Required Reading
This week, a profile of the family benefiting from a wealthy San Francisco art school, new science fiction about climate change, a shamed Getty curator tells her story, Belize's art revolution, a pomo architecture hater, and more.
This week, a profile of the family benefiting from a wealthy San Francisco art school, new science fiction about climate change, a shamed Getty curator tells her story, Belize’s art revolution, a pomo architecture hater, and more.
A look at the Academy of Art University and the family behind the huge private art school:
Since taking over as president of the family-owned Academy of Art University more than two decades ago, she’s transformed the 86-year-old for-profit institution from a regional operation into America’s largest private art university. Under her watch enrollment has skyrocketed from 2,200 to 16,000, generating an estimated $300 million in annual revenues, heavily subsidized by federal student loans. The Stephens family has turned that pile of art-school tuition into one of the largest real estate empires in San Francisco, with more than 40 properties in prime areas, including a historic former cannery on Fisherman’s Wharf and a 138,000-square-foot office building steps from City Hall. In all, the real estate is worth an estimated $420 million, net of debt, and the family pulls in tens of millions of dollars each year leasing these buildings back to the Academy of Art for classrooms and dorms.
Does the state of the environment mean we need to develop a new type of science fiction to confront it? Claire L. Evans thinks so:
In recent years the term climate fiction, or cli-fi, has emerged to refer to works dealing explicitly with climate change. Margaret Atwood has championed the term, which has since been applied broadly, and even retroactively, to writers like JG Ballard and Jules Verne. Cli-fi, with an emphasis on global warming and its attendant anxieties, goes some of the way toward the ideal of Anthropocene fiction, but it’s too narrow a designation. Even the books most often cited as examples of cli-fi – Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Paolo Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake – address issues beyond climate change. They envision futures dictated by human recklessness: as Atwood said this year in an interview with Slate, it’s not climate change; it’s “the everything change.”
Marion True, a former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, was accused of a crime she didn’t commit, and as a result she was shunned by the art world. Now, she wants to tell her story:
In her unpublished memoir, True charts her rise from working-class Newburyport, Mass., into the mysterious, swashbuckling universe of ancient art and, finally, into an Italian courtroom. She offers a rare glimpse into the often too-cozy-for-comfort relationships among museums, dealers and collectors. She describes the absurdity of being targeted. Because even True’s detractors knew about her efforts to create collecting standards in a profession that, for decades, operated with the ethical compass of a junk bond trader on 1980s Wall Street.
True’s trial, covered with great fanfare at its start, fizzled out quietly.
“I understand why the Italians did what they did,” True, 66, said in one of a series of interviews in Newburyport, where she maintains a modest, third-floor walkup so she can visit her 91-year-old mother. “It was very clever, and it was very mean, but at least I understand why. What I never understood is why American museums did what they did. And my colleagues and my bosses never, ever stood up for me. They acted as if I had done all this stuff on my own, which would have been impossible to do. They just vanished.”
Belize is having a small art revolution:
Now on its fifth issue, Baffu is a treasure chest of visual and literary outpouring from Belizean up-and-comers, none of it made with tourists in mind. Some of the pages are shots from artists’ notebooks, spiral binding and all. Other pages are screenshots of Facebook blowups about the Belizean art scene. The front cover of Issue 4 is a close-up of a friend’s stomach, shaved and stitched, after he caught a bullet in gang crossfire. The back cover is the exit wound.
An interview with the Brooklyn artist Mark Porter, who is creating the controversial Baphomet sculpture for Satanists:
Baphomet, which was likely a mash-up of the Egyptian ram-headed fertility god Banabdjedet, and the prophet Mohammed, was an idol that members of the secret society The Knights Templar were accused of worshipping in Europe and the Middle East until the order disbanded in the 14th century. Over the years, the figure has been increasingly associated with anything vaguely occult or satanic, to the point where he’s come to represent the devil himself.
… “Much like the idol the Knights Templar were accused of worshiping, this depiction of Baphomet represents an interconnectedness of the elements of the natural and spiritual world. It is male, female, human, animal, magical and mundane. It is both serious and comical, rendered with sincere intensity and contemplation.”
Owen Hatherley is really mad at postmodernism and what it did to architecture, but first a realization:
One thing that Postmodernists were and are most certainly right about is the fact that the culture of architecture is strangely unwilling to admit that what it does is massively determined by fashion. Postmodernists themselves have been hugely unfashionable during the 2000s, but a slow revival is obviously taking place, seen particularly on this site of late.
The color black is always evolving, and here is a useful short history:
Malevich’s work inspired abstract artists such as Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, who all made heavy use of black in their work. Whereas Malevich used a spectrum of carbon blacks in his paintings, from ivory black to lamp black, his successors wanted to reflect the rapid technological changes in society through the materials they used, and went looking for new black paints. As Pollock said in 1951: “It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.”
Matthew Lawrence ponders the meaning of Daddy porn, that category of gay porn that makes many people uncomfortable:
These films feature an element of real cinematic drama, which is another rarity in commercial porn these days. Scenes build over time. Gage’s dads and sons don’t have sex with one another, because that would be crossing a line. But the dads will jerk off while watching the sons bottom for surrogate authority figures, holding the son’s head in place while the younger man fellates a third party, for instance. When an uncle fucks his nephew it’s made very clear in the dialogue that they’re only related by marriage and there’s no blood relationship between the two. Though flirting with the incest taboo is what animates Gage’s output, actually breaking it would be going too far.
Characters in Gage films are rarely gay in whichever sense of gay we generally think of. They aren’t in long-term relationships with other men, they don’t date one another, and there are never visual signifiers to indicate that they might self-identify that way. It might be reactionary or it might be revolutionary; in either case, it’s out of time. Gage characters are butch archetypes who are emotionally secure enough that the physical rewards of gay sex are wholly compatible with homosocial friendships and an otherwise heteronormative blue collar lifestyle.
Journalist Dee Barnes, one of the women assaulted by Dr. Dre, is speaking out over what the new film Straight Outta Compton, which tells the story of the rap group N.W.A., leaves out, including this chilling episode:
It was so caustic that when Dre was trying to choke me on the floor of the women’s room in Po Na Na Souk, a thought flashed through my head: “Oh my god. He’s trying to kill me.” He had me trapped in that bathroom; he held the door closed with his leg. It was surreal. “Is this happening?” I thought.
RELATED: A few days later Dr. Dre apologized to the women he hurt through a statement released to the New York Times:
“Twenty-five years ago I was a young man drinking too much and in over my head with no real structure in my life. However, none of this is an excuse for what I did. I’ve been married for 19 years and every day I’m working to be a better man for my family, seeking guidance along the way. I’m doing everything I can so I never resemble that man again … I apologize to the women I’ve hurt. I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all of our lives.”
The changing gang culture of New York:
The biggest gangs in NY are obviously influenced by the Department of Corrections (DOC) and filter to the streets. Traditionally, since 1993, the Bloods have been the power within Rikers Island and many state correctional facilities. Sets like the Mac Ballers, G Shine, Brims, and Gorilla Brims have been active and constantly fight for control of facilities. They outnumber many rivals. There are Crip sets, Latin Kings, Trinitarios, Gangster Disciples, MS-13, and others active.
Every nationality is represented within the gang culture… and with the African-American population in New York State prisons being the largest, the gangs will reflect that. In California, for example, because of the Mexican population, the Mexican Mafia (Sureños, Nuestra Familia) are the power groups. With the Hispanic population growing in New York State, these groups are starting to become more visible in our state. The largest ethnic group in the area will dictate what type of gangs you see.
The biggest trend in New York State has been the influence of hybrid gangs—these groups are known and represent in their cities only… They represent local housing projects, parks, city blocks, and streets…. Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, and obviously the boroughs of New York all have a heavy presence of local territorial hybrid gangs with nontraditional names like Wave Gang, 4 Block, YGz….Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Mount Vernon, Washington Heights, you name it… they all are seeing a rise in hybrid gangs that are not connected to the traditional “super-gangs” (Bloods, Crips, Kings, etc.).
Wasn’t the internet supposed to destroy jobs for creatives? Well, that didn’t happen:
If you believe the data, then one question remains. Why have the more pessimistic predictions not come to pass? One incontrovertible reason is that — contrary to the justifiable fears of a decade ago — people will still pay for creative works. The Napsterization of culture turned out to be less of a threat to prices than it initially appeared. Consumers spend less for recorded music, but more for live. Most American households pay for television content, a revenue stream that for all practical purposes didn’t exist 40 years ago. Average movie-ticket prices continue to rise. For interesting reasons, book piracy hasn’t taken off the way it did with music. And a whole new creative industry — video games — has arisen to become as lucrative as Hollywood. American households in 2013 spent 4.9 percent of their income on entertainment, the exact same percentage they spent in 2000.
At the same time, there are now more ways to buy creative work, thanks to the proliferation of content-delivery platforms. Practically every device consumers own is tempting them at all hours with new films or songs or shows to purchase. Virtually no one bought anything on their computer just 20 years ago; the idea of using a phone to buy and read a 700-page book about a blind girl in occupied France would have sounded like a joke even 10 years ago. But today, our phones sell us every form of media imaginable; our TVs charge us for video-on-demand products; our car stereos urge us to sign up for SiriusXM.
And want to learn the difference between Latino and Hispanic? Here you are:
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.
