The Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington D.C. just started a new thing with their email newsletter called “Sumud Saturdays” where they share a single piece of Palestinian culture with their audience every week.
I really recommend joining their mailing list, you can do it here (link)
If you use Instagram, they also do Sumud Saturdays over there, too.
It is a shame to fight over terminology, especially when there is a perfectly accurate and precise term that could be used: personal collections. Not only is “personal collections” more accurate, in my experience it also draws students’ attention to a number of questions that they don’t ask about the term “archive.” When I discuss personal or special collections with students, they begin asking questions that “archive” does not inspire, such as: Collected by whom? Collected why? For what purpose? These are the questions we are trying to teach as historians.
As many historians currently use the word “archives,” they seem to imply that an archive is the natural state in which primary sources arrange themselves after being discarded or left by their creators. It creates the false impression that there is little to no work that goes into making primary sources available to researchers, and—more dangerously—that archives are even a neutral or unmoderated space. When archives and the historical record are used interchangeably in this way, we are unable to see what might be missing.
The governor of Ohio has changed his mind about the death penalty, because he understood that the death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent, and that it doesn’t help the families of the victims (often on the contrary harms them).
If you live in Ohio, please send a letter to your state representatives, asking them to support the bill to abolish the death penalty in the state. If you know someone in Ohio, please ask them to send a letter.
One of the insane circumstances that gets glazed over in art, is we're essentially trying to create objects that we ourselves can't afford. It's completely asinine. Essentially no artist in New York( the "art mecca") that's 30 years old lives solely off of their work, but we have this gross hope that collectors we have no social or cultural relationship to will afford us the lives we want. It feels like as an artist in this current set up you never elevate beyond needing your parents to put the drawing on the fridge. We need to relate and connect with our class. Either way you're going to be broke in this era. Why pretend to give a fuck about some banker or lawyer who's buying art just to distract themselves from the revelation that they aren't some cultural dilettante
And it’s frustrating because the “proper” art world decides what is important in its eyes, and it’s like you say, such-and-such collector, this gallery or art museum, that event, etc…
But in reality, if we actually think that art is important and culture is a human right and all that (and not all people think that, but I do), then for example artists who also teach art classes for kids or like “normal” people are also important! For most people going to some kind of community college type art class as a hobby is the accessible way to engage with making art.
If we want a society where many people make art on their own terms (not all people want a society like that, but I do) then we need an enormous army of people who can teach art/dance/theatre/crafts/music/etc classes, both for kids and adults.
People from some backgrounds find museums and galleries really off-putting places to go to, so if we want a society where everyone has access to look at art (not everyone wants that, but I do), then we also need street art and public art and “outsider art”.
If we think that it is good and important for people to have art in their homes (not all people think so, but I do), then “smaller” artists selling their work online are also important, because they are providing an important service at a price point that the artists that the art world has deemed important are not doing.
Johannes Vermeer Van Delft (Dutch, 1632 - 1675) - Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657-1659) - after the restoration in 2021
(Detail)
You can go your whole life knowing what a specific, hundreds of years old picture looks like and then all of a sudden people change it and go “no it looks like this actually, the earlier version was wrong”
And like we live in the age of photographic reproduction, the old image still exists. If you google this painting you will still see photos of this painting before its restoration. There are books with the old picture in them. There are now two versions of this painting, only one exists physically but the ghost of its past will never disappear either.
Losing my mind slightly.
In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”
“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”
Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”
It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option. My thinking around this issue is enriched by the philosopher Brian Massumi’s concept of “esqueness.” He exemplifies it by discussing a kid who plays a tiger:
One look at a tiger, however fleeting and incomplete, whether it be in the zoo or in a book or in a film or video, and presto! the child is tigerized… The perception itself is a vital gesture. The child immediately sets about, not imitating the tiger’s substantial form as he saw it, but rather giving it life—giving it more life. The child plays the tiger in situations in which the child has never seen a tiger. More than that, it plays the tiger in situations no tiger has ever seen, in which no earthly tiger has ever set paw.
Just as the child and an actual tiger are not one bit alike, the words Mary has a huge smile on her face have nothing in common with the picture of Mary holding her diploma. Yet the tiger announces something to the world, its essence, and a kid can become tiger-ized and be tiger-esque, their every act shouting, I am a tiger. The picture of Mary at her graduation is shouting something, and the words Mary has a huge smile on her face are also shouting something. It is at the level beyond each actuality, in the swirl that each stirs up, that the two meet.
(from Against Access, by John Lee Clark - link in notes)
love like you.mp4 || Steven Universe AMV
the su movie has convinced me forever and eternally, without a shadow of a doubt, that the lyrics of this song are rose/pink singing about a lifetime of regrets and how maybe… if she’s lucky… she can learn to love and become a better person.
