Art Archives - Page 3 of 17

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

The Arts and the “Fierce Urgency of Now”

Our supposedly universal traditions have left too much out

March 2, 2022 • by Katha Pollitt

Perl writes of the need to relate deeply to tradition and the past—he’s basically a proponent of art for art’s sake—but there are different traditions and different pasts. Maybe the problem is that our supposedly universal traditions have left out too much. ...

The Arts and the “Fierce Urgency of Now”

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

The Hip-Hop Revolution that Never Happened

Why it’s foolish to expect any form of art to change the world

March 2, 2022 • by John McWhorter

Today, hip-hop lives on without most fans taking seriously the fantasy that it will trigger a revolution or even increase political activism—that conceit now feels as antique as an iPod. Even a form of poetry as viscerally compelling as hip-hop cannot, it would seem, change the world....

The Hip-Hop Revolution that Never Happened

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

How Many Americans Believe that Art Has Any Value?

The real threat to the arts today

March 1, 2022 • by Lindsey Scharold

When I worked for an arts non-profit in suburban Minnesota, I saw the widespread lack of appreciation for the arts firsthand....

How Many Americans Believe that Art Has Any Value?

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Authority as Freedom: Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center, 2015

A young woman’s love song finds its Platonic form

March 1, 2022 • by Ingrid Rowland

When the curtains opened in the Kennedy Center forty-eight years later to reveal Aretha Franklin in a floor-length mink with a glittering clutch purse in her hand, they didn’t herald a performance: they announced an epiphany....

Authority as Freedom: Aretha Franklin at the Kennedy Center, 2015

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

What makes the arts an essential part of a society is their freestanding value—a value that cannot be described as radical, liberal, or conservative

February 28, 2022 • by Jed Perl

While there have been many periods when the arts inspired some sort of controversy, different times have different troubles. In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central problem is that the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is under threat....

The Arts

Art on Her Mind

bell hooks’s theory of beauty in the everyday

February 14, 2022 • by Monika Gehlawat

bell hooks’s contributions to feminist thought and race politics are widely known, as are her rigorous theoretical works and academic scholarship. While I have read and learned much from her art and political criticism, what has moved me most recently are hooks’s personal reflections on the quotidian spaces of Black ...

The Arts

When Diane Arbus Came to Central Park

The New York City story of a latchkey kid and a trailblazing photographer

November 30, 2021 • by Vicky Oliver

For me as a city kid, Central Park was a forbidden Eden. Even though I grew up a stone’s throw from the park, my parents forbade me to walk there, even chaperoned, even in broad daylight. And so, it’s all the more astounding that I recently found myself trotting—no, tearing over—to see ...

Democracy

Learning to Think About Memory and Politics

Jeff Goldfarb navigated–and worked through–the polar opposites that can define academic and political life

July 7, 2021 • by Irit Dekel

_____ Jeff Goldfarb has been my teacher, colleague, and friend: our conversations about culture, politics, democracy, and activism—through reading and writing, in public and private forums—have continued since I began as a student in the Department of Sociology at the NSSR. From and with Jeff, and by studying sites within which democracy ...

Learning to Think About Memory and Politics

Art & Design

What Can’t be Contained

A conversation between Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

May 13, 2021 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

_____ In March of 2020, with the pandemic devastating New York and Queens being declared the “epicenter of the epicenter” it felt impossible to find words to describe the uncertainty, the losses, the distance. Over the coming months, Alexandra Délano Alonso gathered images and fragmentary language to hold what was (and still ...

Art & Design

Thinking Design through Literature

Identity: The cultural politics of things and places

May 5, 2021 • by Susan Yelavich

_____ Where design projects possibilities, literature activates their potential and shows their effects. Brought together in Thinking Design through Literature, they form a new and wider tributary in the thought of things and places. That said, in this excerpt from the chapter on culture, readers will note that the word ‘design’ ...

Activism

Teaching Through the Pandemic

In a course about memorializing HIV-AIDS, students learned about community by making one

April 21, 2021 • by Dan Royles

_____ Everyone involved in education has found the past year to be a special challenge for teaching, learning, and simply making it from one day to another. But how do you teach students about a pandemic during a pandemic? In December 2020, queer historian Dan Royles interviewed Theodore (Ted) Kerr and his ...

Uncategorized

Dancing is my Amazing Grace

How art taken up as a child has shaped the rhythm of my life

November 25, 2020 • by Katherine Huggins

Dance is my catharsis: when I dance, the rest of the world fades away. I could not be more grateful for my dance education—it has propelled me to unimaginable heights and unexpected friendships. I’ve traveled the country to better my dancing, and in the process I’ve befriended people from all over ...