‣ Writer Kelsey McKinney — best known as the host of the tea-spilling podcast Normal Gossip — reflects in Defector on falling out of love with an artwork. For her, it was Monet’s famed “Impression, Sunrise,” which first stole her heart as a teenager:
We emerged in a large octagonal room with giant square Monet paintings on the wall, and I felt my stomach drop. They were smaller than I remembered. They were less vibrant. I had seen bigger versions of them at other museums since, and I was stunned into silence. These were supposed to be all-time great pieces of art. These were supposed to be the kind of art that could move me to tears over and over again regardless of how long it had been since I’d seen them. Like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, my stomach was supposed to flip in their presence. But it didn’t. I felt nothing.
I should have expected it, in a way. My relationship with Monet has changed. Prominent curators have argued—along with several prominent exhibitions at major museums—that these works by Monet were a guiding force and accelerant for abstraction and abstract expressionism, that the change in one artist’s eyes helped to inspire a whole generation of young artists to create their own movement. That makes sense, it happened for me too. I had moved on: to Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan. The daughters of those paintings in the basement in a way.
‣ Critic Doreen St. Félix turns our attention toward an unlikely site of racialized, gendered “inchoate panic”: the waist. In the New Yorker, she explains:
What the waist does in clothing, and what it can do to clothing, is the site of enduring and inchoate panic. For all the literacy around Instagram Face, there isn’t commensurate seriousness applied to our culture of body modification, associated with women marked by their race, their class, their transness. The B.B.L. body, created through surgery or through girdle training, is as if a tailoring of the flesh. The woman with the Coca-Cola-bottle shape means to look like she’s been carved—she is not at the mercy of Ozempic naturalism. Not many days after giving birth, Cardi B went to Paris Fashion Week with an extreme waist, thanks to her dutiful wearing of a magnified faja, or girdle. (The name of one of the more popular sculptwear brands riffs on the compliment given to a “snatched” person: What Waist.) Some who may have a more subdued relationship to body alteration feel they are controlled by trend, their buying practices decided by a divining rod. When millennial women got informed that the proper pant silhouette of the twenty-tens, the high waist—which truncated the torso, elongated the leg, and made of every ass a pear—was on the way out, with low-rise making its incursion again, there was a lot of real anger. They were aging, and their bodies were changing. They felt haunted by the tabloid era of Paris, Britney, and Lindsay—by their own fear of trash.
‣ A historian who researched a medical journal’s silence on Nazism in the 1930s is arguing that the publication’s using the same blueprint to gloss over the Israeli military’s attacks on Gaza today. The Intercept‘s Jonah Valdez writes:
She said that it is the role of historians, medical journals, and universities to speak out and raise such questions to reckon with both past and present, referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as “the most glaring and moral crisis of our time.”
“What is happening today in Gaza is unprecedented. It far surpasses the violations of medical neutrality seen in El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Syria, Sudan, or Ukraine,” Abi-Rached continued. “We are witnessing today the same deliberate and systematic targeting of health care personnel, not only in Gaza, but also in Lebanon where the conflict has moved and shifted.” (“Medical neutrality” refers to the principle of preserving access to medical care during times of war.)
‣ Climate scientists sounded yet another alarm, this time directed at Nordic countries regarding a key ocean current system on the brink of collapse. Reuters reports:
A collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a system of ocean currents that transports warm water into the North Atlantic and provides Europe its mild climate, could put living conditions for people in the Arctic region and beyond at risk, according to the scientists.
“Such an ocean circulation change would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world,” the scientists said in a letter on Saturday to the Nordic Council of Ministers, which comprises five countries, including Denmark and Sweden, and three autonomous territories.
‣ Speaking of dire times ahead, the presidential election is just around the corner! Both candidates are wielding their last line of defense for the home stretch: the power of the influencer. Makena Kelly writes for Wired:
On Wednesday and Thursday this week, the Harris campaign set up action hubs in New York City and Los Angeles to create a space for influencers to make get-out-the-vote content and phone-bank from the studios. The creators are supposed to sign up for specific shifts, and they will be given interview spaces outfitted with mics, backgrounds, and on-site production teams to turn around content quickly.
In an email to those who signed up, the campaign outlined some of its top-performing GOTV content to provide examples for the creators, like voting day reminders, making plans to vote, specific battleground callouts, and videos explaining “what voting means” to the creators.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation met with a group of conservative influencers last week at the Influence America event, including Emily Wilson from Emily Save America, Savannah Chrisley, Sean Mike Kelly, and John McEntee, the founder of the Peter Thiel–backed Right Stuff dating app. CJ Pearson, a 22-year-old conservative creator, hosted the event, where creators strategized how to synchronize their content over the next few weeks, focusing on some of the Republican Party’s favorite policy issues like immigration and the economy.
‣ Spike Lee’s recent talk at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston traverses the vast constellation of Black artistry in the South, his filmmaking practice, and more. Watch his full conversation with American Federation of Arts Director Pauline Forlenza below:
‣ RIP Long Boi, the beloved and unusually tall Yorkshire duck who’s now memorialized by a bronze sculpture near his old stomping grounds:
‣ Representation MATTERS:
‣ Of course he was an ugly Renaissance dog in a past life …
‣ Happy almost-Halloween, and stay safe out there!
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
