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It all comes down to that urge to fascism — maybe a big word to use for art, but I think the right word — it comes down to that urge to fascism to know what’s best for people, to know that some people are of the best and some people are of the worst; the urge to separate the good from the bad and to praise oneself; to decide what covers on what books people ought to read, what songs people ought to be moved by, what art they ought to make, an urge that makes art into a set of laws that take away your freedom rather than a kind of activity that creates freedom or reveals it. It all comes down to the notion that, in the end, there is a social explanation for art, which is to say an explanation of what kind of art you should be ashamed of and what kind of art you should be proud of. It’s the reduction of the mystery of art, where it comes from, where it goes…In his fantastic SVA commencement address, cultural critic Greil Marcus addresses the recent Gatsby cover controversy and what it tells us about the perilous division between “high” and “low” culture.
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“When you step away from the prepackaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.” -
Adolph Gottlieb, Equinox, 1963
From the Phillips Collection:
Once he felt he had exhausted the myriad possibilities of his pictographs, Gottlieb began to simplify his symbols and composition in order to enhance his theme of universality. By the 1960s, he was creating paintings like Equinox, in which the grid is reduced to an implied (although occasionally delineated) horizontal division that separates the image into two halves. Within each half, a few shapes—circles, squares, or calligraphic gestures—float against a field of color, vying for focal supremacy. Gottlieb creates a tension between the two forms struggling against each other, but in their balance and containment within a field of color, he also achieves a harmonious resolution.
Duncan Phillips acquired his two examples of Gottlieb’s work soon after each was painted, evidence of his appreciation of his art. Although no specific reference to Gottlieb appears in Phillips’s surviving writings, he could have had Gottlieb in mind when he declared in 1955, “I admire the aesthetic interpretations of the age we live in—even the symbols for the anarchy, the turmoil and the inner tensions.”
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“Be contemporary. Have impact. Strive for it. Be of the world. Move it. Be bold, don’t hold back. Then the moment you think you’ve been bold, be bolder. We are all alive today, ever so briefly here now, not then, not ago, not in some dreamworld of a hypothetical future. Whatever you do, you must make it contemporary. Make it matter now. You must give us a new path to tread, even if it carries the footfalls of old soles. You must not be immune to the weird urgency of today.” —Wisdom from Ian Bogost’s commencement address at the University of Iowa, a fine addition to this ongoing archive of timeless advice. Pair with Greil Marcus’s fantastic 2013 School of Visual Arts commencement address.
(↬ austinkleon)
(via explore-blog)
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Mummiform Figure of Osiris
The inscription identifies this figure as Osiris. He wears the crown of ostrich feathers, a sun-disk, and the ram’s horns that identify him as a king. Yet he is also in the form of a mummy with the curled beard worn by the dead.
The figure stands on a hollow base. Originally, a papyrus with a spell written on it was stored in the base. When this figure and papyrus were placed in the tomb, the deceased enjoyed the protection of Osiris and of the spell.- Medium: Wood, painted
- Place Made: Egypt
- Dates: 664-332 B.C.E.
- Period: Late Period (probably)
- Brooklyn Museum
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Isis, the Mother of Apis
Associated with fertility, generation, and resurrection, the Apis bull was prominent throughout the long history of ancient Egyptian religion. Originally the bull, as all other animals, was revered as the manifestation of certain divine powers and was not itself a deity. Later, however, the Apis was in fact worshiped. Through its connotations of potency and renewal, it was associated with the gods Ptah and Osiris and with royal ritual. Isis, the wife of Osiris, is shown here in her role as mother of Apis. She is identified by her long cow’s horns, distinct from the Apis’s shorter set. This bronze item may have been a finial or fitting for the end of a carrying pole that bore a portable shrine of the Apis.
- Medium: Bronze
- Place Made: Egypt
- Dates: ca. 670-332 B.C.E.
- Dynasty: late XXV Dynasty to early XXVI Dynasty
- Period: Third Intermediate Period to Late Period
- Brooklyn Museum
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“ What I went looking for was an answer to a deeper question about the metaphoric holes left in a person, a family or a community by murderous acts, whether by guns, knives, or bare hands. If nothing else, talking about guns can serve as a beacon, starting me on the road toward answering the question: Why do Americans kill so much?
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There are two kinds of social capital—bonding and bridging—and each impact a society differently. Bonding capital is what you get within a given group. These tend to be closer and more reliable bonds that form the foundation of our social capital. Yet bonding social capital is not always positive: Tight-knit groups can turn insular, reaching their logical conclusion in gangs and militias but with negative effects found in everything from families to groups of friends to certain kinds of religious communities.
In contrast, bridging social capital reaches across a societal divide such as race, region or religion and is by nature weak. But it also promotes empathy and tolerance and enlarges our radius of trust, allowing us to see other people as people, not as a faceless other.
This sense of bridging a divide is especially important in the U.S. because, contrary to popular opinion, we regularly put the needs of the group ahead of the needs of the individual in a way Europeans don’t. In surveys, Western Europeans are more likely than Americans to say citizens should follow their conscience and break an unjust law or that citizens should defy their homeland if they believe their country is acting immorally.
On the other hand, Americans are more likely to believe they control their own fate and to believe in a more laissez-faire relationship with the state. It’s a more complex mix than our myths allow for, and the end result is that it can be hard to fathom just how different Americans are from the rest of the world.
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Perhaps, like a true original sin, groups in power in the U.S. have systematically destroyed social capital in vulnerable communities and between groups of all kinds in order to gain wealth and power and deny it to others. And perhaps they have done this in more ruthless fashion than in other comparable cultures. This could explain why the murder rate in New York has been more than five times higher than London’s for 200 years, though the American propensity for violence reaches even farther back than that, going all the way back to frantic religious refugees with visions of the Apocalypse both at their back and before their eyes.
”—Bad Land – Nathan Hegendus explores the social psychology underpinning gun culture in America.
Also see Stephen King on gun control and violence.
(via explore-blog)
(via explore-blog)
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Indigenous people of Brazil trying to prevent their eviction from an old indigenous museum which they have been living in for the past 7 years.
On March 22nd all of the inhabitants and their supporters were forcibly removed or arrested.
The building is being destroyed to make a parking lot :(
(via blackcontemporaryart)
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John Ashbery, “Summer Dream.”
In 2008, Ashbery returned to collage work, an art form he hadn’t worked with since the 1970s. As Dan Chiasson wrote in issue 188’s portfolio, “Collage is an art of time, like poetry. … These collages are a collaboration across decades: like Ashbery’s poems, they are a way of keeping time an open question.”
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Meta is Murder: Free Will and the Fallibility of Science One of the most significant intellectual errors educated persons make is in underestimating the fallibility of science. The very best scientific theories containing our soundest, most reliable knowledge are certain to be superseded, recategorized from “right” to “wrong”; they are, as physicist …
