Required Reading
World AIDS Day at Stonewall, Alison Bechdel on making ends meet, Houston van art, NYC’s latest eyesore, Christ and kink, and the family behind Elf on the Shelf.
Luminary cartoonist Alison Bechdel's new graphic novel is finally here, and Hyperallergic contributor Alexis Clements penned an excellent essay about its lessons for working artists in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Bechdel is likely one of the people for whom it’s fair to say that aspects of her life have become easier with added income, but the generating of the work still relies on her alone. She still has to come up with something to say about the world that interests both herself and the buyers of her work—something that Alison struggles with regularly in Spent. And with that in mind, it seems notable that, at this moment in her career, Bechdel is returning to the work with which she started, to the characters and world she first developed in the 1980s, which helped her build her body of work. It’s a kind of return to basics, a touching-ground after what have likely been some pretty heady years.
Looking at the public record, Bechdel appears to be a sort of Horatio Alger, one of the little guys who made it big (let’s be clear that this is even rarer for lesbians than it is for the typical American). And yet, her return to the original source, and her protagonist’s existential crisis, feels like a reminder that success, particularly for artists, is a tricky thing, even more so for those who don’t manage to bring in enough money to stabilize themselves financially.
Sasha von Oldershausen reports for Texas Monthly on the work of Mario Ayala, whose new exhibition explores spray-painted, bumper-sticker-laden backs of vans:
“I think my interest has always been of things that maybe are banal to some,” Ayala says. “I’ve always been interested in the things that people sort of pass over, the unobvious.” One of the vans, entitled “Camouflage,” depicts a teal-green Toyota Sienna with a temporary Texas plate and a facade painted with alternating brush strokes of light green and black. “Their choice of expressing an exterior paint application in a way that represents a perspective of camouflage feels like a political gesture,” Ayala explains. (Noticeably absent on the vans is any explicit political iconography.)
Ayala alternates between referring to the pieces as “protagonists” and “portraits.” And they do feel like portraits, in the sense that each van offers a glimpse into the driver’s inner world—their identity, class, and personality. In a way, the rear of a car is its face: It’s the plane we engage with the most while we’re sitting in traffic.
New Yorkers aren't happy about the new JPMorgan building, whose presence has already changed the city skyline. Oliver Wainwright explains for the Guardian:
The sheer amount of structural steel – 95,000 tonnes in total – is obscene for a building that contains just 60 storeys in its 423-metre height, half the number of floors you might expect in such a colossus. It uses 60% more steel than the Empire State Building, which is taller and has more square footage. One leading engineer calculated that if the steel was flattened into a belt (30mm wide by 5mm thick), it would wrap the world twice – an apt symbol of the bank’s throttling global domination.
If the building is a bullying affront to the skyline, it is just as domineering at street level. It erupts from the sidewalk with gargantuan bunches of steel columns that fan out at each corner, clutching the base of the tower like Nosferatu fingers. Positioned to dodge train tracks below, the columns splay out to hold the building’s swollen mass ominously above new strips of privately owned “public space”, where shallow steps and planters look designed to deter lingering. To the west, on Madison Avenue, the building greets the street with an incongruous cliff face of carved granite boulders. This, it turns out, is an artwork by Maya Lin, who has achieved the impressive feat of making real stone look like fibreglass scenery from Disney’s Frontierland, complete with morsels of mossy garnish clinging to the cracks.
A beloved Claes Oldenburg lipstick sculpture that stood in a courtyard at Yale for over 50 years is being removed, thanks to a notoriously annoying a cappella group. Kiva Bank and Jerry Gao report for the Yale Daily News:
The sculpture, officially named “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,” was created in 1969 by sculptor Claes Oldenburg ’50 at the request of a group of Yale students as an unexpected gift for the University. The sculpture was initially installed on Beineke Plaza on May 15, 1969, as a speakers’ platform for the ongoing anti-war protests, but it was later removed due to vandalism and re-gifted to be placed in Morse College’s courtyard in 1974.
Stuart Wrede ’65 ARC ’70, who took part in the gifting of the sculpture to Yale, wrote to the News that he had not heard of the decision to remove the Lipstick from Morse College but said the student group would want the lipstick to be moved back to Beinecke Plaza.
Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz recently went viral for a truly disgusting rant about Holocaust education and the genocide in Gaza. For Forever Wars, Spencer Ackerman claps back:
I took that to be the point of Holocaust education. Not to exceptionalize Jewish suffering, but to activate solidarity. To recognize that there is a continuum of atrocity perpetrated by dominant classes against subjugated ones. The Holocaust shows where, once normalized, such things can lead. Antisemitism doesn't have to be the exact same as anti-black racism for the lesson of antisemitism to be to confront anti-black racism. The ongoing Nakba doesn't have to be the exact same as the Holocaust for me to find it appalling—particularly because it is performed in the name of my safety.
That was what I learned from my Holocaust education: Never again for anyone.
What Hurwitz objects to is that Holocaust education works. She is not upset that TikTok is driving misperceptions of the genocide. She is upset that the various social media vectors through which people hear directly from Palestinians drive accurate perceptions of the genocide. She is upset that those perceptions are unavoidable because of Holocaust education.
Bosnian poet Selma Asotić has a new poem in LitHub, "they descend upon us." Brilliant and hilarious, it begins:
the American PhDs, eager to investigate this part of the world so often plagued by bursts of inter-ethnic violence. Before they arrived we never knew murder was indigenous to our hands, a thing that blooms at regular intervals like the laughter of history. Nick from Connecticut is here to inspect.
In Prism Reports, Alyssia Choiniere writes about the Indigenous-led movement to categorize the Yukon River as "a living being," a crucial fight for Native sovereignty and environmental protections:
With a decimated salmon population, Silverfox-Young, of Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation, said she has been asking herself what the salmon crash means for the identity of her people. “If we don’t have salmon, are we still Little Salmon people?”
Silverfox-Young is committed to using her “voice for the salmon.” She’s the youth lead of To Swim and Speak With Salmon, an Indigenous-led group that trains young people to be salmon advocacy leaders. To Swim and Speak With Salmon is one of many Indigenous groups at the helm of a new struggle to champion the ability of salmon to thrive, while advocating for the Yukon River to be granted legal personhood rights on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
Granting the non-human living ecosystems legal personhood recognizes that humans are a part of nature and not separate from it. Simply put, legal personhood would grant the Yukon River the right to flow, to remain free of pollution, and to be represented in court if these rights are violated.
The once-secretive profession of celebrity ghostwriting is quickly becoming a public status symbol, reports Sophie Vershbow for Elle:
Like everything that goes into a public figure’s carefully calibrated crafted persona, partnering with a known writer and acknowledging their contribution rather than claiming sole credit is a calculated decision that’s explicitly outlined in the contract. “Everything is image crafting, and a lot of it is, ‘Does this look good on me?’ It’s a cost-risk analysis of what looks good to say,” notes Rachel,* a senior culture writer I spoke to who regularly interviews celebrities about their book projects. For some celebrities, it’s worth admitting they had help in order for their book to be taken more seriously—like influencer and podcaster Tinx talking about partnering with novelist Gabrielle Korn on her sapphic beach read Hotter in the Hamptons, or Grammy winner Mark Ronson openly acknowledging that he got help from an unspecified New Yorker editor to polish the final draft of his recent memoir, Night People.
The Strategist's Bella Druckman interviewed the two sisters who invented Elf on the Shelf, just in time for the holiday season:
How long has this elf tradition been part of your family?
Christa Pitts: Our mother had an elf that became our elf. Our grandmother would say, “You guys, cut it out. That elf works for Santa.” So pieces of what people know today as the Elf on the Shelf were part of our family history.
How did the elf go from Fisbee to the Elf on the Shelf?
Chanda A. Bell: It started when I was working for my dad two days a week in his engineering and fabrication firm. His office was about two hours from where I lived, and I was a new mom staying at home, trying to make a little extra money. So I would go over, and I would spend the night with my parents and bring my son with me. It was during that time that I looked up and saw the elf that I grew up with sitting on a shelf, and I said, Hey, Mom, we should write a story about our elf. We spent the next several months writing when I would stay with them.
From the very beginning, we knew we were going to make a book and that it would come with an elf doll because the story was written as a how-to versus a traditional story. I brought the viewpoint of a child experiencing it, and my mom was able to bring the viewpoint of an adult, so we wrote the story together
@heike.young They used to drink cups of hot milk with a little coffee inside, and put little pieces of avocado on bread! So quaint. #corporatelife #corporatetiktok #corporatehumor
♬ original sound - Heike Young
If you don't hear from me, it's because I'm busy watching this:
@avariecarone It’s called Great Big Tiny Design Challenge 🔥 ~ #minis #miniatures #miniart #dollhouseminiatures #dollhousemakeover
♬ original sound - Avarie
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
