Above photo: 1st Prize Winner - Category Travel: Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Umbria, Italy by fcattuto

This image was the First Prize Winner (Category: Travel) for National Geographic’s 3rd annual International Drone Photography Contest. It was taken by Francesco Cattuto (aka fcattuto) and depicts the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Umbria, Italy. (via My Modern Met)

This week, Cleveland artists and the RNC, Nicole Eisenman’s genius, the Baton Rouge protest image in context, blackness and contemporary art, and more.

 Our senior editor Jillian Steinhauer wrote about the response of Cleveland artists to the upcoming Republican National Convention for the Guardian. A must-read:

Cleveland tends to feels both shrunken and stretched. At its peak, in 1950, it was the seventh-largest city in the nation; today, it has fewer than 400,000 residents. It has also undergone a demographic shift: whereas mid-century, African Americans made up about 30% of the population, today they account for a small majority, 53.3%. If the inhabitants of Cleveland could talk to the Republican conventioneers about their city, what would they say?

This question was the impetus for Sopko’s project The Fixers, a series of six short documentary films released – at Spaces gallery, at screenings around Cleveland and online – in the lead-up to the RNC. Each of the films considers a topic central to the lives of everyday Clevelanders – the education system, access to healthy food – by focusing on one or two knowledgable locals. These are the titular fixers, a term Sopko learned from a photojournalist that describes locals hired by foreign correspondents to help with finding sources and putting together stories.

 Barry Schwabsky writes about the genius of artist Nicole Eisenman:

Eisenman’s slightly dowdy and all-too-­illustrational approach to figuration did lend a definite charm and humor, even a kind of sweetness, to her renderings of sometimes violent fantasies that might otherwise have been hard to take. She was using a gambit I’d seen some artists employ in the previous decade, giving a knowing twist to an unfashionable historical style in order to make something that felt new. In these early works of Eisenman’s, a strange reversal was taking place: It was the seemingly “innocent” and nostalgic style that lent sophistication to the ostensibly cutting-edge yet unmistakably and defiantly crude subject matter. And yet, and yet… I was (and remain) too wedded to the aesthetics of modernism—you might even say of formalism—to be entirely convinced by an art fixated on a bygone style that was itself already so indebted to premodernist modes of representation. Two steps forward, but only one step back; two may be one too many for me.

 There’s a battle over the Wildenstein art empire:

The family’s business runs on secrets—so fiercely kept that Wildenstein has said he didn’t learn about the family’s financial machinations himself until the death in 2001 of his father, Daniel. When it came time to settle the estate, Guy and his brother, Alec, claimed their father had a net worth of €40.9 million, or about $45 million. To cover the resulting estate tax bill of €17.7 million, they gave the French Republic—Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, was a close friend of the family—a set of bas-reliefs by Marie Antoinette’s favorite sculptor. Lovely as the reliefs were, this turned out to be a true let-them-eat-cake moment, tossing crumbs to the French public while, French prosecutors claimed, the Wildensteins were keeping a towering confection of property, art, cash, and investments for themselves. In the month of Daniel’s death alone, the government uncovered a veritable airlift of art, with $188 million worth of paintings moved from the U.S. to Switzerland.

One painting stayed where it was. A Wildenstein-owned Caravaggio hung in a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Known as The Lute Player, it was worth tens of millions of dollars, quite possibly more than the entire declared estate. French prosecutors would soon conclude there had to be more like it in the family vaults.

 A gif of the “iconic” image (with context) that came out of the Baton Rouge protests:

 Taylor Renee Aldridge writes about black bodies in the white cube and how trendy contemporary art deals with blackness:

Too often, I wonder if artists responding to Black Lives Matter are doing so because they truly are concerned about black lives, or if they simply recognize the financial and critical benefits that go along with creating work around these subjects. The year 2015 was a watershed in the new art responding to racism, arriving just after two separate grand juries failed to indict police officers who killed unarmed black men—Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. Another shattering incident was the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, who mysteriously died while in custody, en route to a local police station. Artists responded to these events in different ways. At the Venice Biennale, Adam Pendleton covered the walls of the Belgian Pavilion with large panels that read BLACK LIVES MATTER. Robert Longo made a hyperrealist charcoal drawing of the heavily armed Ferguson, Missouri police, which was later purchased by the Broad museum in Los Angeles. Photographer Devin Allen—who was, in fact, protesting while documenting (or vice-versa) the 2015 Baltimore protests in response to Gray’s death—captured a profound image of the Black Lives Matter movement that ended up in Time magazine. 

 Michelle LHOOQ points out that the gender breakdown of headliners at music festivals is troubling:

 Four poems by Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski, who is not widely translated into English, were published in Asymptote (and they were translated by Hyperallergic editor Elisa Wouk Almino, who many people may not realize is also a translator):

sets versus setbacks

a flashback
a flashback inside a flashback
a flashback inside a flashback of
a flashback
a flashback inside a third flashback
memory falls into memory
rockflower on smooth water
all tiresome (flashback)
minus the recollection of the recollection of the recollection
of the recollection

And Bomb Magazine just published two poems by John Yau, one of the Hyperallergic Weekend editors.

 Leah Finnegan thinks about the Instagrams being published from Auschwitz and what they might tell us about photography, tragedy, and our times:

The ambiguity about atrocity photography exists behind the camera as much as in front of it. It’s an understanding among journalists that some reporters use cameras as a defense mechanism — a means of protection between them and an uncomfortable subject. George Rodger, who photographed piles of dead bodies at Bergen Belsen for LIFE magazine, later recused himself from taking photographs of atrocities. “The natural instinct as a photographer is always to take good pictures, at the right exposure, with a good composition. But it shocked me that I was still trying to do this when my subjects were dead bodies,” he said. “I realized there must be something wrong with me, otherwise I would have recoiled from taking them at all.”

 Van Abbemuseum director Charles Esche talks about nationality, activism, curatorial education, and whether art can have any real social effect (emphasis mine):

Charles Esche:  I have some doubts about the discipline of art history. It always runs the risk of isolating forms of artistic expression from what is happening around them. Most of my work has been about connecting aesthetics to social, political and emotional change in society. How we see and what is seen influences how the world turns. I appreciate that many art historians also feel this and work hard to develop other strategies, but there is still something isolationist about art history as a whole, particularly how that art history is then presented in museums. Look at the Tate Modern art timeline, for instance, which is a way many English people and London tourists first encounter art history. It is partially a prolongation of Alfred Barr’s abstract art family tree of 1936, but the Tate chose to do away with all links to the world beyond art, something that Barr did include tangentially. Art becomes a simple succession of styles and names with no connection to what is going on in the world. That’s simply not how we should be presenting art to people in general. It gets them off on the wrong foot. As for the art press, I am still amazed at the resistance of many art journalists to curatorial gestures. At least in the Dutch press, they seem to interpret any deviation from the white-cube presentation or the solo exhibition as a restriction on their sovereign right to commune with the artwork, without seeing how much the white cube and solo protocols are themselves curatorial devices. It becomes a little bit absurd when they accuse museums like the Van Abbemuseum of having too many opinions, as though an opinionless museum would be possible.

 Carolina Miranda of the LA Times considers the success of Donald Trump’s red-with-white-type “Make America Great Again” hat and what it means for design:

But the designers and critics I spoke with said its success feels more like a colossal fluke than a thoughtfully considered project. (In that way, it mirrors the Trump candidacy itself.)

“A genius didn’t design it,” says Lois. “I’m sure he just gave the job to a hat maker and they probably gave him two or three typefaces to choose from and he picked one.”

Zachary Petit, who edits the design magazine Print, described the cap’s design as quite “jarring.”

“The shape, the font — Times New Roman? — and composition,” he stated in an email, “makes one think it might have quickly been drawn up in Microsoft Word by a campaign intern as a one-off, not realizing the power it would go on to have.”

But what the hat lacks in sophistication — “Trump is clearly not pandering to designers,” jokes Petit — it makes up for in scrappy punch.

“It’s a strong visual,” says Lois. “The red hat stands out in an audience.”

 Iran tries to convince women to wear chador by highlighting the pre-Islamic roots of hijab. Alex Shams writes:

But this is the first time I’ve ever seen a pro-hijab campaign that points primarily to a pre-Islamic past to justify itself! Though it’s not hard to understand, given the new trend online of arguing hijab is specifically not traditional “national” dress.

Full explanation of the image here.

 The red/blue divide in the United States is very evident on Facebook, as this WSJ story shows:

Screen Shot 2016-07-17 at 11.53.38 AM

 For all the doubters, scientific evidence that there is a bias in the way police officers deal with black people:

The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average

 Trust in government is collapsing around the world, and that’s bad for everyone:

In democratic systems, this deep distrust of government is corrosive. For democracies to function properly, the German journalist Henrik Müller recently wrote, there must be “enough common values that [people] trust their institutions, that majorities and minorities respect one another, and that everyone generally deals fairly with one another.”

The anger currently on display in many parts of the world is borne of anxiety, including concern that “we may not know how to architect trusted institutions at scale in public space,” said Jane Holl Lute, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, at a separate session at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “Our institutions—their weight-bearing effectiveness for social problems of enormous complexity is being called into question now across the board.”

 The best funny response to the failed coup in Turkey was this tweet:

 Awesome baby video of the week:

YouTube video

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.

Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic.