Small World: Are American Museums Forgetting the Rest of the World?

“What happened to Africa?” an art-world friend of New York Times writer Holland Cotter asked. “It disappeared.” What that friend was alluding to, and what Cotter analyzes in a recent article titled “Under Threat: The Shock of the Old,” is how American art museums show little non-Western art. The little non-Western art that graces their walls seems to be almost exclusively contemporary art—a troubling development considering how homogenous today’s art has become in an international market driven by what sells. Forget the “shock of the new” from today’s art. Worry more about the loss of the “shocking” old, especially the traditional art of cultures beyond our borders. As technology shrinks our world more each day in terms of communication, is it possible that our cultural world is smaller, too, but in the sense of being more narrow? Has the lust to see the new blinded us to the works of the past, especially those we Americans never really knew in the first place? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Small World."

Junk Man: Revolution, Complicity, and Art

In Death of the Liberal Class, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges argues that liberals have “conceded too much to the power elite.” In other words, traditional liberal institutions such as education, religion, labor, and the arts have stopped challenging corporate powers and, instead, joined them. It’s a powerful and often depressing argument, especially when Hedges probes fields usually condemned for their “liberal” and “revolutionary” tendencies, such as art. Hedges raises the old question of what is art in a different way, asking if art is creative expressions that free the mind, what do we call creative works that support the status quo? Junk, Hedges would most likely answer, giving some surprising examples of famous “junk men” in American art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Junk Man."