Page 2 - Phongh Bui News Today

Melissa Chiu has been the director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden since 2014. During that time, she has focused on bringing the museum and its collections into the twenty-first century, with direct attention to what she terms “radical accessibility.”

We like to think of culture as providing a balancing and healing element for the human condition. And the present political circumstances all over the world make us all the more aware of how important such balance is—how important it is for us to act in harmony with, and with consideration for, each other.

Having followed Edmund de Waal’s work as both a writer and an artist ever since the publication of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), and Atemwendeb, his first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in 2013, I’ve come to realize how Edmund has managed to maintain a remarkable balance between on one hand the making, and on the other hand the writing.

As we think and re-think who we are as individuals, capable of integrating our inner and outer lives, we should question how we are related to the world’s economic machine, especially in relation to our constant consumption of things, and how we as individuals relate to economic forces that we are part of and at the same time try to maintain a certain distance from.

At home, former president Donald J. Trump is facing multiple criminal cases for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the US Capitol, in an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power, posing a great threat to American democracy.

Having long been married to a painter, I am aware that for most artists, making art is a solitary activity. Every day, my wife goes to her studio to create, to think, and to be her own critic. Except for the days that she has to teach, she is loyal and looks forward to being in her space.

The recent news of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner forces (a mercenary army that had played an outsized role in the fighting in Ukraine) accusing Russia’s military leadership of attacking and killing his own soldiers has raised eyebrows all over the world. Especially when Prigozhin commanded his forces to return to their bases, and then to begin making their way toward Moscow.

Janne Sirén is the director of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, a 161-year-old institution with one of the most important collections of American Abstract Expressionism. He was named director in 2013 and guided the organization through a major building project in which the concept of partnership was the cornerstone of the process. Sirén joined Guggenheim President Emeritus Jennifer Stockman and Rail Consulting Editor Joachim Pissarro for a conversation about the history of the Buffalo A...

Many of us have come to identify Trumpian America as a kind of mirror image of Jacksonian America of the 1830s. They both, for example, shared a common distrust of any form of expertise, aggressively insisting instead that all important functions are simple enough to be performed by any ordinary citizen. And above all, they both had a strong desire to overthrow whatever they thought represented the establishment. We’ve come to realize, I think, that large parts of the population harbor nati...

A Tribute to Brian O’Doherty, edited by Brenda Moore-McCann