Art, Commerce, and Vision
Art isn’t free to produce. Especially the kind of art Sabin makes.
A collection of 63 posts
Art isn’t free to produce. Especially the kind of art Sabin makes.
Now that they are channeling the self-censoring spirit of our times, the soul is being sucked out of the business, and the art, that I love. This essay is my attempt to explain how we got here.
There are too many artists, too many people who want to be artists, most of them aren’t very good, and schools should focus on inculcating self-discipline rather than dopey ‘all must have prizes’ creativity.
Quebec briefly played host this summer to a theatrical production described by one prominent artist as “reminiscent of blackface minstrel shows.”
Unfabling the East is a brilliant new book by Jürgen Osterhammel that goes back to the original sources, and carefully reconstructs the evolution of European views of Asia.
The rising popularity of a genre known for its politically subversive content and heavy use of profanity clearly unnerved some of the more staid.
Activists wanted museums to pivot away from historic collections and towards their audiences, focusing more on excluded groups.
Among these is a preference for what have come to be called ‘traditionally marginalized narratives.
Abdou responded to the advice she got by writing a different kind of book altogether. “These were big edits,” she says. “I now had a ghost story without a ghost.”
Quebec is very much part of that great cultural mash-up we call Western culture.
Great cultures of the past were built around grand unifying ideas.
The centripetal tendency, if unchecked, ends in a black hole, in narrow paranoia, in the life-denying singularity of fundamentalism or fascism.
Yet, modern art is still portrayed as being avant-garde, defying trends, and sticking it to the establishment.
Ranked by concentrated cutesiness, the ‘original’ smiley faces that launched a fad and first bothered me as a kid didn’t pack the punch of what they would devolve into.
If taxpayers from both the Right and the Left refuse to fund identity culture, what exactly will remain of the arts?