The art world is all abuzz about the Museum of Modern Art’s plans to charge $20 for admission when it reopens this weekend after a multi-zillion dollar renovation. In response to defenders of art for the people, Glenn Lowry, MOMA’s director, said this: “If you think that museums should be free, campaign for a government …
Colin Powell has stepped down as Secretary of State, and it appears Condoleeza Rice is going to be his replacement. It also looks like the end of an era of essentialist thinking about race. In a post-election essay that’s been circulating via the Internet, Charles Frederick characterized race as “a concept of no meaning while …
My husband and I moved to Washington, DC in 1979 to head a national organization of community artists. At that time, the federal government was allocating about $200 million a year to public service jobs for artists: painting murals, designing community gardens, running neighborhood circuses, offering music classes, and so on. One of Don’s and …
I was in New York last week, mainly talking with groups of NYU arts students about roles for artists in social change. Every once in a while in such milieux, I run into the complacent view that artists are doing good just by being artists. It annoys me when people trot out essentialist ideas of …
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, very near the liberal epicenter at Berkeley, I’ve yet to meet anyone who is now or has ever been a Bush voter. I?ve been thinking hard about this, because it’s in my nature to want to understand those with whom I disagree, and my encounters with their views …
Two headlines this gray morning by the San Francisco Bay. The California Supreme Court invalidates the marriage licenses issued to gay couples in San Francisco, and the governor of New Jersey, flanked at the podium by his wife and his mother, steps down, confessing that he has been living a lie: he comes out as …
The other day I took a walk with a friend who came to this country as a child, a refugee from Nazi Germany. We talked–are there any other topics these days–of the state of American politics and society. “It’s just like Germany,” she said. “If we were younger, if our children didn?t live here, we’d …
My friend Michael Dorsey has a good story on his blog for June 29th about the U.S. Attorney’s insane charges against artist Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble. They started with bioterrorism and whittled the indictment down to something they thought might actually stand, petty larceny. But the crime the artist actually committed was …
A few days ago I alerted you to expect information about another great project by and for artists awakening to the crisis in democracy. SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, California, has inaugurated the National Call to Artists, a Web repository for images, songs, scripts, and ideas that can help increase …
In my blog entry for June 6th, I reported on a meeting of community artists. I described how the participants noticed that, out of political demoralization, we had silenced ourselves in the public arena, not even bothering to state our case. Unlike earlier times, we artists weren’t promoting a cultural policy agenda for the presidential …