s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] > Books: non-fiction‎ (99)

‘People in my class wanted to save the environment, find housing for the homeless, and provide fair, adequate representation for people with disabilities or those seeking US citizenship. But, for the most part, they all moved on to associate positions in Big Law, defending major corporations accused of poisoning children and things like that. I do not fault them for this. You cannot pay off a $200K debt if your clients are homeless.’

‘As soon as one leaves behind the world of fairy tale and self-fulfilling prophecy and, instead, casts a dispassionate eye on the actual situations in which important art production has existed, in the total range of its social and institutional structures throughout history, one finds that the very questions which are fruitful or relevant for the historian to ask shape up rather differently.’

‘What if Picasso had been born a girl? Would Senor Ruiz have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a little Pablita?’

‘ Indeed, it was argued by defenders of traditional painting in the 19th century that there could be no great painting with clothed figures, since costume inevitably destroyed both the temporal universality and the classical idealization required by great art. Needless to say, central to the training programs of the academies since their inception late in the 16th and early in the 17th centuries, was life drawing from the nude, generally male, model.’

—What are the possibilities for the dontinuity of dreams and their application to life’s problems?
—Do dreams explicitly harbor the causes of our preferences and our desires?
—What for of reason “broader than all others” gives dreams their “natural allure,” where everything seems possible for as long as the dream lasts?
—How can one conceive the “future resolution” of dreams and reality, apparently so utterly contradictory, in “the surreal”?

‘Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good. Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.’

‘In art, we try out new possible worlds and other ways of being, by paying attention to our feelings about them. Art allows us to share complicated concepts and feelings with each other. This cultural conversation opens doors to shifts—in ourselves and in society. Art shepherds change.’

‘What an artist chooses to write or make drawings or songs about, can draw out attention to certain worlds. It tells us that somebody takes something seriously, perhaps finds it beautiful or threatening, and invites us to rethink how we feel about it. The things we care about are the things we make art about. We frame them with our attention. Art is proof of care.’

‘Watching from the present, I can feel my mother’s terror at seeing her daughter court the same maze from which her own mother never emerged. But I was exploring, I went there to make a record of the ghosts to draw a map and bring it back up into a world that held life.’

‘In a society when women still struggle for equality a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, we should look to Carrington, Varo, and Horna, who chose to uplift each other, to collaborate rather than compete, to celebrate one another instead of letting society put them against each other. We should all be witches.’

‘Throughout antiquity public collections played an essential role in nation-building by helping to shape an origin myth that defined the character of a community. The objects, their provenance, and the stories they told contributed to inventing the history of a people—some of it real and some imagined&that became part of a shared identity for an emerging city-state.’

'At its best, the museum should be a place that celebrates artistic achievement, while also embracing the idea that cultures are both diverse and interconnected, with an almost infinite variety in how we experience beauty, creativity, and excellence'

‘The museum is at its best when it is supported by a pluralistic society that values true diversity and community, but not tribalism.’

‘The Metropolitan Museum of Art sees 7 million visitors a year. It’s the number one tourist attraction in New York City and an extraordinarily powerful source of economic vitality for the whole city…
Across the country, there are more than 35,000 museums. They account for 750,000 jobs and generate $50 billion in economic activity. Museums today are very healthy, notwithstanding the fraught political and cultural issues surrounding them.’