The best art of the 21st century
Plus, the venture-capital funded chess competition trying to be the next big thing.
Hello. Since the last time we spoke, I:
Attended Cake Zine’s launch for its latest issue, Daily Bread.
Went to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Night in the Library event.
Rediscovered the pleasure of writing something and not publishing it.
Now, the news.
The Trump administration’s executive order banning the use of federal funding for anything DEI-related is—unsurprisingly—already having an impact on the art that gets shown across the country. The Art Museum of the Americas, which is located in Washington, D.C. and the oldest museum of Latin American and Caribbean art in the U.S., has canceled two upcoming shows: one focused on Black artists across the Western hemisphere, called “Before the Americas,” and another focused on queer artists in Canada, “Nature’s Wild With Andil Gosine,” the Washington Post reported. People involved with the exhibits told WaPo that Trump was direct reason for their cancellation, and, Cheryl D. Edwards, curator of “Before the Americas,” says: “Because it is DEI.”
The Art Museum of the Americas is attached to the Organization of American States, an international organization formed in 1948 and comprised of 35 different member states, including Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Canada; the United States, WaPo notes, makes the largest financial contributions to OAS’s humanitarian-focused mission annually, providing more than $50 million in funding last year.
Meanwhile, several arts organizations, including Rhode Island Latino Arts and the National Queer Theater, have sued the National Endowment for the Arts with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, saying that its new requirement that grant recipients not promote “gender ideology” is unconstitutional. All four plaintiffs in the suit…
are each committed to creating, producing, and promoting art that, among other things, affirms the equal dignity of all people—regardless of race, sex, religion, sexuality, or gender identity. In particular, they have created and promoted art in the past that promotes and affirms the lived experiences of transgender and nonbinary people, by casting transgender and nonbinary actors, and by promoting and producing art that features transgender and nonbinary themes.
The ACLU told the New York Times that it would ask a judge to block the new requirement from taking effect ahead of the 2025 NEA grant application deadline in April.
The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program has also lost its federal funding, the program learned last week, with a total $1 million annual loss, Lit Hub reported. This makes the already prestigious program even more selective: several of Iowa’s programs have been cut, and its fall residency—a “counterpart” to the famed Iowa Writers Workshop—will halve its number of participants, from approximately 30 to 15. The IWP has hosted 1,600 writers from more than 160 countries since its 1967 founding; its mission centers on cultural diplomacy and the promotion of “mutual understanding through creative writing and literature.”
Meanwhile in the Mexican state of Jalisco, all public schools—of which there are more than 7,000—have been mandated to require both technology and music education, Mexico News Daily reported. Governor Pablo Lemus Navarro said in his announcement that all schools will be renovated not just to have up-to-date computers, but also music classrooms and instruments. His hope is that this will yield “10 new orchestras” in “every corner of Jalisco”—and that his state will stand as a strong example across the country for its a top-tier education.
This STEAM approach makes sense when you consider that in the U.S., parents in tech increasingly want their kids to go into the arts, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. Why? Because they’re afraid that the jobs that so long seemed like guarantees of secure, lucrative futures are now at risk of becoming obsolete with increasing adoption of AI. “I keep telling my daughter, if nothing else works out, you could still help others learn to sing and dance and you should be OK,” says Rajeev Madumba, a healthtech worker.
Here’s another thing that parents might want to take note of: Opera for children is trending. We first spoke about how the Vienna State Opera was future-proofing back in June, and now we are seeing the fruits of those efforts. The company’s newest theater, the Nest, opened in December and was designed to make opera more accessible, particularly to children and families, the New York Times recently reported. Canadian-born, Germany-based composer Thierry Tidrow is at the forefront of an emerging boom in operas for children, as is German composer Gordon Kampe. Both suggest that the medium is beneficial for exposing children to current issues (climate change), big subjects (death), and, of course, music; as composers, too, they find new challenges but also a bit of stress-relief. This audience, Tidrow told the times, has not read Adorno, which makes them, naturally, a bit less critical.
Over in New York, the Metropolitan Opera has dipped its toe into its trend with its annual kid-friendly, abbreviated, English-language production of The Magic Flute. But I’m curious to see what a bit more innovation stateside in this field could yield.
What does the game of chess have in common with Formula 1 racing? Not very much, at the moment, but German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner, who got rich during the dot-com bubble, is intent on making a global chess tour that, “elevates chess players to celebrities, earns fees from sponsors and hosts, and capitalises [sic] on the game’s growing online fan base,” the Financial Times reported. With a €10 million investment from Left Lane Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm whose portfolio includes credit-card-for-renters Bilt, gentrification-signaling coffee chain Blank Street, psychiatric telehealth provider Talkiatry, and petty probiotic soda brand Olipop, Buettner and his co-founder, chess mega-celebrity Magnus Carlsen want to make Freestyle Chess the next big thing.
Freestyle Chess is different from traditional chess competitions put on by international governing body Fide because it switches up the game play: the last row of pieces are placed in random order for each game, adding a sense of novelty and a new challenge in an era of computer domination. Of course, there are streamers and many commentators involved to add to the spectacle of a competition that is held in a northern German estate, Weissenhaus. There is still a lot that the chess startup has to do to evolve into a real business that isn’t overly reliant on its VC funding (which, true, can be said for a lot of businesses in any given industry), and it’s contending with all kinds of growing pains. But there’s something exciting here. We’ll see how it goes.
Book festivals are booming in India as younger generations are “increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English,” and seeking inclusive literature on topics such as caste and gender, the New York Times reports. This story reminded me a bit of the Times’s story a few weeks back about the booming literary scenes across Africa, with festivals and publishers that promote and support authors writing in their native languages rather than trying to appeal to a western audience. It’s encouraging to see a thriving literary landscape anywhere—and we can hope that Tilted Axis’s growing success could help some of these titles become accessible to English speakers through translation.
In France, film lovers say: We’re so back. The New York Times reported that French cinemas have seen an uptick, recovering from a pandemic-induced slump and persevering in spite of streaming domination. There are are plenty of reasons for this. For one, France offers many smaller theaters financial support and taxes streamers in order to funnel that money back into movie-production efforts. The country also takes its cultural industries very seriously as a whole. There is, reporter Richard Fausset writes, “a very French idea about citizens’ moral obligation to support the arts and to do so somewhere other than at home.” Must be nice !
I was just a little bit worried about the upcoming Am*zon Prime series, Étoile, when I learned about it, but I think it will actually be a Good Thing. The show, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s first ballet-focused project since the short-lived Bunheads (2012-2013), is written and produced with her husband Daniel Palladino; it will premiere on April 24 and focus on a New York City ballet company and a French ballet company’s efforts to make a big marketing splash with the temporary swap of their star dancers.
I get nervous about ballet shows/movies because often they are very bad. But so far, it seems like Sherman-Palladino made all the right decisions. Vanity Fair says the show avoids cheesy depictions of France unlike Emily in Paris and worked with the translator of Anatomy of a Fall, Dany Héricourt, to script for exclusively French-speaking actors. All ballet scenes use actual ballet dancers (groundbreaking!); American Ballet Theatre principal Unity Phelan appears in five episodes of the eight-episode series as a character named Julie. Most resonant of all, to me, is Sherman-Palladino’s goal in creating this series: to express a great admiration of ballet and to push for the preservation of the art, which appears to be a key theme of the show. “You need art, literature, drama, dance,” she says. “Without this, life is just not life.”
At Georgia Tech this weekend, the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition Concert introduced 10 newly invented musical instruments to the world. Finalists of the competition included the Living Strings, a “hybrid acoustic-digital keyboard instrument,” the Hacked Double Trumpet, a “fully acoustic, modular wind instrument built from two trumpets modified with 3D-printed parts and adaptors,” and the Mulatar, which “combines elements of slide guitar, harp, and percussion into a single instrument,” among others. You can take a listen to them here.
Perhaps taking a cue from the New York Times (fair), ArtNews has released its list of the 100 best artworks of the 21st century. There is quite a lot to dig into here. Worth spending some time with it. ▲