Culture Worriers – The libertarian struggle to understand contemporary art
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“Freedom: Art as the Messenger.” “We are living in an era where people are finding their combative voice but having little conversation or dialogue. The goal of this exhibition is to provide a medium for that conversation,” the call for entry read. “A full spectrum of interpretation is invited … addressing Freedom in all its manifestations through art.” When the exhibition was formally announced, the description took on a more polemical thrust:
Freedom means something different to every person, yet its value is a common bond between Americans. In these polarized times, Freedom: Art as the Messenger aims to provide a unifying platform of civility and creativity. Artists from across the country … share innovative and thought-provoking perspectives on freedom and the enduring need for its protection.
For four decades, Cato’s only position on the arts was “defund the NEA.” Suddenly, it wanted to stake a claim to culture.
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You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart
You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees
You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats
You protecting the river You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick
You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose
You taking your medicine, reading the magazines
You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.
You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe
You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet
You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June
Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts
You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal
You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME
You are who I love, you struggling to see
You struggling to love or find a question
You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes
Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels 2019 – Sebastião Salgado:
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Der Börsenverein zeichnet mit ihm einen Bildkünstler aus, der mit seinen Fotografien soziale Gerechtigkeit und Frieden fordert und der weltweit geführten Debatte um Natur- und Klimaschutz Dringlichkeit verleiht. Zugleich hat Salgado mit seinem ‚Instituto Terra‘ eine Einrichtung geschaffen, die einen direkten Beitrag zur Wiederbelebung von Biodiversität und Ökosystemen leistet. Mit seinem fotografischen Werk, das in zahlreichen Ausstellungen und Büchern veröffentlicht ist, nimmt er die durch Kriege oder Klimakatastrophen entwurzelten Menschen genauso in den Fokus wie jene, die traditionell in ihrer natürlichen Umwelt verwurzelt sind. Dadurch gelingt es Salgado, Menschen weltweit für das Schicksal von Arbeitern und Migranten und für die Lebensbedingungen indigener Völker zu sensibilisieren. Indem der Fotograf seine aufrüttelnden, konsequent in schwarz-weiss gehaltenen Bilder als ,Hommage an die Grösse der Natur‘ beschreibt und die geschändete Erde ebenso sichtbar macht wie ihre fragile Schönheit, gibt Sebastião Salgado uns die Chance, die Erde als das zu begreifen, was sie ist: als einen Lebensraum, der uns nicht allein gehört und den es unbedingt zu bewahren gilt.
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In der Kartause von Parma hatte Stendhal das Getümmel der Schlacht von Waterloo geschildert; in den Sewastopler Erzählungen hatte Tolstoi die Kameradschaft in den russischen Feldschanzen beschrieben. Aber es gibt wohl keine schonungslosere Darstellung als Dunants Buch Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
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Michael Ignatieff – Die Zivilisierung des Krieges
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SIGNUM MORTIS – Doppelheft und Ausstellung
November 2019: Kunsthandel Boesner Hannover
Frühjahr 2020: Goethe Institut Zagreb
Herbst 2020: Poetenfest Erlangen
RIP: …my old friend Johnny, le Zoulou Blanc
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Copper sun sinking low
Scatterlings and fugitives
Hooded eyes and weary brows
Seek refuge in the night
They are the scatterlings of Africa
Each uprooted one
On the road to Phelamanga
Where the world began
I love the scatterlings of Africa
Each and every one
In their hearts a burning hunger
Beneath the copper sun
„Who made me here and why
Beneath the copper sun?“
African idea
African idea
Make the future clear
Make the future clear
Each uprooted one
On the road to Phelamanga
Where the world began
I love the scatterlings of Africa
Each and every one
In their hearts a burning hunger
Beneath the copper sun
And we are the scatterlings of Africa
Both you and I
We are on the road to Phelamanga
Beneath a copper sky
And we are the scatterlings of Africa
On a journey to the stars
Far below, we leave forever
Dreams of what we were
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The international literature festival berlin [ilb] calls upon individuals, schools, universities, the media, and cultural institutions to join a Worldwide Reading on September 11, 2019 to support freedom of expression. These readings are especially intended to draw attention to the fate of imprisoned or disappeared authors and human rights activists who are denied these rights due to their respective political circumstances. More than 100 authors from 40 different countries have supported this call so far – including Margaret Atwood and Nobel Prize in Literature winners Elfriede Jelinek, Wole Soyinka and Orhan Pamuk.
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IN EXTREMIS – the life of war correspondent Marie Colvin
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a few months after her injury, she met someone who understood too well the psychological impact of seeing too much. The war photographer Don McCullin, who had taken haunting pictures in Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and other war-torn places … interviewing him, Marie could see instantly that he was „as much victim of the decades of war he recorded on film as the victims whose misery is pictured“. Like her, he saw a virtue in laying himself open to injury, in narrowing the difference between himself and his subjects. But what haunted him were not his own injuries – which were several – but guilt for walking away after taking pictures, for surviving.
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The Black Swans
Through a panel of glass in the back of a wagon
the country went past. You clean your weapon,
make camp, drive around, stand guard, stand down.
Sit with a gun in your hand and you thumb up your arse.
Or you try to get a shot at – just for a laugh.
Nineteen, fighting the boredom, wearing a blue lid.
Then one day the kid who gets smokes for the lads
walks into the woods and never comes back.
Then one day the Black swans drive by in a van –
a death squad of Bennies in bobble hats, wielding Kalashnikovs,
smirking, running their fingers across their throats.
Not to be checked or blocked. A law unto themselves.
Walk in the valley. Walk in the shadow of death
in the wake of the Black Swans, treading the scorched earth.
Houses trashed and torched. In the back yard
a cloud of bluebottles hides a beheaded dog.
This wonan won´t talk, standing there open-mouthed,
tied to a tree, sliced from north to south.
In the town square, a million black-eyed-bullet-holes stare
and stare. Crows lift from the mosque. Behind the school,
flesh-smoke – sweet as incense – rises and hangs
over mounds of soil planted with feet and hands.
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Love after Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
by Derek Walcott
Über die Seele und Werte des alten Kontinents
von Mathias Greffrath
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Wie kann man, so fragte der Papst im Europäischen Parlament, das Vertrauen in eine „friedvolle, kreative und unternehmungsfreudige“ Zukunft Europas wiedergewinnen? Und dann erzählte er von einem 500 Jahre alten Bild, einem Fresko des Raffael, das im Vatikan zu sehen ist. „Es stellt, so der Papst, die sogenannte Schule von Athen dar. In ihrem Mittelpunkt stehen Platon und Aristoteles. Der erste deutet mit dem Finger nach oben, zur Welt der Ideen, zum Himmel, könnten wir sagen; der zweite streckt die Hand nach vorne, auf den Betrachter zu, zur Erde, der konkreten Wirklichkeit.“ Platon, mit der kosmologischen Schrift Timaios in der Hand zeigt in die Welt der Ideen und Ideale, und der Naturforscher Aristoteles, die Ethikschrift im Arm, weist nach vorn in die Zukunft. Das gute Leben für alle im Einklang mit der Ordnung des Kosmos.
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