Required Reading
This week, more proof Joseph Beuys lied, more problems for Cooper Union, the world's biggest building in the world unveiled, Gehry's Eisenhower Memorial has more problems, Timbuktu's library assessed, and more.
This week, more proof Joseph Beuys lied, more problems for Cooper Union, the world’s biggest building in the world unveiled, Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial has more problems, Timbuktu’s library assessed, and more.
Joseph Beuys may be one of the patron saints of contemporary art and his “war experience on the Crimean Peninsula — or, more accurately, Beuys’ subsequent versions of it — became a founding episode of a new avant-garde.” Now Spiegel Online has discovered a letter that the young Beuys wrote that same year that provides more proof that it was all a fiction:
And he achieved that in part because of the way he mythologized his past in the war and especially in Crimea: elevating himself from radio operator to dive-bomber pilot; making himself the victim of enemy artillery fire, although it was actually poor weather that brought his plane down from the sky; and transforming the people who pulled him from the plane’s wreckage into Tatar shamans, although his 1944 letter says they were Russian workers.
There are still more problems for Cooper Union as their tax break status may be under threat.
Brian Dillon reviews Simon Starling’s “Phantom Ride” commission at the Tate Modern for the London Review of Books and has these critical words:
But perhaps the more lasting effect of “Phantom Ride” is not in the slightly dreary realm of institutional critique, which here looks a little too much like institutional advertising, but in its melancholy imagining of institutional collapse, as Starling’s camera drifts across a CGI scene of the bomb-damaged Duveen Galleries in 1940, and asks us to picture the place in ruins, supplanted by its lubricious digital twin.
People investigating the ugly marketing scheme of The Lone Ranger film includes the realization that Gabriel Good Buffalo, who has been touting his Native American roots as a designer for the film, is not in fact Native but an fraud and an impostor. And as Colorlines reports, this is where things get interesting:
What might surprise most readers is that Good Buffalo is in apparent violation of federal law. Congress enacted the Indian Arts and Crafts Act in 1990, which allows for the prosecution of anyone who sells any good in a way that fraudulently suggests it was produced by a Native, when it was not.
But sadly there is little hope anything will be done:
And while the Indian Arts and Crafts Act exists to protect Native artists, Keene notes that, “it doesn’t have a lot of teeth.” That’s because although President Obama signed an amendment to the act three years ago that allows any federal law enforcement agent the authority to investigate any violations, the number of breeches are far disproportionate to the number of agents that scrutinize them. “The Lone Ranger” provides an extraordinary chance to exploit consumer desire for something — anything — Native.
Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC, continues to have problems. The original design was criticized, including by the Eisenhower family, as being “too extravagant” and too “avant-garde.” Now, analyst have discovered that revising design will cost about $17 million over the next five years
Have you ever revised your writing? Well, blame the Modernists:
It’s easy to assume that history’s greatest authors have been history’s greatest revisers. But that wasn’t always how it worked. Until about a century ago, according to various biographers and critics, literature proceeded through handwritten manuscripts that underwent mostly small-scale revisions.
Then something changed. In a new book, “The Work of Revision,” Hannah Sullivan, an English professor at Oxford University, argues that revision as we now understand it — where authors, before they publish anything, will spend weeks tearing it down and putting it back together again — is a creation of the 20th century. It was only under Modernist luminaries like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf that the practice came to seem truly essential to creating good literature. Those authors, Sullivan writes, were the first who “revised overtly, passionately, and at many points in the lifespan of their texts.”
Zooey Deschanel is the latest musician to impose an anti-photo policy at her concerts. “Security guards … are now flashing flashlights in the faces of fans in the first few rows who dare pull out their phones,” tweeted Toronto concertgoer Rob Duffy.
Italian freelance war journalist in Syria, Francesca Borri, writes about her upside-down life covering the escalating conflict in Syria. You might find it incredible to think that she is paid only $70 per article. She describes her situation as working in the middle of a “nut house”:
But we’re war reporters, after all, aren’t we? A band of brothers (and sisters). We risk our lives to give voice to the voiceless. We have seen things most people will never see. We are a wealth of stories at the dinner table, the cool guests who everyone wants to invite. But the dirty secret is that instead of being united, we are our own worst enemies; and the reason for the $70 per piece isn’t that there isn’t any money, because there is always money for a piece on Berlusconi’s girlfriends. The true reason is that you ask for $100 and somebody else is ready to do it for $70. It’s the fiercest competition. Like Beatriz, who today pointed me in the wrong direction so she would be the only one to cover the demonstration, and I found myself amid the snipers as a result of her deception. Just to cover a demonstration, like hundreds of others.
The United Nations have presented their findings about the destruction at the Timbuktu library last year. David Stehl, program specialist in the cultural section of UNESCO, says 1/10th were destroyed:
“Of the 46,000 manuscripts that were held by the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, 4,203 manuscripts were either burned by the Islamists or stolen.”
The promotional video for the largest building in Chegndu, China:
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.
