Guggenheim Museum Removes Toxic Sackler Name

New York City’s Guggenheim Museum is the latest cultural institution to remove the Sackler family name from its building. The Sackler family’s billions were accumuated over the dead bodies of 841,000 Americans who overdosed on the Oxycontin opioids pushed by their pharmaceutical company. The Sacklers shared some of their loot – and their name – with cultural institutions, hospitals, and universities, which are now beginning to wake up and smell the Narcan. The Sackler name and blood money have now been recognized as poison.

More:

“Guggenheim Removes Sackler Name Over Ties to Opioid Crisis,” Zachary Small, New York Times

“The Guggenheim Museum, Which Long Resisted Calls to Drop the Sackler Name, Has Finally Quietly Removed It,” Sarah Cascone, Artnet News

 

_________________
Shortlink: https://wp.me/p6sb6-z0B

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

 

Trump Executive Order: Create a ‘Garden of Heroes’

Two days before fleeing the mess he made in Washington, lame duck Donald Trump issued an executive order “establishing a statuary park named the “National Garden of American Heroes,” his reaction to the removal of statues celebrating America’s racist past. In keeping with his deep reverence for America’s history, Trump’s imaginary garden is planted with tributes to 244 legendary dead Americans like William F Buckley, Johnny Cash, Alex Trebek, Vince Lombardi, Walt Disney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Daniel Boone, Kobe Bryant, Johnny Cash, Whittaker Chambers, Julia Child, Henry Clay, Roberto Clemente, Buffalo Bill Cody, Samuel Colt, Davy Crockett, Barry Goldwater, Billy Graham, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Bob Hope, Audie Murphy, Annie Oakey, Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Babe Ruth, Fulton Sheen, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple, Sam Walton, and Cy Young, as well as founding fathers like John Wayne.

Also included are some notable personages who might object to inclusion in this Trump-ordered hodgepodge were they not conveniently expired: Muhammad Ali (Muslim and Civil Rights activist), Hannah Arendt (analyst of Totalitarianism), Dorothy Day (founder of the Catholic Worker movement), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (liberal feminist jurist), Samuel Gompers (labor leader), Woodie Guthrie (radical songwriter), Helen Keller (suffragist, pacifist, radical socialist, ACLU founder), Edward Murrow (journalist), environmentalists Ansel Adams and John Muir, and Civil Rights icons Medgar Evers, Barbara Jordan, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Rosa Parks, for example.

Don’t get too excited about this. The Executive Order doesn’t specify a site for the “Garden of Heroes,”and there’s no funding, either. In other words, it’s a typical Trump construction project.

More:

“Trump orders creation of ‘Garden of American Heroes’ amid backlash over monuments,” Martin Pengelly, The Guardian

“I Beg Your Garden? Trump Adds ‘Hero’ Names To Statue Garden Unlikely To Take Root,” Barbra Sprunt, NPR News

Executive Order 13934 Revised, January 18, 2021

_____________

Shortlink: https://wp.me/p6sb6-wz6

Image (alternate “Heroes Garden” concept) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Happy Birthday Frida Kahlo

Mexican painter and activist Frida Kahlo de Rivera  was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, Mexico. The National Museum of Women in the Arts is celebrating with a virtual Happy Hour today, 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM Eastern. Reserve your spot and mix up a cocktail. ¡Salud!

Related:

Frida Kahlo at MoMA

Frida Kahlo: The Complete Works, Frida-Kahlo-Foundation.org

“Frida Kahlo Was a Painter, a Brand Builder, a Survivor. And So Much More.” Rebecca Kleinman, New York Times

___________________

Short Link: https://wp.me/p6sb6-v4D

Image (“Frida in Shades, after Frida Kahlo”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Guernica

“In 1937, in one of the worst civilian casualties of the Spanish Civil War, Fascist forces bombed the village of Guernica in Northern Spain. For Pablo Picasso, the tragedy sparked a frenzied period of work in which he produced a massive anti-war mural, titled “Guernica.” How can we make sense of this overwhelming image, and what makes it a masterpiece of anti-war art? Iseult Gillespie investigates.” A TED-Ed video.

Related:

“Picasso’s Guernica: 80 Years Later,” Jacque Venus Tobias, The Artifice

______________
Short link: https://wp.me/p6sb6-uaM

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Olympia

“Western art followed the same rules for centuries. Until Olympia.” a Vox video by Marie Cascione and Coleman Lowndes.

_____________

Short link: https://wp.me/p6sb6-tLM

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Van Gogh’s Ugliest Masterpiece

Evan Puschak at The Nerdwriter explores what Vincent van Gogh called “one of the ugliest pictures I have done,” The Night Café.

More:

“Van Gogh’s The Night Café Was Among His ‘Ugliest Pictures,’” Jason Kottke, Kottke.org

________________________

Short link: https://wp.me/p6sb6-t5y

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Trump Steaks in the Meatpacking District

Photographer-artist-provocateur Andres Serrano has assembled an array of 1,000 Trump-related objets in an exhibition called “The Game: All Things Trump” at 409 W 14th Street, in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Mr. Serrano has been assembling his collection for thirty years, and organized the exhibition to show that President Trump “didn’t appear out of nowhere.” Exhibits include a slice of cake from Donald and Melania’s 2003 wedding, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, remnants of the Trump Shuttle, and a Trump University diploma.  “I wanted to paint a portrait of Donald Trump using his own brushes,” Mr. Serrano told the Washington Post.

The show’s title is drawn from the 1989 Milton Bradley board game “Trump: The Game,” released with the tagline “It’s not whether you win or lose, but whether you win!”

More:

“All things Trump: behind Andres Serrano’s memorabilia museum,” Nadja Sayej, The Guardian

___________________

Short Link: https://wp.me/p6sb6-t5X

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

An Empty Vessel in the Big Apple

Hudson Yards has opened, a new office, upscale condo and luxury shopping development built over an active trainyard on New York’s West Side. The city and state chipped in $6 billion for the project, but maybe that’s not as bad as it sounds.

What is bad, undeniably, is the 150-foot-high, 16 storey, copper-covered selfie magnet looming over Hudson Yards plaza called Vessel. The structure, consisting of 154 flights of stairs, may be a perfect metaphor for New York: you keep climbing but get nowhere.

Migrant Mother

An exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s photographs, The Politics of Seeing is currently on display at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. Her most well-known photograph is her 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, popularly known as “Migrant Mother.”

A video from the WorldCrunch OneShot photography series.

More:

“The Assignment I’ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother,” Dorothea, Lange, Popular Photography (1960).

“Unraveling the Mysteries of Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother,’” James Estrin, New York Times

_____________

Short link: https://wp.me/p6sb6-sB5

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

The Fore-Edge Painter

Martin Frost of Worthington, England may be the last professional fore-edge painter in the world, delicately painting scenes on the side of books, hidden beneath the gilded page edges.

Martin Frost website

____________

Short link: https://wp.me/p6sb6-sdq

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine