Required Reading

This week, the whiteness of power in the US, Minnesota’s racist State Capitol paintings, black women and the Oscars, poet Eileen Myles defends Hillary Clinton, does eastern Congo need an art gallery, and more.

 The faces of US power are nearly as white as the Oscar nominees. The New York Times investigates:

We reviewed 503 of the most powerful people in American culture, government, education and business, and found that just 44 are minorities. Any list of the powerful is subjective, but the people here have an outsize influence on the nation’s rules and culture.

 Sheila Dickinson writes about the racist murals in the Minnesota State Capitol:

Almost all of the Capitol’s paintings were commissioned circa 1905 when the grand building was erected. From what hangs on the Capitol walls, it appears Minnesota’s moral evolution came to a grinding halt that year.

The 120,000 visitors to the Capitol every year get a glimpse into an era when women couldn’t vote (installing women’s bathrooms is one of the few modifications to the structure), when Native Americans could apply for U.S. citizenship if they abandoned their tribes and adopted “the habits of civilized life,” and when the population of Minnesota was 98 percent white.

 Some interesting facts about the Oscars and performances by women of color:

Nearly every black best-actress nominee has faced a similar plight, right up through “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012), in which Quvenzhané Wallis played a little girl about to lose her home to a flood. No black woman has ever received a best-actress nomination for portraying an executive or even a character with a college degree. (Though Gabourey Sidibe’s character in “Precious,” from 2009, seems likely to get one eventually.)

All 10 performances for which black women have received best-actress nominations involve poor or lower-income characters, and half of those are penniless mothers. Two of the portrayals — Diana Ross’s incarnation of Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues” (1972) and Angela Bassett’s depiction of Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It” (1993) — are of singers who enjoy a measure of wealth at some point. But Holiday begins broke, and viewers know she’ll end up that way, while Tina Turner doesn’t have money of her own until the film’s last five minutes. The remaining characters are maids, sharecroppers, criminal-drifter types, impoverished housewives and destitute girls.

 Cartoons can be powerful:

 Election Confessions amasses all the weird thoughts people are having about the current US Presidential election. This one is funny:

 Poet Eileen Myles publishes a defense of Hillary Clinton. She writes:

Because Hillary Clinton is my candidate she is the one I get to interrogate and possibly effect as opposed to that guy wanting to throw out Muslims or building along the U.S.–Mexico border an even bigger wall. Or that man selling me a really nice solar battery car. When asked about Israel Bernie yells shut up, shut up, shut up. He’s not explained yet how a Congress that doesn’t like the health care we’ve got would be open to single-payer. I don’t see that Congress raising taxes either for free higher education. It’s a wonderful show. I wish it was true. I don’t think Bernie will “make Hillary a better candidate” as someone has suggested on Facebook. We will make her a better candidate. I want to stop living in this ass-backward world where her time in office or times next to Bill’s always resemble a hate crime unlike the terms of Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, George Bushes, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt…virtually all of whom except Jimmy Carter waged war and killed enormous numbers of people.

 No comment: “It is one of the poorest parts of the planet, a place where workers earn $1 a day – which is why, according to one artist, the plantations of eastern Congo really need an art gallery.” More here:

Perhaps in the future, he muses, Congolese artists will sip cappuccinos in the jungle while discussing, say, critical strategies in contemporary art practice, just as they do in Shoreditch and Brooklyn.

Why is he doing this? “Clearly these people can’t live off plantation labour. But I think they can live off critical engagement with plantation labour.” By which he means workers making saleable art expressing their feelings about their lives. As we talk, Martens offers me a chocolate head, a reproduction of a self-portrait by a plantation worker. The original was made from river clay in eastern Congo. That clay bust was scanned, a 3D digital print was then used to make a mould into which chocolate was poured in Belgium. Some of the cocoa used came from the artist’s plantation.

 I’m sure you’ve noticed it, but Facebook is cool again. Writing for New York Magazine, Hudson Hongo thinks it is about the rise of “weird Facebook“:

Weird Facebook has been around since at least 2014, when Daily Dot writer Jordan Pedersen identified and described the phenomenon as “a loose conglomeration of pages that post bizarre image macros. Fodder for the guy you bought weed from in high school.” It’s just that it’s become much bigger in the last year or so, and no one can really figure out why.

For their part, the people who run the pages that fall within the greater sphere of Facebook’s avant-garde mostly seem baffled by the sudden popularity of their creations. The most frequently offered explanation as to why the site has been such a successful platform for oddness lately, however, is that Facebook “is where everyone already is.”

 This is funny:

 When you’re 110 years old, you probably want a Fox reporter to leave you alone:

 Someone has written a chose-your-own adventure game on Twitter, and it’s pretty great:

 And this:

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.

• Opinion
• Required Reading
• Weekend