May 12, 2008
Weekend notes
- Arthur Danto's essay "Unlovable," in the May 26 issue of The Nation, discusses the 2008 Whitney Biennial:
There has been oddly little excitement, let alone controversy, surrounding the Whitney Biennial this year. No one told me that it must be seen, no one said how awful it was. People wondered if the show had become obsolete, especially in late March, when Europeans thronged to New York City to see the Armory show and its galaxy of satellite art fairs--Pulse, Red Dot, Bridge, Scope New York and the rest. Why would anyone leave the glitter of these seductive displays to visit what was generally understood to be a drab exhibition that billed itself as a survey of where American art stands today? In any case, there would be plenty of American artists at the fairs who had already made the cut at one commercial gallery or another. I knew but a small handful of the eighty-one artists listed in the Whitney's press release, and few of those I did know were near the top of my list of favorites. (Some of them were near the top of my list of artists to be avoided when possible.) I could tell that this was mainly to be a show of "emerging artists"--the kind sought by enterprising collectors, funding agencies, younger curators and galleries out to make a name for themselves. Since the fairs were full of emerged, emerging and about to emerge artists, many just hatched from their MFA shows, it was hard to figure out what could be special or different about Biennial 2008.
- Dan Barber, chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, contributed an editorial to yesterday's New York Times titled "Change We Can Stomach":
For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we’re feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be?
Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer.
In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre.
- For those of you who read George F. Will's review of Rick Perlstein's new book, Nixonland, you may be interested to see a long excerpt that was published in the April-May Bookforum.
- Bill McKibben has published an editorial announcing his new 350.org campaign at TomDispatch.com:
There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."
[...]
A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.
- In the Washington Post Book World, Michael Dirda reviewed Albert Camus's Notebooks, 1951–1959.
- There was a profile of Vanessa Beecroft, loosely pegged to the new documentary about her attempt to adopt Sudanese twins, in last week's Los Angeles Times Magazine.
- "Measure for Measure," an essay by Jonathan Gottschall in the Boston Globe Ideas section, argues "literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science." I disagree with its content fairly vehemently, which is one reason why it's worth reading.
- Lastly, photographs of a lightning-streaked thunderstorm intersecting with the ash in the sky above the Chaitén volcano, in Chile. When I saw this, all I could think of was Ghostbusters: "Zuuuuuuuull......"
