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September 29, 2003

Elsewhere

I'm only just starting to catch up with my fellow bloggers. Here are some things that caught my eye.

Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes shares two of my own pet peeves--and tells me something I didn't know:

What is it with galleries and price lists? Why are the prices of work on display a state secret? In New York the law dictates that galleries must have a list of the prices of the work on view available for anyone who comes into the gallery. (Yes, NYC galleries frequently ignore the law. I don't know what the law is in other states.) At one San Francisco gallery last week getting a list of works in the show (which included prices) was something that required a gallery staff meeting. Absurd. Can you imagine the same policy being in effect at Wal-Mart?...

When the Hirshhorn started its "Gyroscope" hanging by just saying no to wall text, nearly every critic who wrote about the show (me included) was thrilled that the art was allowed to talk without curatorial trap-flapping. Sadly wall text has crept into the show: There is now a tedious biographical wall text about Giorgio Morandi in the previously brilliant Morandi gallery. God forbid anyone would just happily look at the paintings and then Google the artist when they get home.

Megan McArdle (who blogs at Asymmetrical Information) wrote a provocative piece for Tech Central Station about what ought to be built--or not--at Ground Zero:

If I were in charge of the site, I would make it a simple sheet of grass, with flat stones set into the earth to mark the outlines of the missing buildings. There would be no other memorial on the site but the shape of what was absent; if you must have a statue or some such, you can put it next to the site of 7 World Trade Center, which is already being rebuilt. But on the site itself, just a grassy space, with enough room for people to reconstruct the site in their imaginations if they wish--and enough room for those who don't so wish to sit on the grass and enjoy life's short moments in the sun....

Are we "letting the Confederacy win" because there are no longer farms at Gettysburg? We don't have to show the South they haven't licked us by painstakingly reconstructing a reasonable facsimile of what was there before; we showed them that by winning the war. It is losers who have to put a good face on things and pretend that nothing has changed, because their puffed-up ego is all they have left. If we smash al-Qaeda, I don't think we need to be afraid to show the world that the loss of more than 3,000 innocent lives has caused us unutterable pain.

And the indispensable Erin O'Connor of Critical Mass tells a few hard truths about her profession:

I have often had occasion to say to students that the things that draw them to advanced literary study--a love of learning, a love of literature, a deep desire to share those loves with students through teaching--are not the things that drive most English professors, and have next to nothing to do with what they would be expected to do in graduate school and beyond. The student who enters grad school intent on becoming a traditional humanist is the student who will be labelled as hopelessly unsophisticated by her peers and her professors. She will also be labelled a conservative by default: she may vote democratic; may be pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, and anti-gun; may possess a palpably bleeding heart; but if she refuses to "politicize" her academic work, if she refuses to embrace the belief that ultimately everything she reads and writes is a political act before it is anything else, if she resists the pressure to throw an earnest belief in an aesthetic tradition and a desire to address the transhistorical "human questions" out the window in favor of partisan theorizing and thesis-driven advocacy work, then she is by default a political undesirable, and will be described by fellow students and faculty as a conservative. She will become untouchable, mockable, and literally unsupportable. She will have a hard time finding people to work with, a harder time getting good letters of recommendation, and may feel that she is being drummed out of the work she is called to do by people who are using that work for profoundly other, self-serving ends.

What would we do without blogs?

Posted September 29, 2003 9:51 AM

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