Required Reading

This week, the Pope in the Sistine Chapel, logo ripoffs, art’s connection to OxyContin, Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemeni cultural heritage, gender disparity in the art world, and more.

 Helen Molesworth, the chief curator fo the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles, talks about the gender disparity in the art world:

People always stay “still today” as if something happened to change the patriarchal system that we live under. As far as I can tell, the patriarchal system is still firmly in place. Since the movement in the early 20th century to get the right to vote, we haven’t had that long a battle in terms of changing the institutions that shape our culture. That’s why the percentages are the way they are—in the Senate and the House of Representatives and Fortune 500 companies. I don’t think the art world has any special purchase on patriarchy.

… The only way you get diversity is to actually do it. That means that certain men don’t get shows. There are only X number of slots every year on the calendar and the number of artists always exceeds the number of slots. If you are going to be equitable, some of the dudes don’t get shows that year. That’s what’s hard about it.

Most museums still maintain a commitment to an idea of the best, or quality, or genius. And I’m not saying I don’t agree with those as values. But I think those values have been created over hundreds of years to favour white men. One of the things you have to say as a curator is “We are not going to present the value that already exists; we are going to do the work to create value around these woman artists and artists of colour that would just come ‘naturally’ to the white male artist.”

 Artspace asks Richard Tuttle about his art and the spiritual in art:

Q: What do you think is the most salient change you’ve witnessed in the art world since your first solo show in 1965?

A: I think what we’re experiencing now is a big, big shift in the way we think about the world. When I was your age, the experiential was dominant. You’d feel that other really cool people were having an experience that was far more interesting or unusual or deeper than yours.

In today’s world, it’s about the image. The cool people are the ones who can process images or throw them back and forth faster and better and more and so on than you can. Each one has its drawbacks, its weaknesses. It doesn’t really matter—either way you feel like a shit.

It seems that in our world today nothing is impressive. How many images are there? You’re an image, I’m an image—who cares? There’s no differentiation. I mean, you’re 24, I’m 74. That’s 50 years difference, but if we’re both images, it’s “so what?” You can’t get rid of experience just because the world changes. The world is going to change again, but when it changed from experiential to image, it was [snaps his fingers] instant.

 BoingBoing points out that some very prominent logos are not as unique as you might think:

 How the art world is related to the OxyContin addiction empire:

https://twitter.com/cmonstah/status/728265909597573122

 What happened when Facebook hired journalists:

But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team—“news curators” as they’re known internally—Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm.

 Too busy to see your mom for Mother’s Day? Well, for $30,000 you can send a 3D printed model of yourself to you mom (it’s being offered through Groupon):

The company explains:

Your busy schedule means you can’t always be with Mom for Mother’s Day, but thanks to this unique Mother’s Day gift, you can still show her you care. Unlike busy adult children, life-sized 3D-printed models do not have hectic schedules. That means they’re there when Mom needs them most: all the time. And while your mom can’t claim this life-size replica of you as a dependent on her taxes, she will be able to take it to the movies, drive in the carpool lane, and tell it all about how Darlene is really more of a friend than a hairdresser.

 An archeologist has some choice words for the Saudi government that has been destroying the cultural heritage of Yemen:

This museum has just been obliterated from the air. In a matter of minutes, the irreplaceable work of ancient artisans, craftsmen and scribes — not to mention the efforts of Yemeni and foreign researchers who have dedicated years of their lives to studying and preserving this legacy — were pulverized. The museum and its 12,500 artifacts were turned to rubble by Saudi bombs.

… Saudi Arabia is thus responsible not only for devastating a country of 25 million impoverished people, who are now suffering from famine, deteriorating sanitary conditions and a lack of medical supplies, but also for a strategy of demolishing significant world heritage sites. This Saudi cultural vandalism is hard to distinguish from the Islamic State’s.

 The first climate refugees in the US, and they are mostly Native American:

One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.

“We’re going to lose all our heritage, all our culture,” lamented Chief Albert Naquin of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, the tribe to which most Isle de Jean Charles residents belong. “It’s all going to be history.”

 Where 30 years ago young adults used to earn more than national averages, now in many countries they have slumped to earning as much as 20% below their average compatriot. Pensioners by comparison have seen income soar:

 Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains why he wants to ‘problematise’ Europe and why ‘the Donald’ is something of a paradox:

“Read Trump closely – it is difficult to do, I know – and if you extract his total racist and sexist stupidities, you will see that here and there, where he makes a complete proposal, they’re usually not so bad,” said Žižek. “He said he will not totally dismantle universal healthcare, raise the minimum wage, and so on.”

“Trump is a paradox: he is really a centrist liberal, and maybe even in his economic policies closer to the Democrats, and he desperately tries to mask this. So the function of all of these dirty jokes and stupidities is to cover up that he is really a pretty ordinary, centrist politician.”

 The election of Sadiq Khan as London’s first Muslim mayor is a good time to look back at the history of Muslim mayors in Europe:

So Muslim heads of major European cities have been a commonplace for nearly 1300 years, and even at the beginning of the 20th century a few Balkan cities still had Muslim governors. Sadiq Khan’s victory is a great one and we should be happy that an Islamophobic and scurrilous campaign against him by the Tories was thwarted by the good sense of Londoners. But let us not exacerbate the weird amnesia of Europe about how central Islam and Muslims have been to its history since the eighth century (when the post-Roman Byzantine Empire, founded by Heraclius in 610, was only a century old itself). Sadiq Khan has many illustrious predecessors among European Muslim urban leaders.

 One Instagram user @johndrops shows us that all you need are some plastic bags and tape to reproduce the outfits from the Met Gala:

 This image was everywhere this week, yet another example of how Trump knows how to get attention:

… and there was this response … no comment:

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.

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