Required Reading

This week, Eli Broad and LA charter schools, Calatrava’s new Manhattan boondoggle, selfie politics, Umberto Eco and Donald Trump, and more.

 Renowned art collector Eli Broad also has a strange relationship with the charter school movement in LA:

In 2012, Broad publicly proclaimed his support for California’s Proposition 30—a bill aiming to raise income taxes on the wealthiest Californians to stave off massive school budget cuts. “I do support it,” Broad told the LA Times in an article all about his progressive endorsement. “Those of us that are wealthy like myself should pay more. There are so many human needs in education and elsewhere.”

It was not until two years later that a state investigation uncovered Broad’s scheme. While soaking in public praise for supporting the tax, Broad smuggled $1 million into the Koch brothers’ “dark money” PAC in Arizona in an attempt to defeat the distributive measure.

Broad has no problem directly snatching public tax dollars meant for poor communities, either. The $52 million Broad nabbed for his museum’s in 2011 was intended for blighted areas of Los Angeles—specifically to build affordable housing and clean up toxic waste. All of South Los Angeles, home to exactly the poor communities Broad claims to advocate for, received a fraction of that.- See more at: http://portside.org/2016-02-29/philanthropic-hypocrisy-eli-broad-billionaire-and-leading-education-reformer#sthash.bAcQ80zg.dpuf

 Michel Kimmelman doesn’t like Santiago Calatrava’s new $4 billion PATH station in lower Manhattan:

Assuming the best, commuters will head to bright, inviting train platforms — picking up a carton of orange juice and a copy of The New York Times at a Hudson News stand — and the hub will not suggest some bloated Soviet folly, a pretend Palace of the People testifying to broken government and chutzpah.

… But he has become a one-trick pony. The World Trade Center Hub conjures up his station in Lyon, France, and his museum in Milwaukee. Aside from the obvious Pantheon allusion, I no longer know what the hub is supposed to mean, symbolically, with its now-thickened ribs, hunkered torso and angry snouts on either end, weirdly compressing the entrances from the street. It’s like a Pokémon. Think of Eero Saarinen’s skylights at Kennedy’s TWA terminal, which resolve so elegantly into big, playful porthole windows. The imagery is clear. That’s great architecture.

 Has the selfie lost the power people hoped it would have? Aria Dean writes:

Maybe 2013 felt like the beginning of something; around then we began to hear murmurs at the margins of this idea that the selfie might be powerful. It started with young queers and people of color and a realization that perhaps if you could flood the network with something, it would become impossible to ignore. The selfie soon was written of as a “sign of life” — as the ultimate tactic toward #visibility. As we were taught via the likes of Susan Sontag, “photographs furnish evidence.” The image is, or can be, a powerful verifying tool, and with the selfie it seemed that you could continually verify and affirm your very existence on your own terms.

… The nascent selfie politic’s success in making itself visible made it vulnerable to subsumption within already dominant ideologies — which is to say, ideologies that center and favor whiteness. And white feminism, for whom the selfie politic was a wet dream, was first to pick up the scent.

 Gabrielle Moser writes about a Toronto art show and what it gets “wrong” about the local scene:

Instead, I found myself bewildered, puzzled and irritated by “Showroom.” After repeated visits to Sheridan’s exhibition, I still cannot make sense of how the chosen works bear out the show’s supposed theme, or how it accurately reflects the interests and aims of Toronto artists.

The didactic panel opening the exhibition makes its goals seem straightforward: “How do Toronto artists perceive new social and visual orders brought about by a decade of urban development?” it asks. It’s a relevant and rich topic, to be sure: one that Toronto (and other Canadian) artists have been exploring for decades.

But instead of the works I expected to see—ones that delivered an incisive critique of gentrification, for instance, or made radical proposals for equitably designing and using space—“Showroom” offers a series of projects that, taken together, seem singularly fixated on the aesthetics of presentation and modes of display. This has the effect of taking complex works and flattening them into an exhibition that could just as aptly be titled, “Toronto Artists Want Things to Look Nice.”

 Artist R. Luke DuBois has combined Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” essay from 1995 with Trump quotes, and the result is strangely appropriate. See it all here. The URL is pretty great too (http://fascist.republican).

 Who is controlling the Detroit narrative?

Narratives are important. They shape the way we understand a history, or time. Arguably, even more important than the narrative itself is the person sharing the narrative. The Storyteller, the person who has the privilege of using their voice to amplify an epoch. Storytellers are powerful; they have an unlimited amount of responsibility as they serve as translators of sorts, informing, re-contextualizing, and inciting . Storytellers also have the opportunity to misconstrue truths, fabricate histories, and misinform. Narratives can be held captive by people who don’t narrate justly.

In a city like Detroit, the latter happens often when there are stories told about the city through a narrowed voice and perspective. Journalism about Detroit has become wildly problematic – often times just recounts of a short visits to the city that include several ruin porn photo references paired with the thematic narrative of an overdue reconstruction and renaissance. This is a false narrative. There is no renaissance. Renaissance is often defined as a cultural rebirth. Detroit’s culture did not die. The cultural vibrancy is more so a continuation and evolution of a strong arts community that has been in existence for some time.

 STONER DREAM ALERT! The government wants to pay people to hang out and smoke weed all day:

Researchers looking to gather over 300 recruits into their facilities before the study begins; these recruits will be paid $3,000 for every week they take part in the study.

 BBC is doing a podcast series about the antiquities destroyed by ISIS. This episode on the Temple of Bel is worth listening to.

 Should we save video stores?

Once upon a time, a busy video store wouldn’t have seemed so peculiar – after all, there were nearly 30,000 of them in the United States in 1989. But by 2014, that number had dwindled to barely 6,000. The loudest noise was over the shuttering of the behemoth video store chains; following years of struggles, acquisitions, and bankruptcies, Movie Gallery (which had taken over Hollywood Video five years earlier) closed its doors in 2010, and Blockbuster followed suit in 2013.

… “Netflix so does not care about film culture, because they found the original content game is more lucrative for them,” says Video Free Brooklyn’s Aaron Hillis. “So because of that they’re letting these licenses lapse, and now, if you want to watch great films of the canon, how do you see them? How do you watch The Godfather? How do you watch Citizen Kane? I’ll tell you right now: The works of Alfred Hitchcock are not on Netflix.” He’s right:

 There’s an “invisible” black man on a Brooklyn statue by Daniel Chester French of Lafayette:

The statue, by Daniel Chester French, had been commissioned when a Frenchman turned Brooklynite named Henry Harteau died and left the city $35,000 to cast a monument to his celebrated countryman. (Lafayette and Harteau are identified on the statue’s base, and it was dedicated in 1917.) He asked that the statue be based on a painting called Lafayette at Yorktown by Jean-Baptiste Le Paon. The painting was actually of two men named Lafayette; one was the familiar marquis, and the other was named James Armistead Lafayette. The marquis was white and James was black. Still, I wondered: Were they brothers? Why did they share a last name?

It turns out that James Armistead was an enslaved man from Virginia who enlisted to fight against the British and ended up working as a double agent. The information he acquired helped to win the battle of Yorktown; hence, the heroic painting. He served under Lafayette, and the two men became such close friends that the marquis successfully petitioned to have James made a free man, after James’s own request for manumission was denied. (Apparently, they were only freeing “slave-soldiers” who fought in the war; being a “slave-spy” didn’t qualify.) James Armistead then took the name of his friend out of affection and gratitude. He lived a long life and become a farmer and a family man.

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

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