Franklin Einspruch on our fearlessly radical aesthete caste: 

Last fall, the Guggenheim made quite the symbolic gesture of its own. As reported in the Washington Post, the White House asked the museum to lend it an 1888 canvas by Vincent van Gogh in which a man and his dog trudge through a snow-covered, vibrant landscape. A smarmy reply from the Guggenheim explained to the White House’s Office of the Curator that “Landscape with Snow” was unavailable… Instead, the museum offered a work of conceptual art by Maurizio Cattelan, a functioning toilet made from solid, 18-carat gold that had been installed at the museum during the prior year. “The work beautifully channels the history of twentieth-century avant-garde art by referencing Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal of 1917,” the email explained. It did not mention the title of the 2016 piece, which is “America.” 

When our self-imagined betters speak, it often pays to consider the psychology in play. In the case above, the Guggenheim’s artistic director, Nancy Spector, was prepared to publicly insult not only the First Lady but also, more importantly, everyone who voted for the current incumbent of the White House – half of the nation that the Guggenheim supposedly serves - in order to signal her own political edginess. As Franklin notes, one wonders whether Ms Spector believes that her display of disdain will help the wider cause of arts funding or encourage the kind of broader public interest that such organisations claim to want.

Perhaps she was too busy admiring herself to consider such details.

In the pages of the Guardian, another pressing issue of the day:

Marijuana: is it time to stop using a word with racist roots?

Posing the question for a general readership, even one as fretful and agonised as the Guardian’s, is, however, somewhat misleading, given the author’s conviction that only “marginalised communities” have the “moral authority to decide if marijuana is a racist word which should be avoided, or an important reminder of a more racist past.”

Local toughs. (h/t, Ben) || Lucas has been captured. || The London time machine. || The mothership wasn’t the first thing to land there. || “How big would the Solar System be if Earth were the size of a basketball?” || “His basketball game got better.” || Why dogs don’t rule the… Oh bugger. || Bond versus Bond in… Die Spy Kill Kill. || Acoustic tractor beam. || Hot steel malfunction. || It tells you quite a lot about who they are. || Lighthouse interior. || Best not to, really. || “Not a sweet smile.” || If she didn’t have double standards, she’d have no standards at all. || Gastro Obscura. || That star over there is much, much bigger than ours. || Owl buddies. || Bathroom scenes. (h/t, dicentra) || Birds in fog. || And finally, via Elephants Gerald, “I felt like my hands were just too big for this task.”

Further to the recent, eye-widening exchange between Jordan Peterson and Cathy Newman, Conor Friedersdorf on scandalous paraphrasing: 

In the interview, Newman relies on this technique [of perverse rephrasing] to a remarkable extent, making it a useful illustration of a much broader pernicious trend. Peterson was not evasive or unwilling to be clear about his meaning. And Newman’s exaggerated restatements of his views mostly led viewers astray, not closer to the truth… One of the most important things this interview illustrates — one reason it is worth noting at length — is how Newman repeatedly poses as if she is holding a controversialist accountable, when in fact, for the duration of the interview, it is she that is “stirring things up” and “whipping people into a state of anger.”

Fabian Tassano on “critical thinking”: 

It is interesting that the scholars feel able to announce in advance, on behalf of their own students, and the students of other history tutors at Oxford, a decision on whether students will engage with the [Ethics and Empire] project. One might think that the ability to “think critically” would include openness to ideas from heterodox perspectives, as well as the capacity to decide for oneself, independently of one’s tutors, whether a source of information is worthy of consideration. One has to remember, however, that the word “critical” may have a special technical meaning in the context of the humanities.

Via Claire Lehmann, Kerryn Pholi on Aboriginal taboos: 

Those who mourn the demise of Aboriginal culture almost always regard things from the viewpoint of the men, who were indeed dispossessed of their land, and subsequently their traditions and status. Land wasn’t the only item of property they lost, however. They also lost or traded their women to the settlers, and this absorption – along with frontier warfare and disease – rapidly eroded tribal structures and doomed Aboriginal traditions to obsolescence. The settlers arrived with a wealth of goods and a shortage of females, and they were generally less enthusiastic about beating women than was customary in Aboriginal culture… The men lost a lot in the invasion, while the women had little to lose and plenty to gain.

And Joe Katzman on leftism as a never-ending status game: 

Do you have any doubt about the left’s hatred for those who will not stay in their assigned status? Have you noticed their quickness to turn on their own allies? Fail to follow the latest fad, and your status is demoted. Perhaps you’ve noticed that endlessly callous virtue signalling is the identifying badge of our modern try-hard Striver Class. Maybe that’s because American public education is now a 20-year Milgram Experiment, where the meta-message inside political correctness is to override your own judgement, in favour of deliberately-shifting judgements from people with higher status. These aren’t accidents. They’re clues.

Very much related, the second item here. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Apparently, this is a thing.