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“Follow
the Money,” the informant known only as “Deep Throat”
told Woodward
and Bernstein
during their investigation into the Watergate
Scandal that they titled All the
President’s Men. Follow the flow of cash behind any endeavor and you’ll
find the true source, which can be surprising and, too often, dismaying. Art
museums, those bastions of civilization, quite often find themselves in the
position of accepting donations from less-than-civilized parties, specifically
corporations polluting the world. A group calling itself Liberate Tate staged their
latest (and largest) protest against the Tate Modern’s acceptance of
money from British
Petroleum, aka, BP, who are best remembered for their Gulf of Mexico oil
spill in 2010 that continues to plague that region. Should we hold museums
responsible for their donors’ actions? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "
Are Museums Responsible for Their Donors’Actions?"
[Image: The Gift.
Performance by Liberate Tate. Tate Modern, 7 July 2012. Credit: Ian Buswell.]
Americans for the past decade seem more caught
up than ever in the idea of what it is to be an American, especially in an
election year and perhaps never so much as on the Fourth of July—the day
on which we celebrate the Declaration
of Independence that inaugurated this little experiment in democracy we’ve
been performing for over two centuries. To see a picture of the Fourth of July
2012, all you need to do is look out your window at the parades, barbeques, and
fireworks. But to look back two centuries and see the Fourth of July circa 1812,
perhaps our best glimpse appears in John Lewis Krimmel’s
Fourth of July, Center Square (detail shown above). Krimmel’s genre scene of Americans celebrating
America back then allows us to see how our celebration today mirrors and,
perhaps, distorts what our ancestors saw as most important for our country. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "
Picturing the Fourth of July."
[Image: John Lewis Krimmel. Fourth of July, Center Square (detail), 1811-1812.]
Art theft is a terrible problem worldwide. Aside
from robbing the public of enjoying the great works of the past, art theft
often leads to damage to the art and involvement with organized crime, who see
great art with established monetary value as a readymade kind of currency. However,
the recent
theft of Salvador Dalí’s 1949
painting Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio
on June 19th and its subsequent
return on June 30th adds a fittingly surreal twist to the taking
of a work by the arch surrealist
(shown above). Not to condone art theft in any way and not to make light of breaking
the law, but is it possible to see this caper as a work of art itself? Is it
permissible to steal a surrealist painting surreally? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "
How to Steal a Surrealist Painting Surreally."
