- After French artist Françoise Gilot passed away last week, the original New York Times obituary headline foregrounded not her creative interests and achievements, but her relationship with Pablo Picasso. Shocker. For the Guardian, author Katy Hessel memorializes Gilot’s work and dissects the media’s obsession with women artist’s relationships to men:
The New York Times’s subheading originally read: “An accomplished painter (and memoirist) in her own right, she did what no other mistress of his had ever done: She walked out.” The subheading has since been corrected from “mistress” to “lover”, considering their relationship lasted almost a decade, and the words “in her own right” have been removed. But I want to touch on those four words. This unnecessary parenthesis appears far too commonly, especially with women. It is used to highlight something that is “other” to what the establishment considers the default: the patriarchy.
This isn’t about removing or cancelling certain stories and details. At times, they are important. But we must be respectful to someone’s life and how they lived it, what they achieved. If we need to root people to something else, in order to guide readers, could this not be social and political context?
- Paul Kodjo was considered the “father of Ivorian photography,” with wide-reaching influence on future generations of artists, but his works were nearly lost. Tiana Reid writes for Aperture:
Self-presentation, modernity, aspiration, self-propulsion, confession, and the politics of respectability are at the heart of studio-photography practices. Studio photography limns the line between self-determination and conformism, intimate and public life, performance and the mundane. By contrast, Kodjo’s photos of nightlife and youth culture especially are edgy, resisting cultural norms of the time. “Crazy, unbridled, carefree, and cheerful,” says Léki in the documentary, narrating over a slideshow of Ivorians dancing, partying, flirting, touching, swaying, smoking, self-fashioning, hugging, and posing. Kodjo also worked for the press, photographing the political elite, and he was the only Black African photographer to cover the May 1968 revolution in France, assigned by a government news agency created by then President Félix Houphouët Boigny.
- Remember Maurizio Cattelan, whose banana artwork “Comedian” was recently victim to a hungry Art Basel visitor? A judge just ruled that Cattelan did not infringe on the copyright of artist Joe Morford, who sued him in 2021 and claimed he plagiarized an earlier work of his. Amanda Rosa has the story for the Miami Herald:
In 2001, Morford made “Banana & Orange,” an artwork of a fake orange and a fake banana stuck onto a green background with silver tape. Almost two decades later, Cattelan gained international acclaim and infamy for his artwork called “Comedian,” which was a real banana taped to a wall.
Dana Susman, one of Cattelan’s attorneys from lawfirm Kane Kessler, said her and her client are pleased with the court’s decision. “It’s an important case as it sits at the intersection of copyright and art law at a critical time in the art world,” she told the Herald. “We think the court got it absolutely right.
- Alex Pareene’s thoughts for Defector on how the internet has changed are worth a read:
The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.
We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information.
- And at the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka writes about how the internet is also turning us all into “content machines”:
Once upon a time, the Internet was predicated on user-generated content. The hope was that ordinary people would take advantage of the Web’s low barrier for publishing to post great things, motivated simply by the joy of open communication. We know now that it didn’t quite pan out that way. User-generated GeoCities pages or blogs gave way to monetized content. Google made the Internet more easily searchable, but, in the early two-thousands, it also began selling ads and allowed other Web sites to easily incorporate its advertising modules. That business model is still what most of the Internet relies on today. Revenue comes not necessarily from the value of content itself but from its ability to attract attention, to get eyeballs on ads, which are most often bought and sold through corporations like Google and Facebook. The rise of social networks in the twenty-tens only made this model more dominant. Our digital posting became concentrated on a few all-encompassing platforms, which relied increasingly on algorithmic feeds. The result for users was more exposure but a loss of agency. We generated content for free, and then Facebook mined it for profit.
- Wanna guess which populations in New York City were most impacted by the wildfire air pollution last week? Arya Sundaram has this report for Gothamist:
Some 70% of the asthma-related visits during the period were in ZIP codes with predominantly Black or Hispanic residents. And 60% were in ZIP codes with higher poverty rates than the city overall.
- As trans femicide continues across Peru, an initiative called Féminas aims to provide health services and resources for trans women, Nicole Froio writes for Them:
Féminas is also working on simplifying the costly processes of changing one’s name and gender marker on official documents, which often includes a long and costly legal back and forth between courts. While Huerta points out that some trans people are able to cover the cost of social transitioning, she challenges the idea that being able to afford it is the solution. For her and for Féminas, the right to socially transition should be an inherent right of citizenship.
“Being a trans woman in Peru is difficult, and it’s also very complex,” Huerta says. “Because many trans women are able to earn money as sex workers, many think they are treated as citizens because they are able to purchase goods. Capitalism makes us think we are citizens because we are consumers, but it is not citizenship to be discriminated against when there are no legal protections against transphobia.”
- Katha Pollitt writes for the Nation about Elizabeth Gilbert’s decision to self censure her new novel that was set in historical Russia:
I support Ukraine in its self-defense against the Russian invasion. I don’t understand the infatuation of a part of the left with the USSR or Putin’s Russia, or their weird claim that Russia, currently invading a sovereign nation, is anti-imperialist. I can understand why Gilbert’s Ukrainian fans would be upset about The Snow Forest, as it exists in their imaginations. But I can think of better ways for Gilbert to have responded, beginning with “I think you’ll be surprised when you actually read the book.”
As for Hitler, should people really have stopped reading German literature when the Nazis came to power, let alone any book, by anyone in the world, set in Germany—in any time period? My mother, who was Jewish, took German as a student at New Utrecht High in Brooklyn in the 1930s—did memorizing poems by Heine make her a Nazi sympathizer?
- Earlier today, the Indian Child Welfare Act was upheld by the Supreme Court after months of uncertainty about the crucial piece of legislation’s future. For the Washington Post, Ann E. Marimow and Robert Barnes report:
The tribes and their supporters argued that the law is based on political distinctions, not racial ones, and that Congress had decided the law was necessary in part to ensure the tribes had a future. They said the law was meant to rectify a past in which, studies showed, about a third of Native children were removed from their parents for foster care or adoption. Upward of 85 percent of placements were in non-Native homes.
Tribal leaders called the decision a “major victory for Native tribes, children, and the future of our culture and heritage.”
“We hope this decision will lay to rest the political attacks aimed at diminishing tribal sovereignty and creating instability throughout Indian law that have persisted for too long,” said a statement from leaders of the Cherokee Nation, Morongo Band of Mission Indians, Oneida Nation and Quinault Indian Nation.
- George Soros has handed over the reins of his $25 billion empire to his son, but what will the right-wing conspiracy mongers think? DW has the story:
- A major savior slay, and we know da Vinci would’ve approved:
- Another development in the impending orca rebellion!
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
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