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This 1,400-year-old ginkgo tree is located within the walls of the Gu Guanyin Buddhist Temple in the Zhongnan Mountains in China. Every autumn its bright yellow leaves attract tourists from all around. (via Colossal)

This week, Trump at ArtPrize, the photo collection at the African American museum, a poignant review of new Hitler book, Portlandia has overstayed their welcome, and more.

 Trump wanders into ArtPrize and it’s as awkward as you would expect:

 Various novelists, including Hari Kunzru, Aminatta Forna, and Stella Duffy, discuss appropriation:

Good writers transgress without transgressing, in part because they are humble about what they do not know. They treat their own experience of the world as provisional. They do not presume. They respect people, not by leaving them alone in the inviolability of their cultural authenticity, but by becoming involved with them. They research. They engage in reciprocal relationships. It does not seem like a particular infringement of liberty to pass through the world without being its owner, unless someone else is continually asserting property rights over the ground beneath your feet. The panicked tone of the accusations of censorship leads me to suspect that what is being asserted has little to do with artistic freedom per se, and everything to do with a bitter fight to retain normative status, and the privileges that flow from it. The solution is simple, my fearful friends. Give up. Accept that some things are not for you, and others are not about you. You will find you have lost nothing. It may even feel like a weight off your shoulders. Put down that burden and pull up a chair. You might hear something you haven’t heard before. You will, at least, hear some new stories.

 This week, the 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) Rosetta Spacecraft belly flopped onto the surface of the Comet 67P, and this was the last thing it photographed before it “died”:

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And kind of related … a map created by the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope that shows a billion stars in the Milky Way:

 How the African American museum built their new photo collection:

Q: How is your work different than someone from another history museum?

Bryant: The museum and its collection were built from scratch. We started without a collection or facility, but now we have a museum on the National Mall with roughly 30,000 images. We’ve collected to build a foundation for the photography collection, while hoping to add to the canons in various fields in a way that shifts cultural paradigms and historical narratives.

We also were aware that we were building a 21st century collection for a museum that would serve several generations. So while collecting to preserve a distant past, we also collect to reflect contemporary histories and issues as well. We built the collection with the idea that we are about the present and the future, as well as the past.

RELATED: US owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says UN panel:

“In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent,” the report stated. “Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”

Citing the past year’s spate of police officers killing unarmed African American men, the panel warned against “impunity for state violence,” which has created, in its words, a “human rights crisis” that “must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”

 We reviewed Public Movement’s “Debriefing Sessions II” earlier this week, but I thought it was worth posting the review by Mariam C. Said, the widow of Edward Said, who has a lot to say about the performance:

For half an hour this young man excuse my French bullshitted about Art in Palestine before 1948. That is my opinion. He jumped from one thing to the other after informing me that the museum in Tel Aviv before 1948 encouraged Palestinian artists. He mentioned normalization, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and proceeded to drop names of Palestinians involved in the Art world like Kamal Boullata, who wrote a book on the history of Palestinian Art, and Gannit Ankori, an Israeli who wrote another book on the subject based on Boullata’s work. They knew each other and ultimately had a falling out and she sued Boullata. That last piece of information he did not mention, but I mention it to you to give you the background. He simply dropped their names (Boullata and Ankori) and the name of Ariella Azoulay who is working on photography pre 1948 to bring out the coexistence aspect before 1948.

He also mentioned Samia Halaby, the first Palestinian artist to be exhibited at the Guggenheim (incidentally her work was donated by a Jewish person) and seemed to dispute the fact that she was a first for the Guggenheim. He spoke of a project of the Tel Aviv Museum that was founded early on in the Zionist project where art was to be used for political purposes. He mentioned that Peggy Guggenheim supported that museum. I sensed that what he was trying to say is that all the artists at that museum at that time who were Palestinians were part of the museum’s mission at that time. What narrative he was spinning I could not tell. I remained silent.

 Reviewing the new Hitler: An Ascent From ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue, Michiko Kakutani’s word have a strange parallel to today’s Trump campaign:

Hitler was often described as an egomaniac who ‘only loved himself’ — a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization and what Mr. Ullrich calls a ‘characteristic fondness for superlatives.’

… Hitler increasingly presented himself in messianic terms, promising “to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness,” though he was typically vague about his actual plans. He often harked back to a golden age for the country, Mr. Ullrich says, the better “to paint the present day in hues that were all the darker. Everywhere you looked now, there was only decline and decay.”

 In what may be peak Portlandia, the In Other Words feminist bookstore, which is the setting for many sketches of the comedy show, has published a blog post titled “Fuck Portlandia” about the show that “has had a net negative effect on the city as a whole.” They write:

The Women and Women First segments that are filmed at In Other Words are trans-antagonistic and trans-misogynist and have only become more offensive as the show goes on. ‘LOL Fred Armisen in a wig and a dress’ is a deeply shitty joke whose sole punchline throws trans femmes under the bus by holding up their gender presentation for mockery and ridicule. In a world where trans femmes – particularly Black trans women – are being brutalized and murdered on a regular basis for simply daring to exist, dude in a dress jokes are lazy, reactionary, and actively harmful. They’re also just straight up not funny.

Also: there are no Black people on Portlandia. There are a tiny number of people of color on Portlandia. Portland is white but it’s not that damn white. It’s also a city with a deeply entrenched history of racism and white supremacy. In Other Words is in the heart of a historically Black neighborhood in Northeast Portland. We have Black Lives Matter written on our window. Black Lives Matter Portland meets regularly in our space. But as more and more Black folks and people of color have become involved at In Other Words, Portlandia has only gotten steadfastly more white. Oh and also: the last time the show filmed in our space, the production crew asked to us to remove the Black Lives Matter sign on our window. We refused.

 The British broadcasting regulator ranked offensive words:

 Try to resist the adorableness of this. Really, just try:

 Good question, Max:

https://twitter.com/max_read/status/781836152689025024

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.