Culture workers–artists, curators, museums, galleries, and even collectors–will need to choose their weapons well at this highly charged cultural crossroads. Will a paintbrush, pencil, theater, soup kitchen, computer, parade, YouTube, or even cash suffice to forge meaningful change? My guess is the means of engagement will inevitably evolve to match the challenge, but that won’t include simply “liking” a picture of a naked and pregnant Trump in the arms of Vladimir Putin.
Read MoreFor this Reader Advisor, I have been thinking a lot about resources and strategies of self-care and healing. Some are experiencing their first time being politically active, others are continuing on their marathon. Being constantly politically active, immersed, and empathetic will likely be draining for most people.
Read MoreResponding to Aldouri’s mandate to make art mean something again, not just produced for First Friday consumption, might we be able to create the requisite “distance from the imperative to make and exhibit” by rediscovering the energies that animated Plato, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and subsequent moral philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and secular humanists to engage in the agony of confronting art with morality, thereby suspending this malignant “superabundance of production”?
Read MoreIn 1948, The New Yorker published a story about idyllic small town America where everyone knows everyone’s name. Each year those names are placed into a box and townspeople gather as one name is retrieved and the owner of that name is then publicly stoned to death. The story is The Lottery, and it remains Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece.
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