Word: artful
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There's a Stephen Sondheim lyric that says it all: "Art isn't easy." Last week Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., stunned both the academic and art worlds when it announced that it would shut down its Rose Art Museum and sell the collection. The reason was an institutional budget crisis - not at the museum, which is largely self-sufficient, but at the university. Since June, Brandeis has seen its endowment fall from $712 million to $530 million. Over the next six years it projects a budget shortfall totaling $79 million. And the collapse of Bernard Madoff's alleged Ponzi...
...Rose, with its collection of more than 7,100 objects, including works by major American artists like Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. In 2007 the collection was assessed by the auction house Christie's to be worth around $350 million. The downturn in the art market since last fall makes its value today anybody's guess, but it would still command a sizable sum. Brandeis trustees insist that if they can't raise money by selling art, they will have to reduce staff by 30% - there were already cuts last year - or eliminate...
...Reading the elegiac prose of one such as Victorian art critic John Ruskin, conversely, does far more to inspire genuine environmentalism than do blind imperatives to recycle. In his memoirs, Ruskin writes of the pristine Alps, meadows, and lilac trees of his childhood, noting that these were eventually paved through by railroads and left “filthy with cigar ashes” by travelers who “knocked the paling about, roared at the cows, and tore down what branches of blossom they could reach.” Nature writing in cases like this is not mere romanticism...
...ambition to be mocked. The inflammatory images in “Entropa” cast a similarly negative light on other EU goals, such as unity and cooperation. Such “ironic” jibes can only create hostility and division; it is unnecessarily aggravating for such provocative art to decorate a political forum when so many more positive images could have been found...
...Such art, however, belongs outside the political arena. The role of the politician is to attempt to mend divisions and to aim toward uniting people, not to encourage divisive differences. It is dangerous and unhealthy to mock politicians within their working environments, as such jibes only accentuate divisions and hostility. Political institutions thus necessitate a sanctuary of political correctness; choosing a sculpture so contentious is inexplicably antagonistic. One can only hope that all as the Czech government takes the reins of Europe, its future decisions will be more prudent than this...