Required Reading

This week, “smart dumb” is a thing, High Line shenanigans, Martin Scorsese talks cinema aesthetics, the charitable-industrial complex, every movie reference in The Simpsons, and more.

 Is there something called being “smart dumb“? MoMA’s first poet laureate Kenneth Goldsmith seems to think so and makes his case in a manifesto at The Awl:

Smart struts. Dumb stumbles. Smart dazzles. Dumb numbs.

There is dumb dumb and there is smart dumb. There is also smart smart. Dumb dumb is plain dumb and smart smart is plain smart. Smart dumb rejects both smart smart and dumb dumb, choosing instead to walk a tightrope between the two. Smart dumb is incisive and precise. In order to be smart dumb, you have to be really smart, but not in the smart smart way.

Dumb dumb is rednecks and racists, football hooligans, gum-snapping marketing girls, and thick-necked office boys. Dumb dumb is Microsoft, Disney, and Spielberg. Smart smart is TED talks, think tanks, NPR news, Ivy League universities, The New Yorker, and expensive five-star restaurants. By trying so hard, smart smart really misses the point. Smart dumb is The Fugs, punk rock, art schools, Gertrude Stein, Vito Acconci, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, Seth Price, Tao Lin, Martin Margiela, Mike Kelley, and Sofia Coppola. Smart dumb plays at being dumb dumb but knows better.

 Is there something fishy about New York’s High Line Park? This post raises a lot of questions:

There is something about Friends of the High Line, however, that makes it very different from these other organizations. First, there was an actual Central Park, and later the Central Park Conservancy was formed to take care of it. In the case of the High Line, first there was a group of real estate developers called Friends of the High Line, and then they built a park to be friends with, making sure that zoning rules were changed to facilitate the right kind of residential property alongside it. The development of the High Line was coterminous with the development of the area around the High Line.

… When the City Council “slush fund” scandal was revealed five years ago, it turned out that the largest beneficiary of these improper disbursements was the High Line.

Martin Scorsese has penned a must-read essay for the New York Review of Books on the language of cinema. He writes:

And I realize now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images on the screen gave me something very precious. We were experiencing something fundamental together. We were living through the emotional truths on the screen, often in coded form, which these films from the 1940s and 1950s sometimes expressed in small things: gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. These were things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our lives.

And he includes this curious early film by Thomas Edison of cats boxing from 1894:

 The 92Y’s 75 at 75 series is pretty great. It invites “authors to listen to a recording from our vast archive and write a personal response.” Some of the published (and upcoming pieces) are incredible, like Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop, Rick Moody on W. G. Sebald, A. L. Kennedy on E. E. Cummings, Cynthia Ozick on W. H. Auden, and Tom Stoppard on Harold Pinter (the videos are being released slowly over the next few weeks). But here is Brian Boyd on Vladimir Nabokov for your enjoyment:

 Billionaire Warren Buffett’s son, Peter Buffett, delves into something he is seeing in the world of philanthropy, something he calls the “Charitable-Industrial complex“:

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

 A useful list of 50 zines by people of color. I love these types of list that highlight some little known publications that deserve more attention.

 In an incredible piece of detective work, Brazilian bloggers reveal what seems to be police infiltration of protests. Now there is disagreement to whether those infiltrators disguised as protesters sparked the violence that was then used as justification by police to crack down on protests.

 Artist Lorna Simpson is currently having a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and she spoke to Aperture about her work, childhood, and her use of reenactments. It is curious to hear her reaction to stepping in front of her camera:

I started really stepping in front of the camera with “1957–2009,” which was painful! Every day I was in a bad mood and I just wanted to get through it. [Laughs.] I was suffering through that. It’s very artificial: I was imitating a woman’s body that is different from mine, a woman’s body that is more agile — I think she was slightly double-jointed and I’m not. I was less self-conscious, though, because my aim was to mirror her. But even then, I hated it at the beginning. Toward the end of the project I became more comfortable and it became less of a horrible chore.

 Photographer Dave Jordano “returned to his home city three years ago with a mission: not to photograph what’s been destroyed, but to record what’s been left behind and the lives of those coping with it.” His photo essay at Time magazine’s Lightbox is worth viewing.

 Who doesn’t love a good supercut? Here is every movie reference in the first five seaons of The Simpsons:

There’s also a tumblelog devoted to finding the original references and sources of many scenes of The Simpsons.

 And finally, can you name these cities by their Starbucks locations? It is surprisingly easy if you know the city.

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.

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