Art galleries put into existing structures within cities, that went through an adaptive process and construction to become valuable spaces for art and culture.
I’m interested in how words with particular identities and backgrounds “spirit,” “God,” “thought,” “tranquility” take part, without comment, and perhaps without full knowledge, in a metamorphosis, a movement across meanings that leads not so much from the “West” to the “East” as, subtly and suggestively, away from the Enlightenment to a new emergence and sense of the “literary.”
Recent years have seen the museum, and especially the art museum, highlighted as a key site for protest and a critical space for political struggle. Actors within and beyond the art world have challenged the museum on the grounds that arts institutions perpetrate harm not just in the galleries, and not only in the workplace, but on local, national, and even global scales.
As Kimmelman’s employer keeps reminding us with googly-eyed headlines, rent is soaring. The city’s pandemic-era eviction moratorium has been lifted. Our new mayor is a cop who seems to disdain unhoused people. And the architects of the largest residential transformation in the city today the supposedly radical campaign to close Rikers Island insist that incarcerated New Yorkers should be in a better jail, not in apartments.