Recent stories of note:
“Planned Centre Pompidou outpost in New Jersey is “a circus of waste and excess,” according to Republican report”
Benjamin Sutton, The Art Newspaper
Occasionally, a battle in the culture wars has all the makings of a staged exhibition: no one gets hurt, everyone gets paid, nothing changes. The bizarre spat over the Centre Pompidou’s planned satellite museum in Jersey City—yes, Jersey City—is one such battle. In the blue corner: Steve Fulop, an up-and-coming mayor with gubernatorial dreams intent on proving how sophisticated and worldly he is; in the red corner: Michael Testa, an up-and-coming state senator with gubernatorial dreams intent on proving how commonsensical and old-fashioned he is. Fulop is responsible for securing a deal with Centre Pompidou that would plant the Parisian institute on American shores for the first time. Unfortunately, the project is ridiculously over budget and behind schedule. This prompted Testa to commission a memo on the project, which points out just how far over its budget the project has wandered before quietly suggesting that something more nefarious is going on. However, the memo also complains (falsely) that the museum will only house French art—one wonders if Testa still prefers to call French fries “freedom fries.” Of course, no further action has been taken by either side. We’ll see if one side takes a dive.
“Infinite Joyce: Prolific Oates Takes On Dead Wallace”
Gideon Leek, The Village Voice
Except for the fact that she is one the bestselling authors of her generation, Joyce Carol Oates is just like any other octogenarian, right down to the glaringly obvious typo in her Twitter bio. And her love for cats. She’s one of those rare authors to achieve widespread name recognition even among Americans who don’t read, a Herculean task. This popularity is thanks in part to her graphomania, which manifests itself in at least one novel a year and some two dozen tweets a day peddling #Resistance cliches. Still, there is something noble about her prolificacy and its persistence into her later years: it speaks to a faith in the novel as a serious, important cultural product at a time when the form is generally ignored or treated as capable of little more than schlock. In a profile of Oates’s recent years, Gideon Leek digs into what makes the author so adamant about writing.
“The covert campaign against field sports”
William Moore, The Spectator
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the workers paving that road are tireless. This time, the pavers have come for the English countryside—and sports. Exercising what has long been a favored tool of the banal and evil—the imposition of shady regulatory burdens—the Labour Party and its ideological allies threaten to eradicate field sports in England. While the underlying motivation for this eradication must have something to do with our world’s absolute allergy to anything with even a whiff of aristocracy, these busy bees claim they’re working for the sake of the environment. And, superficially, their likely success might appear to be a victory for conservation efforts. In reality, as William Moore argues, it is the opposite: the purveyors of field sports understand better than anyone else the sensitivity of the countryside’s ecosystems. The abolition of field sports would strip these individuals of their responsibility over the land, which could well lead to the deterioration of the countryside itself. In this case, then, the anti-fun brigades are aligned with the anti-conservation brigades. That must be the bleakest side of history to be on.