Recent links of note:
“We Ignored Salman Rushdie’s Warning”
Bari Weiss, Common Sense
Recent political attitudes have dangerously suggested that words equate to violence. As Bari Weiss argues in Common Sense, of course they don’t, for free speech is founded on the principle that words are words, and we must treat them that way. To respond to words with violence is the downfall of civilized debate, of compromise; it is the hallmark of ideology—exactly what Rushdie warned us about. We protect freedom of speech, not freedom from speech. For the ideologues in office who wish to limit speech or ban books, words are violence, and the world was horrifically reminded last week of the consequences of such attitudes when Hadi Matar stabbed, and nearly killed, Salman Rushdie. Weiss quotes Rushdie from a telling interview he gave in 2015 in response to the literary world rejecting PEN’s honoring of Charlie Hebdo: “We are living in the darkest time I have ever known.”
“Why does Britain seem to hate America’s favorite landscape artist?”
Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, British art catalogues and critics frequently misnamed Winslow Homer, dubbing him “W Horner” or “Winslow Herron.” Alastair Sooke explains that Britain’s neglect of Homer continues to this day as not a single work by him can be seen there. That will change, if only temporarily, when the National Gallery in London exhibits fifty of the artist’s paintings in “Winslow Homer: Force of Nature.” Considering that Britain developed a culture of seaside tourism during his lifetime, one might assume that Homer’s dramatic depictions of the sea had found an audience there. Sooke notes that Homer even lived in a Northumbrian fishing village for over a year where he took great inspiration from his tumultuous maritime surroundings. But it was Britain’s long-standing reputation of landscape painting, already dominated by figures like Constable, and America’s lack of one, that many believe to be the reason why Homer never took hold in the Isles.
“Allegedly stolen ancient Cambodian sculptures airbrushed from photoshoot of ‘most beautiful home in America’”
Anny Shaw, The Art Newspaper
Architectural Digest has been accused of doctoring photos of a San Francisco mansion owned by the art-collecting Lindemann family to hide allegedly stolen Cambodian relics. In the magazine’s 2021 photo spread of the property, the relics aren’t there. Investigative journalists, however, recently uncovered the magazine’s original photographs that clearly show the presence of the looted art. Recently, the Cambodian government began an investigation into the Lindemann family’s substantial private collection of Khmer works, which contains several artifacts recognized by professionals to be among the country’s most important stolen art. Anny Shaw quotes a legal expert on Cambodian art who stated that the Lindemann family’s owning of one of the Khmer pieces can be compared to having “King Tut’s tomb sitting in their living room.”