"Using Art to Explain Cultural History, Rather Than the Other Way Around"

"Wonderful art objects get demoted to the status of illustrations. Both exhibitions are a big jumble of things brought to bear on cultural history, a subject better handled through texts. That's what illustrations are for--as adjuncts to writing.
"And, yes, both shows tuck some contemporary works into their historical displays, downgrading them as well. The artists will survive, and who can blame them for taking the opportunity? But it's a waste."

Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times reviews exhibits at the Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

At The Reading Experience, Daniel Green offers a similar view regarding literature.

"Whose Venice?"

"It's a bit heavy-handed, but I like it because Venice is the kind of place where a lot of myths are true but also where many truths are just well-established myths. It is the cradle of skate and surf culture built on the ruins of an aspirationally European entertainment district. Some also consider it the slum by the sea, a home to everything experimental, creative and countercultural. Equal parts hip hop, punk, soul and rock 'n' roll."

At the Los Angeles Times, Frank Shyong visits the Venice Heritage Museum.

"Revoking the Experience of Modernity That Has Descended Upon These Paintings"

"When a painting was taken off the wall of the church and brought into the gallery of the museum, we were asked to look at it differently than the artist intended. Broken out of its original lifeworld and turned into a fragment (this is the original crime Adorno speaks of), the artwork became secular, a relic of another time and place, patched together with relics from other times and places. ('It would be an act of madness to enter a museum, kneel down before a painting of the virgin to pray for a soldier missing in battle, lighting a candle and leaving an offering on the floor near the picture before leaving,' Philip Fisher noted in 1975.) It is lost and adrift, yes, but it is also transformed, and here we find the other edge of the sword: One begins to draw connections the artist never imagined. That is the quixotic, heady power of the museum, the birth of which, one might go so far as to say, demands the death of the author. No works made before 1860 were meant to be contemplated in quite the same way—as Foucault reminds us, Manet was the first painter to imagine his paintings in the museum—but nothing that goes into it can resist its power. In this sense the museum is akin to the commodity system, another modern invention: Artworks confront all other artworks within its space. Inside, they change orientation, speak differently, take on new lives, assume new values. The viewer is charged with wondering about their potential, purchase, and power."

Alex Kitnick at Artforum discusses "the discontent with museums."

"A Much More Ambitious Vision of a Thriving Creative Sphere"

"Artists in the middle of the twentieth century flourished not because the economy was inherently favorable to them, but as a result of powerful economic winds and the groups that joined in an attempt to harness them. Together, creative class groups wielded the crowbar of politics in an attempt to pry some autonomy out of consumer capitalism."

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein at The New Republic reviews Shannan Clark's The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism.

"The Only Decision Truman Made Was Not to Alter the Plan"

"On the first two questions, declassified archival documents are pretty clear: There never was a decision to drop either bomb. Instead, there was a decision to build an atom bomb. Once it was ready, it was used; once the second bomb was ready, it too was used. From the outset, this was the plan—an automatic sequence from building the bomb to testing it to dropping it on the enemy."

Fred Kaplan at Slate argues that "decision to bomb Hiroshima wasn't a decision at all."

And a 2016 Atomic Heritage Foundation article recalls the debate over the Smithsonian's 1995 exhibit.

"It Concerns Us All"

"The main exhibition took eight years to put together. The American historian Timothy Snyder called the project a 'civilisational achievement' and 'perhaps the most ambitious museum devoted to the second world war in any country'.
"But the populists who had come to power in Poland's elections two years earlier found this unbearable, preferring to promote a version of events that would airbrush real history and glorify the nation instead."

Estera Flieger at The Guardian criticizes changes at Poland's Gdańsk Museum of the Second World War.

I Feel Like I'm Listening To

"'There is something in the Scottish spirit,' he says. 'A yearning, a romanticism. And this longing, this sadness, does come out in the music. It's maybe a working-class thing. We always seem to be the underdogs. Country music has always been big in Scotland. But there's also a feistiness. We like a party.' What are the Scots, then, yearning for? 'Probably to get out of the slums of Glasgow!' he hoots."

In light of a new exhibit, Sylvia Patterson at The Guardian investigates the history of Scottish pop.

"Local History Museum Really Digging Deep To Fill 2 15-By-20-Foot Rooms"

"'And there's a whole exhibit that, as far as I can tell, is just about the board members of the local historical society.'"

From The Onion.

"Art Need Not Be in a Temple"

"In those two decades, people who were artists, activists, and both, did a great deal to mark blackness as an identity: the Black Panthers organised to stop police brutality, while also creating free breakfast and community medical programmes; Nina Simone released To Be Young, Gifted and Black; and Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black power fists at the 1968 Olympics. And during these years, artists such as Lorraine O'Grady were asking: what is art, who is it for? Taking their work to the streets to insist, as William T Williams put it, that 'art need not be in a temple'. Art could be everywhere."

Steven W. Thrasher at The Guardian discusses the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern in London.

"It Might Express the Idea That All History Is Revisionist"

"And politics makes memory. So does the formal study and writing of history, of course, but the relationship between the discipline of history and memory—or broadly shared cultural assumptions—is complicated. Conventional wisdom shapes historians, who often reinforce it with their work; on the other hand, many challenge it by marshaling evidence and arguments that, on occasion, change the public mind and seep back into politics. I don't mean, then, that we need a historiography museum, but one that traces the intertwining of the popular imagination and the professional study of history. It would go beyond the question, 'What happened?' to ask 'How did we come to believe that this is what happened?' The answer to the latter can be just as important as to the first."

T. J. Stiles at History News Network calls for a "Museum of the History of American History."

"'I T'ink I'd Like to Talk to Someone About Gettin' a Grant'"

"Charm wafted up the line, fragrant as peat smoke, as I heard him utter the magic spell: 'I'd like to start a museum of American literature.'

"He said something else too, but I didn't catch it, because I was already racing downstairs three marble steps at a time."

David Kipen in the Los Angeles Times discusses the origins of the American Writers Musuem.

"Our Stories Have Shaped Every Corner of Our Culture"

"Scripture promised that if we lift up the oppressed, that our light will rise in the darkness, and our night will become like the noonday. And the story contained in this museum makes those words prophecy. And that’s what this day is about, that's what this museum's about.
"I, too, am America. It is a glorious story, the one that’s told here. It is complicated, and it is messy, and it is full of contradictions, as all great stories are, as Shakespeare is, as Scripture is. And it's a story that perhaps needs to be told now more than ever."

Time provides a transcript of President Obama's speech at the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

"Museum Of Repressed American History Conceals New Exhibit On Tuskegee Experiments"

"According to officials, the museum was founded by prominent historical revisionist Henry Fleming, who in 1968 donated his private collection of burned government papers concerning the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II. Since its unannounced opening, the gallery has featured such exhibits as a retrospective of the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad consisting solely of a toy electric train that circled around a locked box containing records of laborers' working conditions, as well as a room devoted to the Trail of Tears that contained no doorways by which to enter."


From The Onion.

"How Photography Helped Shape the Image of Country Music"

"Ask him about that energetic shot of Lynn he took half a century ago and you'll hear pride as well as unflinching honesty: 'It would have been better if I'd had a wide-angle lens. I had the Lenhoff, which was the Cadillac of 4x5 cameras, but darn it, I was so close I cut her hand off,' he said. 'It all happened so fast. But, boy, that was a fun time.'"


In the Los Angeles Times, Randy Lewis previews the Annenberg Space for Photography's new exhibit, "Country: Portraits of an American Sound."

"The Alien, the Brain, the Brute, the Guru, the Kamikaze, the Lotus Blossom, the Manipulator and the Temptress"

"'The images were largely negative,' says exhibition curator Jeff Yang. 'This reflected the time frame—a period when the view of Asians was shaped by racist, xenophobic wartime propaganda' and fears related to immigration and economic and global rivalries.
"He adds that the pieces on display, some of which may 'disturb and disquiet,' illustrate how 'tenacious stereotypes' plus the nature of the medium ('an art of broad strokes and bright colors') helped create stock villains, vixens and sages."


Karen Wada in the Los Angeles Times discusses "Marvels & Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986," a current exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum.

"Or Have We Built upon a Foundation of Sand?"

"Pacific Standard Time Presents gives us a chance to see how L.A. was made modern, but it also chronicles the rise and the fall of the car in Los Angeles culture. Maybe, by seeing this narrative so persuasively presented in museums, alongside the artifacts of other cultures, we can finally admit that our affair with the automobile is history."

Alissa Walker in the LA Weekly reviews the Getty Center's "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future 1940-1990."

"As If in a Careful Dance with Its Audience"

"Wandering through the exhibit, one is reminded of the filmmaker's beloved tracking shots, which accompany protagonists through trenches, corridors and hedges, influenced by filmmaker Max Ophüls, whose death, the exhibit notes, Kubrick memorialized on the set of 1957's Paths of Glory. Intensified by the filmmaker's fondness for wide-angle lenses, they emphasize the singular travels of his protagonists moving through time and space."

Doug Cummings in the LA Weekly reviews "Stanley Kubrick" at LACMA.

"The Museum's 'Patron Saint'"

"'I dig the dog. He's thinking, "Fuck this shit. I didn't join the LAPD, I was pressed into service against my will. You got some hopped-up dipshit in some backhouse, he's barricaded himself in there ... it's 116 degrees right now." And he's out front. There's no body armor on this dog. He's thinking, "I should be up at Ellroy's swank pad. Yeah, he'd let me sleep up on the bed. Yeah, he'd feed me steak. Yeah, I could go out and hunt cats in his backyard. I could be drinking tasty, bracing toilet water, sniffing crotches. Instead I'm out here risking my life for the motherfucking LAPD. Nobody asked me if I wanted this fuckin' job. I am truly a victim of the LAPD."'"

In the LA Weekly, James Bartlett visits the Los Angeles Police Historical Society Museum with James Ellroy.

"Waiting for the Historically Curious"

Three years ago, the decade-old museum joined with street artists to assemble a synthetic wall across Wilshire Boulevard, and then invited Angelenos to tear it down. That event—marking the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's demise—brought media attention and broadened the museum's fan base to more than a constituency of professors, graduate students and historians, Wende Executive Director Justinian Jampol said.
"'We're not officially open on the weekends,' Jampol said as local college students hummed around paintings on a recent Saturday. 'But as you can see, that is not necessarily the case.'"

Andrew Khouri in the Los Angeles Times discusses expansion plans for Culver City's Wende Museum of Cold War history.

Best Coast

Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times and Andrew Berardini in the LA Weekly introduce the multi-venue art exhibition Pacific Standard Time.