Ai Weiwei On Censorship

Given that there can be few contemporary artists who have thought more about censorship – its goals, techniques, efficacy – than Ai, it’s inevitable this new book, which runs to fewer than 90 pages, will be read as his distilled wisdom on the topic. Censorship, he asserts, is no new phenomenon: during the Shang dynasty (1600-1046BC) a saying emerged – “the great affairs of the state are worship and military bases”.

But Ai’s main argument is that censorship is neither a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, nor something confined to “countries defined as autocratic and authoritarian”. In the west – “the so-called free world”, with its “ostensibly democratic societies” – free speech is a chimera, regulated through “more covert, more deceptive and more corrosive” means. Flexing his rhetoric, he describes censorship “as both an indispensable tool of mental enslavement and a fundamental source of political corruption”. Sukhdev Sandhu, The Guardian

On Censorship by Ai Weiwei is published by Thames & Hudson 

Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168

Executive Order 14168, issued on 20 January, is titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. In the book I published last year, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I noted that the campaign against ‘gender ideology’ was very late to gain ground in the US. The term itself was coined by the Vatican back in the 1990s. It was circulated in Latin America by both Catholic and evangelical churches (thus helping to mend a rift between them), and taken up by the World Congress of Families, especially in 2017, when Trump representatives were in attendance. It was an incendiary topic in presidential campaigns in Costa Rica, Uganda, South Korea, Taiwan, France, Italy, Argentina and Brazil, to name a few, though the US press hardly noticed. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán effectively allied with the Russian Orthodox Church in condemning ‘gender ideology’; in turn, Putin declared his fidelity to J.K. Rowling’s critique of trans rights, asserting that the ‘gender freedoms’ associated with ‘the West’ were a threat to Russia’s spiritual essence and national security. The last two popes have both taken a position against gender ideology; Pope Francis, despite his occasional progressivism, has accelerated the discourse, insisting that gender is a threat to men and women, to civilisation, the family and the natural order of human relations. Judith Butler, lrb

Judith Butler è una filosofa americana, insegna a Berkeley.

Meet the Italian ‘Fruit Detective’

When Isabella Dalla Ragione assesses a Renaissance painting, she doesn’t immediately notice the brushstrokes or the magnificence of the imagery. The first thing she notices is the fruit.

She steers us to one more Madonna with Child, the center of an altarpiece painted by Bernardino di Betto, better known as Pintoricchio, in 1495 or 1496. It is all glimmering blues and reds and golds. “Look, there,” she exclaims, pointing to the bottom of the painting. At the Madonna’s feet, just off the gold hem of her azure robe, are three gnarly looking apples—oddly shaped varieties you’d never see in a market today. 

For most viewers, they would be an afterthought. For Dalla Ragione, the apples, including a variety known in the fruit science lexicon as api piccola, represent a key to restoring Italy’s disappearing fruit agriculture, with characteristics not found in today’s apples: Crunchy and tart, they are capable of being stored at room temperature for about seven months and maintain their best qualities outside the fridge. Mark Schapiro, Smithsonian

Science meets art in Brown engineering course

Using the scientific principles behind fluid mechanics, students in a School of Engineering course produced stunning imagery brought to life via high-speed photography.

Conducting the experiment as part of Engineering 0350: Art Fluid Engineering, the students’ goal was to capture stunning imagery, using high-speed photography, of the different ways liquids can splash. The end product is meant to show how the work of scientists and engineers, and the fundamental laws and principles they rely on, can also be applied to artistic creation. News from Brown

Buon Natale!

One of our editors remarked that your cover looked like an advent calendar, and I thought, that’s what every cover should feel like, the anticipation of what’s going to be inside. How did you come up with the idea of staging a kitchen?

I found the assignment inspiring: nothing too sweet or seasonal, no Santa, nothing too predictable. Drawing scenes from the everyday fascinates me. The isometric perspective had to be there too, so I can put as much as possible into in an illustration. I love to look in every corner of a room and peek through an open door or window. My idea was to look behind the scenes: the preparing and cleaning of the home for guests. The other—annoying—side of the holidays. So I thought showing a kitchen with all the cooking and shopping and setting the table, all this going on at the same time as the owner has to answer the door to receive parcels from the postman, would best illustrate the “Holidays.” Sophia Martineck, illustratrice berlinese, intervistata da Leanne Shapton, The New York Review of Books

auguro a tutti un buon Natale in cucine allegre, calde, disordinate, rumorose e odorose!

Verdi’s Jewish Opera Grandly Staged at the Metropolitan

Nabucco is widely seen as a political opera. But while Verdi’s nationalist operas have mostly dropped out of the repertory of major venues, Nabucco is still performed widely, in part because it has better music, and also because it is not so much a nationalist opera as a religious one. With the arguable exception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Nabucco is the most Jewish of operas, with a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the First Exile. David P. Goldman, Tablet

Baritone George Gagnidze makes his Met role debut as the imperious king Nabucco, alongside soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska reprising her thrilling turn as his vengeful daughter Abigaille. Mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova and tenor SeokJong Baek, in his company debut, are Fenena and Ismaele, whose love transcends politics, and bass Dmitry Belosselskiy repeats his celebrated portrayal of the high priest Zaccaria. Daniele Callegari conducts Verdi’s exhilarating early masterpiece, which features the ultimate showcase for the great Met Chorus, the moving “Va, pensiero.” Al Metropolitan fino al prossimo 26 gennaio.

Edward Hopper’s New York

A lot of things go missing in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Most notably, it’s people. In the first half of the 20th century, he painted New York when it was the largest city in the world, yet his streets are often empty, or haunted by only a few isolated figures. New York was then, as it is now, a diverse city, rich with racial and ethnographic diversity, but that, too, is absent in Hopper’s imagination. Philip Kennicott, WP

Edward Hopper’s New York Through March 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad

The dismissal of an instructor at Hamline University on baseless charges of 'Islamophobia' raises concerns about freedom on campus.

[...] Through conflation or confusion, Hamline has privileged an ultraconservative Muslim view on the subject that happens to coincide with the age-old Western cliche that Muslims are banned from viewing images of the prophet. This Muslim traditionalist and American Orientalist “echo chamber” is not just simplistic and counterfactual; it also muzzles all other voices while potentially endangering rare and precious works of Islamic art. Christiane Gruber, New Lines Magazine

una discussione molto interessante sul bigottismo ora in corso in molte università americane. Spesso purtroppo l'ignoranza porta ad appoggiare posizioni retrive.

Edward Hopper’s New York

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was the painter of small-town America. This we know. That his small town happened to be New York City, his home for nearly sixty years, we may not know. “Edward Hopper’s New York,” now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, tells the hometown story of an artist we thought we knew all along in a novel and illuminating way. [...] 

Hopper treated New York as his own small town. James Panero, The New Criterion

“Edward Hopper’s New York” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on October 19, 2022, and remains on view through March 5, 2023.

e con questa mostra che si prospetta molto interessante auguro a tutti un felice 2023! 

Diane Arbus e Yuval Noah Harari

hanno molto poco in comune, se non che questa settimana ho trovato due articoli interessanti su di loro, e quindi si trovano, qui, in compagnia.

On the other hand, in Arbus’ case, the photograph might be the weapon. To enter Cataclysm—a facsimile of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition that so disturbed Sontag, staged on its 50th anniversary by the David Zwirner galley—is to be zapped across the room by the close-ups on the opposite wall. Tightly framed (or cropped), Arbus’ subjects typically stare directly into the camera. The show is something of a confrontation. J. Hoberman, Tablet

in occasione di una mostra: "Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited" at David Zwirner from September 14 through October 22, 2022, at 537 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011

e su Hariri:

The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors. Darshana Narayanan, Current Affairs

Texting etiquette

It’s ironic. Texting was meant to make communication easier, but it can be much harder to discern someone’s tone over text, especially with inflections as subtle as sarcasm. 

It’s not as straightforward as tacking a crying-laughing-face emoji onto the end of a message either—sorry, but you are officially Old if you unironically use emojis. Your options are “lol” (which can sometimes come across as quite passive aggressive), “haha” (again, this sounds too abrupt), or, my personal favourite, “lmao” (which translates as a hyperbolic but less blunt “laughing my ass off,” for those who didn’t know). That said—“loool” or “hahahaha” are also good options. Serena Smith, Prospect

in effetti mi rendo conto di quanto siamo diventati bravi a individuare le emozioni nei messaggini! Sempre riguardo la nuova tecnologia e la sua ingerenza ovunque, anche nei sentimenti e nell'arte, da leggere l'articolo di John Herrman intitolato "Intelligencer" sul New York Magazine.

infine un bell'articolo sul lavoro che sta dietro all'uscita di un'opera letteraria straniera (scouting, traduzione, editing, ecc.), "Breaking Into English" di Lily Meyer, Los Angeles Review of Books 

The Sketchbook Project

The Sketchbook Project è un interessante progetto della Brooklyn Art Library. "Zucker and Peterman started the Sketchbook Project out of frustration with a gallery culture that seemed exploitative and exclusive. “We wanted to create a community anti-gallery space that was inclusive of everyone that wanted to be a part of it,” Peterman told me. They were working on a few crowdsourced art projects at the time (they also tried soliciting photos, and mailing out canvases for people to paint on), but the sketchbook collection attracted a surprising amount of enthusiasm and quickly took over their business: now roughly thirty-four thousand sketchbooks line the walls of the Brooklyn Art Library, and about half of those are scanned in the online archive. In the project’s busiest years, the number of people requesting blank books has neared fourteen thousand". Jordan Kisner, newyorker.

Libri d'arte gratis

Dal sito del Metropolitan Museum si possono scaricare più di 400 libri d'arte gratuitamente. Come:

The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry

Husband, Timothy Bates, with an essay by Margaret Lawson (2008)

This title is out of print. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Arts.

The Killing of the Creative Class

Scott Timberg, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press). Ecco qualche dato sconcertante, e triste: "Over the past two decades, the number of English majors graduating from Yale University has plummeted by 60 percent; at Stanford University in 2013, only 15 percent of students majored in the humanities. In American universities, more than 50 percent of faculty is adjuncts, pittance-paid laborers with no medical insurance and barely a prayer to bolster them. In the publishing and journalism trades, 260,000 jobs were nixed between 2007 and 2009. Since the turn of the century, around 80 percent of cultural critics writing for newspapers have lost their jobs. There are only two remaining full-time dance critics in the entire United States of America. A not untypical yearly salary in 2008 for a professional dancer was $15,000". William Giraldi, newrepublic.

When Did the Art World Get So Conservative?

Un titolo interessante, che pone una domanda che anch'io mi sono chiesta molte volte (in Italia il clima intellettuale è particolarmente soffocante). Vale la pena leggere l'articolo del critico d'arte newyorkese Jerry Saltz.

"First and foremost, the art world is a place that says it wants people to be free. This extraordinary openness is what gives art its ever-changing adaptable agency. Or gave.
Flexibility is life, but lately I keep thinking that the art world has gotten a lot less flexible, and the freedom that I've always thought of as completely foundational — freedom to let our freak flags fly and express ourselves, even bizarrely — has constricted considerably. And it’s happening at such mutated and extreme rates that we must ask if the art world is not now one of the more self-policing areas of contemporary culture. How did we come to live in an insular tribal sphere where unwritten rules and rigid moralities — about whom to like and dislike, what is permissible to say and what must remain unsaid — are strictly enforced via social media and online disapproval, much of it anonymous? When did this band of gypsies and relentless radicals get so conservative?" volture.

Dorothea Tanning

Qualche giorno fa è morta Dorothea Tanning, a 101 anni. Di solito era ricordata come moglie di Max Ernst, ma pare fosse un'artista più vigorosa del marito. Ed era anche una scrittrice e una poetessa di talento. Dan Chiasson parla dell'ultimo libro di poesie da lei scritto lo scorso autunno e che rivela una sensibilità molto particolare: "What struck me - besides the extraordinary fact of having the sensorium of a centenarian represented for almost the first time in history - was the nonchalance of her poems, their modesty. It wasn't as if Tanning had been dying all this time to say anything in particular; there was no triumph or despair; these poems dispensed no great wisdom or inspiration. They were rather, in a lovely and surprising way, emotional weather reports. Her great subject was the paradox of having run out of reinventions; everything she had made up to then, she knew, would be followed by other 'takes' and views. These poems were true to her impressions, her final impressions. We'll wait a long time for another book precisely like it. newyorker.

The Line

Nel 1954, Saul Steinberg fece un disegno per la decima edizione della Triennale di Milano. Il disegno si intitolava, "The Line", ed era costituito da un'unica linea lunga dieci metri e da 29 pannelli che si piegavano a fisarmonica. Con quella linea Steinberg aveva ricavato una multitudine di scene: un bucato steso, città che si riflettono in un fiume, donne che suonano la chitarra, e il suo famoso gatto. Questo disegno fu poi ingrandito e inciso sulle pareti di un labirinto (che non c'è più) a Milano. Ed è stato ora ristampato in un un elegante foglio piegato a fisarmonica dalla steinberg foundation.

Making Money

Nel 1981 Andy Warhol regalò a Berkeley Reinhold, la figlia di John Reinhold, un caro amico collezionista d'arte e mercante di diamanti, un libro di disegni del simbolo del dollaro su carta bianca. Di questi disegni ora è uscito un libro dal titolo di Making Money (Skira Rizzoli), con la prefazione di Reinhold. "In the book's introduction, Reinhold shares the experience of growing up in the New York art world of the nineteen-seventies and eighties" citando molti curiosi aneddoti. newyorker.

Libro oggetto

Isaac Salazar, scultore del New Mexico, trasforma libri vecchi in sculture. "I like to take a book that would otherwise end up in a landfill and turn it into art. Rarely do I use new books, unless I am commissioned to. I like to watch Planet Green, and am into alternative energy, recycling and repurposing so it’s a good feeling to know my art can contribute to reducing waste. flickr.

Storigami: storie in forma di origami. E' il formato ideato da una piccola casa editrice indipendente, Featherproof Books, per dei libretti per bambini. Si possono scaricare da Internet, e poi costruire seguendo le istruzioni. Ma pare sia un'operazione piuttosto complicata.