding discussion that was launched into the larger public consciousness during the Stimulus Bill process. I am heartened because I agree, with Greg Sandow (whose article in the […]
More on Arts Funding: Art, Entertainment and Rights of Citizenship
Elatia Harris, commenter extraordinaire, left this as a response to a comment left to the post below. Thank you Elatia for your reliably insightful and sense-making point of view. Re: Arts funding: Much depends on whether you think art follows consumer taste or leads it. And on whether you would be happy for art to […]