Illusions and Other Afflictions
“Since the 2008 recession, profit-making from art as an asset class has only continued to consolidate within a remote strata of the ultra-wealthy.”
If you have any illusions about the art world left, this article will set you straight: it’s all just a shell game for the super rich. Here’s the role played by museums:
“Yet museums do not only burnish the reputations of the ultra-wealthy, as activists lately tend to stress, or passively reflect broader economic trends. Not least as sources of investment capital and fees for the financial sector, they actively sharpen inequality. They’ve become vehicles for the ultra-wealthy to advance their ruling-class interests, diverting the benefits of charitable-giving to themselves and the managers of their vast fortunes.”
Lovely, huh? And that’s before the article dives into some other topics, such as museums’ whiteness or the lousy pay of ordinary workers. So maybe think about all of that next time you consider paying $25 to enter a museum.
Anyway, by sheer chance I came across Japanese acid-punk outfit Bo Ningen a little while ago. Check out this performance. It’s absolutely incredible. If Animal from the Muppet Show had his own band, it would look and sound like this.
I read somewhere that one’s taste in music doesn’t evolve past a certain age. I don’t think that’s fully true. But I’m pretty sure that if I had somehow discovered Bo Ningen when I was an undergrad students (which would have required a time machine), I would have really enjoyed it. A bunch of people playing pretty fast songs with crazy-sounding guitars – it’s not a bad place to become attached to.
“With youth’s carefree ease, you scribble on any subject that comes to mind. Words cascade like an avalanche in spring. Try chewing your pencil and staring out the window in despair every so often.”
This is advice by Wisława Szymborska (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996) when she anynomously wrote an advice column entitled How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) for the journal Życie literackie (Literary Life) from 1960 to 1981. You can find more of her advice here. It’s incredible. One more gem:
“In this world, everything wears out with daily use—except the rules of grammar. Feel free to use them more frequently. They’ll hold up just fine.”
Speaking of gems, last year I came across a Japanese-language interview with Yurie Nagashima. I read it using machine translation. Machine translation isn’t bad for many languages, but in the case of Japanese it’s more ballparky. But if you can’t read Japanese at all, that’s still better than nothing.
Now, an English translation has been made available (translated by Polly Barton; link is to a pdf). For sure, you want to give it a read. It centers on so many things that from the outside are often hidden: the role of women in Japan in general, and the way male critics defined female photographers.
“I also wish that we lived in a world where everyone who saw themselves as a girl could express themselves without having their self-esteem dented by others. For a long time, I secretly looked down on the people who wrote all these misguided things about what girl culture is, while somewhere in my head I was waiting for a critic to come along and correct all their mistakes. Nowadays, you don’t see princes on white horses coming to the rescue, even in Disney films. So I decided that what I needed to do was to protect the value of myself and the work on my own and reclaim the self-esteem that had been stolen from me.” – Yurie Nagashima
Related in a number of ways: there’s a fascinating interview with Aileen Mioko Smith about her late former husband Eugene Smith and the making of Minamata. Apparently, there’s a movie now, which from what I heard isn’t super terrible. You’ll want to read the interview for a number of reasons. First, I don’t think her role is very widely known. Neither is the fact that she is a very, very good photographer. There are many of her photos, and they’re incredible (I actually think they’re better than Eugene Smith’s). There are a lot of details of the actual story – if you don’t have the book, you can learn a lot right there. And then there’s this aspect, which is very photoland but also very Hollywood:
“Gene and I were partners in this work. It was a unique partnership—he as a veteran photojournalist doing his final work, me doing my first—the two of us were one. We took a similar number of rolls of film. Both our photographs are in the book. It’s seamless. I cherish that reality. The movie doesn’t show any of my photographs. The reality that a lot of people who see the movie are going to think [happened] (sic!) is not necessarily the reality that happened to me or us. In a way that hurts, and it bothers me, but I’ve had a sort of epiphany. It’s about letting go.” – Aileen Mioko Smith
Someone’s contribution shouldn’t be ignored, even if it’s a Hollywood movie. To imagine that someone who already has to struggle with being essentially a second-class citizen as a woman in her own country (details) now has her contributions ignored in the supposedly more equal West – that’s just beyond the pale.
With that I’m going to conclude for today. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and as always thank you for reading!
– Jörg