Required Reading
This week, erasing women from Impressionism, Miss Piggy as feminist, gentrification of the self, Louis Armstrong talks pot, inside the ka'ba, and more.
This week, erasing women from Impressionism, Miss Piggy as feminist, gentrification of the self, Louis Armstrong talks pot, inside the ka’ba, and more.
Did a recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art erase women from the history of Impressionism?
So why speak the language of the “father of the international art market” when it is absolutely not true? The answer is simple. Because it is part and parcel of a specific way of telling the story of art. The “great individual” model of art history involves one person who invents a movement and is a founding father. This blinds us to the entanglement of many factors and many actors in the making of the new.
… In the exhibition catalogues for the first few Independent Exhibitions, you’ll find Marie Bracquemond, Eva Gonzales, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt there in black and white. This is the primary evidence. It cannot be contradicted. But it has been consistently ignored by 20th-century art historians and 21st-century museum curators to the point at which what has been offered as knowledge to the visitors to this exhibition in 2015 actively erases this significant fact.
Does this matter? Yes. It has real effects. For example. if there are no works by Mary Cassatt in our major art galleries or featured in these historical exhibitions that represent the Impressionist moment to which thousands flock, no visitor will seek out a book on the artist from the bookshop. No publisher will commission a book on Cassatt, or keep those that exist in print. No books extend the imposed ignorance. No visitor will ask about the artist, and so on.
This is called “disappearing”. Through exhibitions then, the erasure is repeated. What we are allowed to know in art history is thus gendered: favouring “men who invent” and “fathers of invention” when the special fact about this particular event was actually the participation of women side by side with progressive men.
Jen Graves of The Stranger does a fantastic interview with Emily Hall, a MoMA staff member who would be impacted by the recently announced health cuts:
What’s going on?
The members of the union — it’s Local 2110 of the auto workers. It’s a professional union that covers office workers but also people in retail, people all over the museum, and then it tops out at a certain managerial level…. Our contract expired May 20. And then in the negotiations, the museum came back with a proposal for us to cover a great deal more of our health coverage. My husband and my child are both covered on my health insurance, and it would basically triple what I pay in a month.
Can you say how much that would be?
My contribution would go from $100 to a little over $300 a month, if I’m getting that right. And that’s just in premiums. There would also be a huge deductible, and if anyone needed surgery, we would be paying a percentage of that. All these things are new.
Management is saying that health-care costs are going up in the double digits. Management also said something really crazy; they told us, “You really like that health care,” like, you use it, like, are we supposed to not use it?
And they want us to share the burden; however MoMA’s endowment topped a billion dollars last month, and we had a meeting in which they were excited to tell us the endowment had topped a billion dollars. We had the Matisse cutouts show this year, which was a blockbuster. The museum is doing better than it has ever done. Frankly, it seems to me obscene to ask for those kinds of concessions in such a flush time. And you never get them back. Once you give things up, you never get them back. And no one makes very much money here. I’m at the upper end of what people make at the museum.
Adrian Chen looks at the paid trolls of Russia and how they are changing online discourse:
Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. In April, I went to St. Petersburg to learn more about the agency and its brand of information warfare, which it has aggressively deployed against political opponents at home, Russia’s perceived enemies abroad and, more recently, me.
Selfies can kill. One ISIS selfie led to a US airstrike within 24 hours:
“It was a post on social media to bombs on target in less than 24 hours,” said Air Force General Hawk Carlisle at an Air Force Association breakfast in Washington DC on Monday, according to defensetech.org.
“Incredible work when you think about,” said Carlisle, telling the audience that at Hurlburt Field, Florida, the US Air Force has a unit monitoring social media for intelligence on the Islamic State.
Looking back at your 20-year-old website:
I started this site with animated gifs and splash pages while living in a cheap rent stabilized apartment. PageSpinner was my jam. I was in love with HTML and certain that the whole world was about to learn it, ushering in a new era of DIY media, free expression, peace and democracy and human rights worldwide. That part didn’t work out so well, although the kids prefer YouTube to TV, so that’s something.
Choire Sicha on quitting smoking:
Quitting smoking is the khakis of existence. Quitting smoking is the Chipotle on St. Marks Place. I am totally not cool. I may as well be someone’s stupid Brooklyn dad. My hair is its natural color. Most days I’m just wearing whatever. I do yoga endlessly. What am I now?
But also? I feel like anything could happen. Unencumbered, naked and glassy, I feel perilously close to a dozen superfun midlife crises. I could move to anywhere before I even knew I had done so. Someone told me Belgrade is amazing right now, you guys.
First off, did you know there is a Louis Armstrong Museum in Corona, Queens? Second, did you know they have “secret tapes of the music legend talking about being busted for smoking pot, and telling his manager he will refuse to play unless he fixes it so he can smoke as much as he wants without going to jail”? Yup:
From December 1950, until his death in 1971, Louis documented his life ‘for posterity’ on to 750 tapes, totaling thousands of hours of recordings, now owned by Louis Armstrong House Museum. He tells dirty jokes, rails against racism, practices his trumpet, and fights with his wife. And he talks at length about his regular marijuana use.
What 18 focus groups in the former USSR teach us about America’s image problems:
To restore American soft power in the region, the United States should reduce direct support for civil society organizations in former Soviet countries and others that lack intrinsic demand for civic engagement. American financing of these organizations has played into the hands of authoritarian leaders who portray such backing as evidence of American interference, hurting the reputations of both the U.S. and the local NGOs that receive American funds. Instead, American policies should emphasize programs which spread and deepen knowledge and appreciation of American institutions — more exchanges of people, ideas, and cultural products.
Every wonder what the inside of the ka’ba looks like? Well, here you are:
Mira Schor takes a critical look at the recent attention around Miss Piggy, who will be honored by the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center:
Since calling a woman a pig is a familiar way of saying she’s a slut, can one interpret Miss Piggy’s name and persona as a feminist recuperation of a sexist slur in order to make it a mark of pride, the way the word “cunt” was revalued by early feminist pioneers like Judy Chicago and her students in the Fresno Feminist Art Program in 1970?
Miss Piggy is big, brassy, and loud, a relentless self-promoter. She is not embarrassed by her desire and she’s not shy about beating Kermit or anyone else upside their head if they get in her way. It’s a kind of do-me feminism, pig puppet style. So it could be argued that she displays feminist or certainly feminist-inspired traits. But she is also a kind of porcine Lucy Ricardo, always claiming talent she doesn’t have, with Kermit as a more patient and laid-back version of Ricky Ricardo. Given the historical situation of her birth in the mid-1970s, she is all at once a throwback to 1950s genteel oppression via The Feminine Mystique, an emanation of the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970s, a sign for the 1980s backlash against feminism with its curiously confusing characteristics of ambition and entitlement, and since she performs femininity rather like a drag queen, in terms of the way she often dresses, she is an interesting model for gender play today. She is also involved in a trans-species romance, I will say no more!
One college professor discusses how his students, particularly the liberal ones, scare him:
I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.
Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.
… I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.
Should brands avoid cutesy banter (wackaging) and emojis on social media?
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.
