Required Reading
This week: Tania Bruguera’s museum manifesto in stained glass, Molly Crabapple on AI’s art heist, Rachel Corrie’s mother speaks out, remembering Ashaji, right-wing knitters, and more.
Molly Crabapple, who has a brilliant new book out, makes the case in the Guardian that the tech overlords building AI on the work of real humans are conducting the ultimate art heist:
I am an artist, and 2022 was the year when I first started to see knock-offs of my work. It was not my work exactly. It was instead a strange facsimile, as if done by a none-too-talented teenager on tranquilisers, all my lines and blotches reduced to rote. I quickly learned the reason. AI image generators had scraped my entire body of work off the internet and fed it to their bots, to be excreted out as a product. And it wasn’t just my work; it was everyone’s. Billions of images harvested from the internet without credit, without compensation, without even consent. I saw it as the greatest art heist in history.
The tech lords knew what they were doing. Back in 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen claimed that enforcing copyright law would “kill” the entire industry. Tech companies would do what they always did – move fast and break things. The things they were breaking would be us.
Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth has a new show in Berlin that he will never visit. In Africa Is a Country, critic Tajla Vale explores his revolutionary practice and refusal to visit Europe:
Nazareth carries the air of a wandering prophet. For more than 15 years, the artist has been systematically traveling, often barefoot, across the Americas and the African continent, summoning ancestrality through ritualistic walking. He refuses to set foot in Europe until he has walked all 54 African nations, and yet his work has been crossing that border for more than a decade—an echo of the typical South-North exchange. This year alone, besides his show in Germany, the artist presents work at Punta della Dogana parallel to the Venice Biennale.
Evoking the pivotal era of transoceanic European exploration, the 2025 small-scale paintings Verde establish a rhythmic visual correspondence with the formally similar 2025 paintings of Amarelo-Laranja, in which solitary figures, carrying a football, heavy weaponry, and a school backpack, appear as creatures of their landscape. They made me think of Nazareth’s indignation at his college art professor saying one needs to go to Europe to “actually” learn art. With Nazareth’s pre-linguistic understanding of knowledge (pre-cept), and given how history played out in the Americas, the artist has already received all the European influence he will ever need.
The Walrus published a piece about Artemis II as the beginning of space colonialism, and the right collectively lost its mind. Senior Editor Harley Rustad spoke with the writer, Michelle Cyca, about the cartoonish backlash:
I feel like the headline phrasing of “lunar land grab” in particular set people off.
It did, though I think it’s worth remembering X is a microcosm shaped by Elon Musk; I don’t know that it or the National Post are representative of normal people’s views. But it is, in fact, a land grab. The Artemis Accords were written to explicitly permit mining resources from the moon, even though the Outer Space Treaty prohibits any individual country from owning the moon, so it’s just a race to get there and start hoovering up the regolith. In theory, space exploration is supposed to benefit all of humanity, but it’s hard to imagine how this will be accomplished by mining—an activity that has, on Earth, only ever produced unequal distributions of profits and costs.
In The Rebel’s video, Ugolini says that your article is an example of “why Canada is where it is.” What?
There is a certain line of argument that goes Canada’s failures and limitations are the fault of wokeness. If people are feeling disenfranchised—increasingly precarious in their economic status, unprotected at work, limited in their capacity to grow and thrive—it’s useful to direct their anger at minority groups rather than the corporations or billionaires responsible for a declining quality of life. This is the same reason why fossil fuel companies fund anti-trans campaigns. On the other hand, it might also just be a stupid thing to say, with no grand strategy behind it.
In 2003, a US-manufactured bulldozer crushed 23-year-old Rachel Corrie while she protested the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza. Her mother, Cindy Corrie, now writes movingly in the Nation about the fight to stop the shipment of those same bulldozers to Israel:
No policy can bring back those taken from us by these actions—children and other loved ones. But the Senate now has an opportunity to honor the memories of our daughter, other Americans, and thousands of Palestinian civilians killed, and to show that their deaths, and all the destruction, will no longer be condoned and funded. We hope those elected to represent us, the American people, understand the message that voting to block these D-9 bulldozers will send. This will not be a symbolic gesture, but a concrete step toward the protection of human life.
Just weeks before she was killed in Gaza, Rachel wrote to us, “This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop…. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it.”
The Pitt's Supriya Ganesh writes a searing piece in Vulture about the overt racism and transphobia of American gender norms and breaking free from them as an adult:
I felt increasingly disconnected from my body, punishing it for something it could never be. I would chemically straighten my curls, contemplate a nose job, and get waxed on a schedule I took more seriously than some of my classes, so that I wouldn’t be the ungroomed, hairy brown girl. And still, it felt like I was consistently dehumanized in a way white women were not, no matter how they presented. When I performed femininity appropriately, I was exotic; when I didn’t engage in hair removal for a summer because I wanted to spend that money on textbooks instead, I was repulsive and mannish.
Concurrently, I was noticing the phenomenon of transvestigation gaining steam. While white women certainly are not immune to being targeted, it’s hard to ignore how much the right-wing conspiracy theory would dissect the bodies and appearances of women of color to claim they were men — women I looked more like than I didn’t. Michelle Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Serena Williams were early victims, but the fervor has certainly not lost its pace, recently coming for Rama Duwaji. If womanhood was the virtue as to why white women need to be protected, it followed that non-white women would be masculinized so that racism could be meted out upon us.
Are rom-coms dead everywhere, or just in the US? Rebecca Liu reports for the Dial on the film industries where the genre is still thriving:
The ongoing popularity of the romcom around the world raises the question of why its reputation plummeted in Hollywood. Billy Mernit, a Hollywood screenwriter and the author of Writing the Romantic Comedy, tells me that American audiences’ love affair with the romcom soured through overexposure. There was an “oversaturation” during the romcom’s 2000s heyday, he says, as studios chased easy money without investing in the necessary resources and time to produce good work. Faced with reams of formulaic, cheap films, audiences got sick of the genre. “At a certain point it started to implode and die.” Then the romcom label got toxic, he says, and studios began to avoid describing their films as such. “The most popular romantic comedies now are not ‘romcoms.’ They are movies that put it in disguise,” he says, naming 2024’s “Twisters” and “Challengers” — films that were billed as action and sports movies respectively, but have strong romcom elements.
This points to a broader definitional problem. The romcom label is often applied to middling films about love that are barely funny — take your pick from any substandard, low-effort streaming production — while acclaimed films with romantic and comedic elements that hope to be taken seriously avoid the word. This itself creates a sort of self-fulfilling loop: Gloomy reports of the “death of the romcom” are unsurprising when only disappointing or low-budget films own up to the label.
Beloved Indian singer Asha Bhosle died at age 92 this week, and Diet Paratha rounded up a few of hip-hop songs that sampled her prolific output:
Brilliant artist and writer Denali Joie (a former Hyperallergic Craft Archive Fellow) shares the story of her journey as a Jamaican-born trans asylum-seeker in the US and pursuing gender-affirming care, which you can support here:
If "Knitler" isn't a sign of the end times, I don't know what is:
What I wish the inside of my head looked like:
@office.of.collecting What the heck is the Office of Collecting & Design??? Good question.
♬ original sound - Office of Collecting & Design
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.
