Required Reading

‣ Three years after Kaci Merriwether-Hawkins founded Black Girls in Art Spaces, Adria R. Walker visited one meet-up in Mississippi to report on the organization’s growth across the country for the Guardian:

Initially, BGIAS started relatively small, with Merriwether-Hawkins pulling people together online who shared a common interest for arts and culture. In October 2022 , the organization hosted their first event at the Daisha Board Gallery in Dallas.

Almost immediately, people were interested in starting chapters elsewhere, Merriwether-Hawkins said. She created Instagram and TikTok pages for the organization. When the accounts would share images from various events, people would ask when BGIAS would host an event in their city or country.

“Not only were we able to branch out to different cities in the US, but we were able to have meetups in places like Seoul, Korea, and London and Nairobi,” Merriwether-Hawkins said. “It was really just putting the word out there and allowing people to naturally gravitate towards it – I couldn’t ignore the call.”

Each BGIAS meetup looks slightly different, as they are hosted by and crafted by local people for a local audience. But at their core, the meetups are spaces for Black women and girls to engage with art and feel comfortable in galleries which might sometimes feel like spaces in which they are not welcome.

‣ The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody is the latest to opine (albeit with a misleading title) on the value of the written review. Though a bit uneven in its arguments, it’s a useful perspective on the perennial question of criticism’s future as it stands today:

Any cultural journalist can absorb a (no pun intended) critical mass of movies (or plays, concerts, records, etc.), but it’s only by way of extended engagement with each one of them that the essay or discussion can get past chitchat and reflect the substance and the merits of the works at hand. It’s not a matter of critics taking themselves seriously but of taking art seriously. By all means, newspapers and magazines should feature videos (I do them enthusiastically), essays (this is one), festival roundups (which are also reviews), profiles (I’ve done them, too, and find that their prime value is as veiled criticism, as backdoor approaches to the work itself). But all of those things rest on and are nourished by the fundamental critical confrontation with individual works.

In the absence of this, what’s left is the curse and the shrug of the “interesting”—a nonaesthetic approach that puts art before readers as a curiosity, as a set of talking points rather than as a form of personal experience, of devotion, of passion. The heart of the review is emotion, the stirrings of the soul, receptiveness to the life-changing power of art (even commercial art); personality-centered formats rooted in reporting or in talk are art from the ego, more like homework or social capital. And, though criticism is obviously subjective, at another level it is resolutely objective—a form of reporting from within. As idiosyncratic as individual critics may be, they also have fundamental commonalities with readers—and, in expressing, with care and flair, their own feelings, they often awaken such feelings in readers, for whom these emotions had been latent or inchoate. Like any literary work, the individual critical voice finds its echoes in the world at large, in readers’ self-recognition, in a sense of community.

‣ Designer Sean C. Suchara takes a closer look at the updated NYC subway map unveiled this spring, and why we’re so attached to the old one despite its many defects. He writes in the New York Review of Architecture:

Initially overseen by the cartographer John Tauranac and based on a design by Michael Hertz Associates, by the turn of the millennium the 1979 map had evolved into something even more confounding and unusable than the sum of its many, many parts. Co-Op City Boulevard in The Bronx disappeared from view, but for some reason Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens stayed put, alongside a plenitude of other literally surface-level information, like the graveyards that make up Queens’s cemetery belt. (A concession to the map’s deceased readers?) The no-nonsense understatement of a white background gave way to cream in the 1998 edition and then, in 2010, to … what to even call it? High-fructose corn syrup? (When I saw Vignelli and Tauranac speak that year, the latter described the colors of the then-current map as “bilious.”) Info bubbles with connecting bus routes and the like proliferated—kernels of superfluous data insistently popping into one’s field of vision. The service guide—crucial in our three-tiered regime (weekdays, weeknights, weekends)—disappeared entirely, which Tauranac also called out. From Giuliani to Adams, ours was a long era of cartographic resignation.

‣ During the Renaissance, paintings depicting the Crucifixion were apparently often held in front of people sentenced to death as a last-ditch effort to secure their spot in heaven. I was today years old when I learned this from Amelia Soth, who explains the grim art historical phenomenon in JSTOR Daily:

There’s a painting in Florence’s Museo Stibbert that depicts his execution. Rinaldeschi hangs from a window, his brow twisted in a final expression of anguish. Above him, a hooded figure dressed in black looks on. You might assume that’s the executioner, but the truth is almost the opposite: this was Rinaldeschi’s comforter, responsible not for his death but for his eternal salvation.

In his hand, the comforter carries a tiny painting of the Crucifixion, mounted on a stick. This image, called a tavoletta, would have been the last thing Rinaldeschi saw; the comforter’s job was to hold it up before his eyes as he took his final breath. The idea was that, if the condemned man’s last thoughts were of Christ, he’d be more likely to go to heaven. The artist, at least, was optimistic—in the corner, he’s painted Rinaldeschi’s soul ascending between a pair of angels, points out Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr.

The comforters were members of a lay religious order devoted to instructing the “afflicted”—their euphemistic term for people sentenced to death. These orders were scattered through Italy, particularly in the north. (Michelangelo was a member of the Roman brotherhood.)

‣ Music curator Ernesto Lechner looks back on the life of legendary salsa pianist Eddie Palmieri, who died this week at 88, for Rolling Stone:

Born in New York City to Puerto Rican parents in 1936, Palmieri was influenced by his older brother Charlie, a pianist and bandleader whom he always referred to as “the true king of the keyboards.” The brothers would develop parallel careers during the Sixties and Seventies. But whereas Charlie favored a more traditional brand of salsa, Eddie showcased his lifelong rebellious tendencies as a teenager. For a while he dropped the piano and became a timbales player, only to return to the keyboards after getting tired of carrying his drums around New York’s tropical club circuit. Before forming his own band, he was also shaped by the flashy sartorial style of Puerto Rican crooner Tito Rodríguez — a major star from the Fifties mambo era — whom he accompanied on the piano.

An impulsive bandleader, Palmieri changed his sound, orchestrating style and session players throughout his career. He was also astute in his ability to turn the practical limitations of the time to his favor. La Perfecta began like a gutsy Afro-Cuban conjunto with four trumpets, until budgetary limitations inspired him to replace trumpets with the double trombone lineup of Barry Rogers and Jose Rodrigues. Known as a trombanga, this format revolutionized New York salsa in the Sixties. The booming riffs of the trombones left space for the rhythm section — including a rock-solid Manny Oquendo on timbales — to breathe freely. La Perfecta soon became known as one of the grittiest orchestras of the time. It helped that Palmieri’s repertoire was filled with self-penned hits, from the simmering montuno of “Café” to the raucous guaracha of “Muñeca.” Palmieri also had the good judgment of employing one of the most inspired singers of his time as La Perfecta’s vocalist: Ismael Quintana, whom he met at an audition.

‣ Shade has always been political, and Piper French reviews a new book that narrates its history as a neglected public resource in the United States for the New Republic:

But this old way of living began to conflict with a new trend in American life: sun worship. Progressive reformers embraced sunlight as a natural disinfectant. The modernists extolled the virtues of glass—Le Corbusier called it the “fundamental material of modern architecture.” Urban planners used the brand-new concept of zoning to prioritize single-family homes (sunny, spacious) above tenement housing (dark, damp, potentially pestilent) and establish height restrictions on buildings to avoid casting the city streets in shadow. And the Federal Housing Administration’s design standards applied those same values to the nascent suburbs en masse. All of this was made possible by AC, which also fueled the mass migration of Americans into parched desert outposts where so many humans should not by rights exist. (One wonders what Miller would have made of modern-day Phoenix.)

As Bloch explains it, there are two big trends here that would come to define postwar America: a retreat from the commons, and an embrace of manufactured, resource-intensive comfort at any cost. America on AC is an America suspicious of strangers and the outdoors, intolerant of discomfort, addicted to the lonely monotony of suburbia, and willing to sacrifice a great deal to avoid addressing these pathologies—more nightmare than dream. And artificial cooling, of course, only addresses a symptom; in doing so, it worsens the disease. Today, Bloch notes, Americans expend more energy on climate control than the entire continent of Africa uses on anything: “It’s not an overstatement to say the pollution we generate for cooling is burning the planet.”

‣ Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian historian and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, canceled his class at Columbia in response to the university’s submission to political pressure from the Trump administration, Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian:

“Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a ‘special lecturer’ but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June,” Khalidi wrote.

Columbia announced last week that it would pay more than $200m in a settlement with the federal government after the White House claimed the university failed to adequately address alleged antisemitism on campus amid protests over the Israel-Gaza war, and threatened to pull significant funding.

‣ Many of us have been turning to Reddit more and more for honest perspectives on everything from healthcare to neighborhood gossip (the tea in r/ParkSlope is piping hot). Intelligencer‘s John Herrman explains:

Reddit’s place in the collapsing web is both valuable and risk-laden. Google’s response to the gradual breakdown of the digital commons has been to send more and more people to Reddit, where relevant results are at least probably written by human beings, lavishing the site with traffic but binding the companies’ fates together.

Reddit’s relationship with AI is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into AI-generated search “Answers,” and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit’s vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person — or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They’re getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real — and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere — are drifting into mutual suspicion.

‣ For tech bros, touching grass only makes it worse …