Required Reading

This week, digitizing the Library of Congress, conceptual art in Britain, the context for Hellenistic art, the five genders of Native American cultures, pomo ethics, and more.

 Is the Library of Congress not rising to the challenge of the online world? Kyle Chayka, who was formerly an editor at Hyperallergic, writes:

The LOC spends between $6 million and $8 million on digitization annually, maintaining a dedicated staff of 13, plus external contract scanners. With such a modest budget (lower than in 1999), the Library has to make difficult decisions as to which parts of the collection should go online. Beth Dulabahn, the LOC’s director of integration management, told me that objects are more likely to be digitized if they’re of particular importance to Congress or might be popular with the public. “When we digitize we try to go for the biggest bang for the buck,” Dulabahn said. “The mission is still to acquire materials and then as legally possible to make those available to as many people as we can. Certainly the internet has provided a fabulous opportunity to make materials available to much wider audiences.” Recent projects include a scanned series of photographs from Depression-era Wyoming as well as curated Pinterest boards with themes ranging from African American History Month to Walt Whitman.

… A core function of the LOC is to decide which materials merit permanence—in digital or print form—and which don’t. Spare copies of books the LOC already owns and volumes it has decided aren’t worth preserving beyond the reach of time end up in limbo, otherwise known as the Surplus Books department. Every year, 18,000 of the abandoned books (less than two days’ worth of collection additions) are distributed to US public libraries, offices of politicians, and foreign national libraries free of charge. Moldova gets a box per week, Japan specifies intricately protective cardboard boxes for its shipments, and one unnamed South American country never picks up its deliveries on time.

At the end of the LOC’s fraying bibliographic chain, Surplus Books inspires a certain feeling of futility. Digitization will never be completed, at least not before print ceases to be produced, and still there remains the task of making sure the printed books in the collection remain viable.

 Anne Wagner considers the Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964-79 show at Tate Britain:

One possible path through the Tate exhibition involves tuning in to other moments of communicative breakdown: moments which, at their best, guide us to a clearer understanding of how this art works its spell. It is not so much that the show aims to draw us into an impromptu game of ‘spot the mystical.’ Instead it fosters our alertness to moments when form and content seem to clash, then implode. Perhaps such breakdown is inevitable when artists share their audience’s concern with, and resistance to, the forms of knowledge, distinction, difference, power and communication that shape their world. How, if at all, can art remake the ruling order? Can that order be forced to appear? What sorts of freedom do humans possess? Do we mean what we say? Can art trump speech? Can it change or erase what people perceive? How else might it reshape, even interrupt the given patterns of life?

 G.W. Bowersock gives us some context about the Metropolitan Museum’s Pergamon exhibition:

The Metropolitan’s exhibition reveals Rome to have been a kind of engine that drove the production of copies of classical art, as well as the design of new pieces of Hellenistic art and, subsequently, copies of Hellenistic art. The pieces made in the Hellenistic regions were normally dispatched by sea to Italy because overland transport of objects in bulk was not a commercial option, but on occasion shipwrecks disgorged into the watery depths the precious objects they were transporting. The exhibition and its catalog present notable treasures that were retrieved from shipwrecks at Mahdia off the coast of Tunisia, Artemision off the northern coast of the Greek island of Euboea, and Antikythera off the southern coast of Greece. In the midst of its glass bowls and its marble and bronze sculptures the Antikythera wreck also brought to light a complex computing mechanism, with interlocking gears, that seems far in advance of its time. A reconstruction of the mechanism will be featured in a forthcoming exhibition at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, “Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” opening in October.

If Pergamon is the most conspicuous of the Hellenistic kingdoms to which the title of the exhibition alludes, that is only because the city itself and its art are so much more visible, thanks to the excavation at the site itself, than the surviving remains of the Antigonids, Ptolemies (with the exception of Alexandria), or Seleucids. When the Antigonid kingdom came to an end in 168 BC, only Ptolemaic Egypt could compete with Pergamon. Egypt had its great library at Alexandria along with a group of brilliant scholars who were toiling away on manuscripts of Homer and other literary texts. Yet although the Ptolemaic kingdom survived down to the suicide of Cleopatra in 30 BCafter the Battle of Actium, its cultural influence had long been in decline. As for the Seleucids in Syria, Pompey stamped them out in 63 BC, when Syria became a Roman province.

 Zak Smith writes about the postmodern ethic in the art world and what it means:

The truth is, in 2016, the degree to which a piece of fine art is doing identifiable work is precisely the degree to which it is not a threat. Even the most scathing critique (and, let’s be honest: art’s critiques are way too elliptical to be scathing) of power is still worrying about power—and power uses power to soothe those worries. What power is really afraid of isn’t the work art does—it’s the other thing. The not-work. The abandonment of the value of industry and industriousness in favor of what people used to start doing at 5 p.m. Power hates the idea that fine art, this least mass-marketable form of culture, might do what it’s good at: play. Because an individual that is already happily playing is an individual who can’t be bought.

 Donald Trump’s ghostwriter is not a fan of the Republican nominee:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

 Before the Europeans brought their repressive colonial policies to the Americas, many Native American groups had five genders:

The “Two Spirit” culture of Native Americans was one of the first things that Europeans worked to destroy and cover up. According to people like American artist George Catlin, the Two Spirit tradition had to be eradicated before it could go into history books. Catlin said the tradition:

“Must be extinguished before it can be more fully recorded.”

However, it wasn’t only white Europeans that tried to hide any trace of native gender bending. According to Indian Country Today, “Spanish Catholic monks destroyed most of the Aztec codices to eradicate traditional Native beliefs and history, including those that told of the Two Spirit tradition.” Throughout these efforts by Christians, Native Americans were forced to dress and act according to newly designated gender roles.

One of the most celebrated Two Spirits in recorded history was a Lakota warrior aptly named Finds Them And Kills Them. Osh-Tisch was born a male and married a female, but adorned himself in women’s clothing and lived daily life as a female. On June 17 1876, Finds Them And Kills Them gained his reputation when he rescued a fellow tribesman during the Battle of Rosebud Creek. An act of fearless bravery. Below is a picture of Osh-Tisch and his wife.

 One argument for improving the economy includes increasing the minimum wage. This is a well-argued video:

 How, and why, white supremacy continues:

One of the ways in which white supremacy has sustained itself is by staying in the shadows and normalizing this structure of domination. Skepticism often awaits those who merely attempt to point out its existence, let alone to imagine solutions, such as when Rudolph Giuliani recently portrayed the Black Lives Matter movement as “inherently racist.” As the scholar Carol Anderson argues in “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,” one result of this has been our tendency to characterize moments of racial crisis as expressions of solely black anger. Her book grew out of an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post, in response to the events in Ferguson. The issue, she argued, was not just “black rage.” What we were seeing was the direct consequence of “white rage,” a rage that surfaced time and again in the face of black progress, eager to roll back those gains. “With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling,” she writes.

 Lest we forget that Dr. Seuss (yup) was majorly anti-fascist:

https://twitter.com/btabrum/status/756030121979568128

 The Pokémon chart you’ve been waiting for (so you can figure out which ones are the rare ones):

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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