Let's get a bit more creative here
Plus, the current state of book bans.
Hello! Since the last time we spoke, I have:
Watched Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991).
Seen New York City Ballet’s Coppélia, which you can still catch next weekend, and bought my tickets for the Nutcracker (which are selling fast).
Went to program five of New York City Center’s annual Fall for Dance, where I saw the Dutch National Ballet, the London-based juggling(!) troupe Gandini Juggling, NYCB’s Sara Mearns and Tyler Angle performing Christopher Wheeldon’s This Bitter Earth, and, in a rather revelatory performance, ABT principal Cassandra Trenary performing Molissa Fenley’s State of Darkness, an intense, precise, and athletically incomprehensible solo set to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. For a dancer to hold her own against Stravinsky’s menacing score is one thing; to do it for a full 36-minute piece is even more of a challenge. I found Trenary’s artistry particularly compelling; this piece is an oxymoronic bout of controlled mania, and with a less skilled dancer, it could come across more simply as a feat of athleticism. Trenary brought a depth of emotion—fear, pain, passion, a sense of martyrous spirituality—to this dance, moving and shuddering through the primordial choreography. It is all the more impressive that she stood in for Mearns at the last minute, who was slated to perform the piece but is recovering from a minor injury she sustained in a performance last weekend.
Made my way through two-thirds of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, because I simply must be tapped into the discourse.
Let us discuss the news.
Absolutely atrocious. London’s Evening Standard newspaper, an 187-year-old institution that has been rebranded as London Standard, has cut back its schedule to once a week and laid off 150 employees. And it gets worse! It “revived” its longtime art critic Brian Sewell, who passed away in 2015, with an AI-generated review of the National Gallery’s exhibit “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers,” Deadline first reported.
Sewell was known for courting controversy, mainly through his acerbic and sometimes overstepping reviews. He had once said, after all, that “only men are capable of aesthetic greatness,” which, have you ever seen how so many men dress and “decorate” their apartments? In any case, the Standard’s faux-Sewell review was approved by the late critic’s estate, and the newspaper reportedly made a donation to a charity of the estate’s choice.
The paper, which is now, more accurately, a magazine, said that this review was a one-off project, and it was included among a host of other AI-centric stories. General consensus says that this was ultimately a publicity stunt that aimed to get the Standard some interest and intrigue upon its re-launch as a weekly. But ultimately, I’m not sure that this stunt is even all that interesting, much less is it clever; quite literally anyone can use ChatGPT to pull this off, should they desire to partake in the lowest common denominator of fine art engagement while also using more than their fair share of the earth’s energy and water resources. I fear that this stunt from the Standard is exactly what AI Sewell called the National Gallery’s Van Gogh exhibit: “an act of cultural laziness.”
Yes, women can have art just for themselves. “Ladies Lounge,” an art exhibit at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Australia, curated by Kirsha Kaechele, has the right to exclude men, the Tasmanian Supreme Court has declared, throwing out an earlier ruling that it was discriminatory. Perhaps you’ve heard about this exhibit, it has earned a whirlwind of headlines over the past few years. It opened in 2020, but in 2023, a male museum visitor complained, which led a local tribunal to order Mona to open up the space to all visitors. In response, Kaechele moved several of the Picassos that were in the exhibit to the ladies’ restroom. And then she ultimately revealed that the Picassos were not Picassos, but in fact, paintings she had made herself. And so, too, were many of the items displayed in “Ladies Lounge”—it is an exhibit of fraudery designed fully, Kaechele says herself, “to drive men as crazy as possible.”
This whole ordeal—unwittingly to the greater public—has, in fact, been a work of performance art with surprisingly heartening political consequences. It gave “women with a rare glimpse of what it is like to be advantaged rather than disadvantaged,” said acting justice Stephen Marshall.
So were women visitors duped into thinking they were seeing precious works of art? That may not be the case, as the AP notes: One male visitor said earlier this year on an Australian television program, “I begged to find out what happened, but no one said anything….My girlfriend said it was the greatest experience of her life.”
But is this a good work of performance art? Of that I am unsure. This is a project that made women visitors to the exhibit perhaps unwitting participants in an act that was fundamentally hollow. It is not too different, I think, than when my fifth-grade class was divided up into boys and girls for our own separate preliminary sex education, and the girls proceeded to make the boys think that the packets we received of one or two sanitary pads were, in fact, something altogether far more special and exciting. It is nice to pretend at privilege. But I feel that in 2024, perhaps it is time to move on to a more nuanced artistic exploration of gender dynamics.
It’s still pretty funny, I suppose.
Book banning has continued at a rate higher than pre-pandemic, the NYT reports; last year, more than 10,000 books were removed from circulation in public schools—nearly three times more than during the 2022-2023 school year, PEN America said. This has been fueled largely by laws in two states: Florida and Iowa. These laws target books that contain any sexual material and restrict books that contain discussions of gender identity; books by authors of color are also more likely to be targeted.
The impact of book bans is likely greater than we are able to discern, especially because, as NBC reports, “soft bans” are on the rise, too. This is what happens when libraries, schools, or even retailers refuse to stock books; this has been the case for books such as George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir focused on the author’s experience as a queer Black teen and young adult. Schools and libraries aren’t the only institutions impacted by book bans: as The Guardian notes, activists are also pushing back against book bans in U.S. prisons, which can vary widely by state and even by facility. Florida, for instance, bans more than 20,000 titles, compared to 68 in Rhode Island. Two ways you can help fight book bans: reach out to your elected representatives and join a local coalition.
Cemeteries are increasingly becoming cultural hubs, reports the Wall Street Journal. This is actually a continued tradition of a practice that hit its peak in the 19th century and something Mary Shelley would certainly condone. Personally, I feel I must get to an event at Green-Wood cemetery, as it is encroaching on being ridiculous that I’ve yet to visit in my decade-plus of being a New Yorker. Deeply regrettably, I will be out of town during the cemetery’s seasonal Nightfall tour, but it seems worth the visit.
Eyes on the Detroit Opera: Artistic director Yuval Sharon tells the Financial Times that opera is in need of “rebirth” upon the occasion of the publication of his book, A New Philosophy of Opera. Essentially, he views opera as a unique art form because it is the point at which multiple artistic practices meet: theater, music, and poetry. For this reason, he believes that breathing new life into opera with more experimental stagings (or perhaps new operas altogether, like Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded), could yield fruitful artistic engagement from new audiences. Interestingly, the FT notes, Sharon is influenced by Austrian psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik:
whose research on “ambiguity intolerance” after the second world war found that the more negatively an individual reacted to ambiguity, the more they responded to the pleasing order of totalitarian leadership. “Developing a tolerance for ambiguity, then,” Sharon writes, “offered a potent tactic in the effort to rewire a population brainwashed by the era’s fascist governments.”
Very interesting………………..
RIP Fredric Jameson, the Marxist political theorist and literary critic whose work shaped that of many of your favs—your favorite critic’s favorite critic, if you will. The Nation called him the “preeminent critic of postmodernism,” thanks to his analysis of literature, film, architecture, and consumer culture in the post-war period. Several publications have temporarily removed the paywall from Jameson’s work, so I will be spending some time reading over the net month. You can find his notable essay Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, here. You can watch a 30-min seminar of Jameson’s on Lacan via Verso (which, by the way, is doing some urgent crowdfunding at the moment). You can also access all of his essays published in Critical Inquiry through the end of October. I am firing up my printer, in spite of what I said last time about the cost of ink.
Okay! Over the past three decades, 40 percent of jobs in publishing have disappeared, according to Publisher’s Weekly. Seems good!
Alas poor Yorick. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is working on a production of Hamlet that will infuse Shakespeare’s tragedy with the album Hail to the Thief. Sure! “It will see Elsinore transformed into a surveillance state, where two individuals, Hamlet and Ophelia, have their eyes open to a world of lies and corruption,” reports British pub WhatsOnStage. The show will debut next year at Factory International in Manchester. Directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, longtime collaborators who also worked on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, are working with Yorke on the production.
More Vanya. The Chekhov play continues its wave of popularity as Andrew Scott will bring his one-man production to New York in the spring.
Welcome. Molly Young is back at the NYT after her maternity leave, bringing us more respected book recommendations.
Congratulations to the National Symphony Orchestra, which won a raise of eight percent over the next two years after a brief strike, picketing for a few hours outside of the Kennedy Center.
You Don’t Hate AI, You Hate Capitalism, argues artist Charlie Engmann in Art for America. But has he considered the fact that I have enough hate in my heart for both?
I jest. (Maybe). Engmann has his reasons for defending AI: for one, he has greatly incorporated it into his own artistic practice and argues that anti-AI arguments fall apart when you consider the flawed premise that “originality is the definitive criterion for assessing creative value.” These criticisms, he argues, have more to do with our value system under capitalism and less to do with AI itself.
Regardless I am not entirely sure Engmann makes a compelling case for AI. But he does make a compelling case against the ever-constricting grip that capitalism has on art. Still, he does touch upon a greater part of the issue that is not always involved in the debates about AI: process. Art is not an idea. If it was, we might all be maestros of our own making; just have one good idea, and you’re done. The creative process is not a singular moment, but rather something that unfolds through many iterations. There are ways, I suppose, AI can be involved in such a process; I was very intrigued to read graphic designer Linda Huang’s process for making the cover of Vauhini Vara’s upcoming book Searches through a series of seeming collaborations with AI tools.
“Can an AI model replace this process?” writes Huang’s husband Andrew LeClair, a fellow designer who created the book’s final cover. “No, because a true design process is an orchestration of a much more complex, iterative process of prompting—from text to image, from human to human, from human to machine, and from the machine back to the human—each mode informing another, grounded in a deep understanding of the design’s intention. Our jobs are safe, for now.” ▲