JSF blog / Medium
At twenty-two, when things looked rough for me in New York, I jumped; at twenty-seven, jumping seemed impossible. If it was true that nothing you do in your twenties matters, it certainly didn’t feel that way: it felt as if my whole life had been compressed into my twenties, like the clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
Cory Booker: the inexorable rise of Newark’s neoliberal egomaniac
The Guardian
It’d be one thing if the Soviet-style personality cult and let’s-come-together Twitter banalities – recent days have seen him post self-help quotations from Bruce Springsteen and the Dalai Lama – were just marketing for a progressive political program. But Booker is a far more conservative figure than the Cult of Cory, which is too busy making Superman or Chuck Norris jokes, may actually realize.
Frieze
The top five percent of dealers now account for more than half of the entire value of the art market, McAndrew estimates, while the kind of galleries that De Appel wants to cultivate are quickly becoming unsustainable. Teaching practical knowledge to young gallerists may be a fleeting ambition, therefore, and the real, bleaker future of such programmes is doubtless as a clearinghouse for the big boys – just another node in an ever-hardening system of privilege and power, dispensing credentials of low value and very high cost.
Jay DeFeo (exhibition review)
Frieze
Her last works lack the energy of her early paintings or the weirdness of her 1970s output – but that almost didn’t matter at the end of this illuminating retrospective, which argued persuasively that Jay DeFeo deserves to be understood for the entirety of her career. Beyond rigid formalism, and beyond New York too, dozens of stories remain to be told about the American postwar generation, and this show was a welcome contribution to that still delayed project.
Hot List 2013: I’m So Excited!
Out
The passengers in Almodóvar’s rather swank business-class cabin – who include All About My Mother heroine Cecilia Roth and Volver star Lola Dueñas – cope with the plane’s troubles by knocking back mescaline-spiked cocktails and seducing other flyers in varying states of consciousness. The dialogue, meanwhile, comes fast and furious, like an old Hollywood screwball comedy, but in Spanish and much sluttier. (You’ll learn a lot of gay slang for your next night out in Madrid, maricón.)
Eurovision: why Americans can’t afford to miss out on this cultural spectacular
The Guardian
You may have heard Eurovision derided by antimodern haters as some kind of tacky, overblown kitsch festival – and in the years since the fall of the Iron Curtain, some western Europeans have not hesitated to add a racist tinge to their derision, calling it a silly display only fit for Slavs and Balts. Pay them no mind. Eurovision only looks like a singing competition. It is much more than that: it is an emergent political paradigm, a model wherein national pride and pan-European unity go hand in hand. The EU itself can only dream of this kind of allegiance.
Algerian Chronicles, by Albert Camus (review)
NPR
“I need to let you know how I feel,” Camus writes to an Algerian militant in a 1955 open letter. “Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at the moment, as others feel pain in their lungs.” It’s a hugely powerful simile, and not only because Camus suffered and nearly died from tuberculosis as a young man. Algeria was his oxygen — and between colonial repression and anti-colonial violence, Camus felt himself being asphyxiated.
Nobel Literature Laureates, In Order
The Awl
11. Luigi Pirandello, 1934
10. Czesław Miłosz, 1980
9. Rabindranath Tagore, 1913
8. Henri Bergson, 1927
7. Eugene O’Neill, 1936
Frieze New York turns two with a giant balloon dog and a VIP-free speakeasy
The Guardian
So take the ferry to Friezeland, an island off the coast of New York with its own newspaper (produced every morning), its own fashion code (wear black, even in May), restaurant scene (have you tried the Chongqing chicken wings at Mission Chinese?!), and gossip network (you just missed Andrew Garfield over there at the Jonathan Horowitz installation!).
The World’s Best Restaurant is Not a Memorable One
The New Republic
El Celler de Can Roca is located in Girona, a town of about 100,000 people in the northeast corner of Spain, about halfway between Barcelona and the French border. My compañero and I arrived after spending the day in the Catalonian hills, blasting Ciara and Beyoncé out of the windows of our silly European car and gaping at the omnipresent separatist graffiti. The destruction of the Spanish economy by an austerity-obsessed and comically corrupt government had further strengthened the region’s secession movement: the word independència, with its accusatorily Catalan accent grave, had been scrawled on wall after wall. We had come to Catalonia as eurozone disaster tourists, and we were not disappointed.
Is the hoopla over basketballer Jason Collins being gay really deserved?
The Guardian
Many gay writers who praised Collins yesterday are big basketball fans themselves, and I don’t mean to question them. But I myself have no special interest in the glossy corporate spectacle of American sport – last weekend’s obscenely overproduced NFL draft looked, to me, like an outtake from the Hunger Games – and so my reaction to Collins’s coming out has gyrated wildly between profound admiration and deep, deep cynicism. To understand why, I think it helps to break the issues at hand into two: the individual and the corporate, the personal gesture and the machine reaction.
The New Republic
Nobody would deny that images are dangerous, and that their content and force can change depending on their method of presentation—casualties as propaganda for terrorist organizations or for that matter for our own government and its media apologists. But the real morally perilous position is to shut out the suffering depicted all around us in the name of some premodern iconophobia, as if you were respecting victims’ suffering more by turning away.
The New Republic
And sex, too. Sex in New York, it’s sad to say, is really little more than a matter of real estate; marriages are effected in order to get people’s names on leases, and now that the once heaving west side piers have been superseded by a lifeless Copenhagen-on-Hudson bike path for the millionaire denizens of the West Village’s new glass condos, young men look for love on their smartphones and judge prospective partners based on the location of their homes. Bodies are transient; real estate endures. One particularly astute broker recently ran a campaign across Chelsea with the slogan: “I don’t remember his name. But his apartment…”
The Conservative Gay Tipping Point
Out
It’s far too soon to call the GOP gay-friendly. Conservatives still bridle at other political goals shared by many gays, from employment protections to AIDS research to transgender rights. All the same, the rise of the pro-gay marriage Republican is a sign of something: that in less than a decade, our relationships have won broad acceptance and that, at this rate, even the right will soon have more to gain from tolerance than from bias. That may be progress of a cynical sort, but it’s progress all the same.
Catherine Murphy (review)
Artforum
For too long now, critics and curators have segregated realist figurative art from the contemporary mainstream, as if representation were proof in itself of naïveté or belatedness. If anyone can shatter that ahistorical parochialism it’s Catherine Murphy, whose first New York exhibition in five years displays such sophistication and perplexity that it destroys all prejudices about the ambitions of mimetic art.
