Monday, May 04, 2015

Beyond Click Bait Monday

Unknown artist

Monday morning art reads: 

1. Surprisingly, of all places, I found a good account of the current harassment of artist Tania Bruguera by the Cuban government on Buzz Feed news. You may have heard of Bruguera several times recently, through performances of solidarity staged in New York and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. I wanted to know more. This article was a good start:


2. Joni Mitchell had a health scare last week, and many took the opportunity to not only express well wishes but also reflect on Mitchell's life and impact on music. I was reminded of a great article by Zadie Smith from 2012 about Mitchell, describing Smith's unlikely conversion to Mitchell's music. The article has wider implications than just confessional autobiography, it points to the mysterious mechanisms by which we come to love difficult things that initially offer us resistance. For many, this is the essence of art's power. 


3. William Poundstone has an eye for stories that have a tendency to slip through the cracks and he is always interested in the content of art rather than the gossip of art. His blog features a preview of the Allen H. Eaton collection of artwork from Japanese internment camps, recently acquired by the Japanese American National Museum:


4. Finally, I found this article on art and taxes to be very interesting. An article like this seems to come out ever year, though the implications (which are many and far reaching) are rarely discussed:


Video of the week: 

5. Simon Schama's television series, The Power of Art, and its companion volume takes as a central premise the idea that a single work of art is worthy of extended attention. Each episode studies an individual work of art and subsequently brings both the history of the artist and the history surrounding the work to bear on the interpretation of the artwork. Also, each chapter is a lot of fun. The Power of Art is on Youtube, in segments, and I link to the episode on J.M.W. Turner. It should prove a proper companion to the show currently at The Getty. 


Poem of the week: 

6. The recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry is Gregory Pardlo, for his volume Digest which was rejected by most publishing houses in 2010. Pardlo is a new poet for me, and I would be eager to read Digest, especially after finding his poem Written by Himself. The poem presents itself as a simple account of a man's life, but it is written in such a way that the personal quickly becomes the historical and then moves into the mystical. Pardlo retains perfect control, but the poem is full of little silences and strange mentions ("a harrow tooth" and "prologue of references") that cause it to plunge into mystery. It is about poverty, it is about race, it is about our inability to outrun what is chasing us. It is poem for the moment, but also one that should be equally applicable decades down the road.


One click deeper:


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