In case you missed it, this week’s AJ Chronicles deeper dive into stories from the past week ponders German philosopher Jurgen Habermas’s notion of the “public sphere,” that space outside control of both state and market forces where culture circulates freely, ideas get tested, and democratic life lives. Democracy, he argued, required it to exist, and he warned it is never guaranteed. It’s worth pondering this insight now, because the public sphere is currently being tested: by the market, from inside the institutions that host it, and from the state. Habermas died last week at 96.
Calvin Tompkins died this week at 100, and with him goes one of the last great interpreters of contemporary art — the critic who spent 62 years guiding New Yorker readers through the often arcane world of what art was becoming (The New York Times). The timing is pointed. While Tompkins spent a career helping people understand artists on their own terms, the federal government is now insisting on a different kind of interpretation: the National Park Service has pulled films about mill workers from a historic site in Lowell, Massachusetts, apparently in compliance with its “only positive history” directive (NBC). And Black Studies departments at American colleges — some of them storied, award-winning programs — are being quietly dismantled, bottom lines and trustees doing what no culture war had managed to finish (LitHub).
Hollywood is feeling its own version of this. Vulture’s week-after Oscars piece notes that with the Warner Bros. sale and the Academy’s imminent move to YouTube, the ceremony felt like it was being preserved in amber even as it happened — a bittersweet fin de siècle moment for an industry in mid-transformation (Vulture).
A lighter item: a Dutch art detective once answered his door to find a blue IKEA bag on the step. Inside, a blood-soaked pillow. Inside that, a missing Van Gogh (NPR). Cultural transmission takes many forms.
All of our stories below.
