The New Yorker: Inside the U.S. Army’s Warehouse Full of Nazi Art

 Much of Nazi propaganda was ephemeral: posters and flyers, designed to be mass-produced and spread quickly. The paintings stored on high metal racks in Fort Belvoir’s warehouse were part of a different project, meant to give the Reich’s predations a patina of high culture. One of the best-known works is “The Flag Bearer,” painted by Hubert Lanzinger a year after Hitler came to power. It depicts the Führer astride a black horse, clad in shining armor and carrying a Nazi flag. “It’s Hitler as a Teutonic knight,” Sarah Forgey, the Army’s chief art curator, told me, standing before the painting. “It’s showing there’s a connection between the Third Reich and Germany’s feudal past.” [...]

All propaganda is meant to obscure the truth, but two paintings inadvertently highlight the decline of the Nazi project. The first, “Hitler at the Front,” was painted by Emil Scheibe in 1942, about a year after Hitler launched his titanic, megalomaniacal invasion of the Soviet Union. It shows a buoyant Führer surrounded by a throng of German soldiers—young, well-scrubbed Aryans gazing at him in adoration. The second work—“East Front Fighters,” by Wilhelm Sauter—was painted two years later, when the Nazis were being rolled back by the Soviet Army. The soldiers in this canvas are exhausted and battered, if still unbowed. The message to Germans is clear: The war is tougher than we thought, but our soldiers are indomitable. Not long afterward, Hitler killed himself, and the Nazi regime imploded.[...]

Among the hundreds of pieces at Fort Belvoir, the most curious are four watercolors by Hitler. During the First World War, when he served as a foot soldier, he carried paper and often spent free moments drawing—the remnants of an early dream of succeeding as an artist. As a young man, Hitler was twice rejected for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the works at Fort Belvoir make it easy to see why. The draftsmanship is painstaking but stolid, without personal vision or lightness of touch. Most of the pieces are nostalgic street scenes, like something that might hang in a dentist’s office—except that the streets are eerily devoid of people. “Hitler couldn’t paint the human form,” Forgey said. One of the works—“Railway Embankment,” a brown-toned, faintly Impressionist work from 1917—depicts two human beings, but they are little more than dark blurs. Over the years, the Army has lent pieces from the collection to museums, but curators don’t ask for the Hitler watercolors. “They are only interesting because of who produced them,” Forgey said.

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Vox: How museum gift shops decide what to sell

 Gift shops are like the final exhibit of an art museum. They’re often located toward the exit and are unmissable on your way out the door. Souvenirs inside can range from Vincent Van Gogh socks to giant stuffed soup cans to Mona Lisa rubber ducks. But how do gift shop curators decide what to sell?

Stocking decisions often revolve around how curators want visitors to perceive the art lining museum walls. When you see a certain piece of art on a lot of merchandise, that usually means curators think that artwork is important. And thanks to a psychological phenomenon called the mere-exposure effect, the more you see that art, the more you begin to think it’s important.

Nautilus Magazine: What Did the Past Smell Like?

That’s a question with which the minds behind “Odeuropa” will have to grapple. Launching this January, it is a $3.3 million, three-year, multinational project on the collection and recreation of smells in 16th- to early 20th-century Europe that will marry historical and literary analysis with machine learning and chemistry. The project is pioneering and also, in a year of COVID-19 induced anosmia with sensory-deprived lockdowns, timely.2 We became aware of our need for environmental stimulation—and the undervalued power of smell. [...]

Descriptions of odor also are culturally mediated. A 2016 study showed that even French and Franco-Canadians today may not agree in their experience and evaluation of the same odor3: For the French, for example, wintergreen was rated much less pleasantly than for French-Canadians. “In France, wintergreen is used more in medicinal products than in Canada, where it is found more in candy,” a press release for the study stated. “Anise was rated similarly in two cultures but was described more often as ‘licorice’ in Quebec and as ‘anise’ in France.” Intricate cross-cultural differences make for intriguing anecdotes. But they are hard to document. [...]

Odeuropa opens up a new sensory experience of history. The researchers will create a catalog of past scents by digging through 250,000 images and thousands of texts (in seven languages), ranging from medical descriptions of smells in textbooks to labels of fragrances in novels or magazines. Machine learning will help to cross-analyze the plethora of descriptions, contexts, and occurrence of odor names (such as tobacco, lavender, and probably horse manure). This catalog serves as the conceptual basis for perfumers and chemists to create fragrant molecules fitting 120 of these descriptors. [...]

Part of the Odeuropa team is a research project called Smell of Heritage, carried out by Cecilia Bembibre, a doctoral student in heritage science at University College London. Heritage scientists look to come up with new ways to study materials and collections that make up cultural heritage, as well as how the environment interacts with it. Bembibre, for example, analyzes and archives culturally essential aromas. “In the heritage context,” the Smell of Heritage website states, “experiencing what the world smelled like in the past enriches our knowledge of it, and, because of the unique relation between odors and memories, allows us to engage with our history in a more emotional way.” [...]

The historical conservation of smell visualizes (for lack of a better term) our need to directly experience and engage with the changes in our history’s materiality. In a world accelerating the digitization of knowledge and the virtual documentation of other people’s lives, we should not forget about our desire to sensually experience. It’s vital, for me at least. Things like virtual reality, which can persuasively simulate visual, auditory, and even tactile sensations, won’t feel convincing enough without also incorporating smell, the next and perhaps ultimate frontier, given how difficult it is to substitute. A fan of the outdoors like me wants to get a whiff of the horse poop.

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Conscientious Photography Magazine: The Print, the book, the screen

On their own, photographs have no meanings. Actually, even to talk about photographs “on their own” makes very little sense. We always see photographs in some context. We never see photographs outside of any context. One could argue that latent photographs exist “on their own”. But here, I don’t want to deal with the metaphysics of photography. [...]

For example, once digital photography had become widely established, there were a lot of things you could do easily that in the analogue world were very difficult and that often carried negative connotations. A good approach would have been to simply accept the fact that digital photographs can be “manipulated” easily and in a large variety of ways — instead of sticking with photographic orthodoxy and worrying about the supposed ill effects of manipulation. [...]

Obviously, it doesn’t help that the commercial world of photography — galleries and collectors — just love the idea of the unique object. If it’s not fully unique (most photographs simply aren’t — they can be made in any number), then they will have to be artificially limited: editions. [...]

It might help to consider the case of literature: a book in its original language isn’t the same as a translated one. In fact, there are different schools of translation, and as far as I understand it, the jury is still out what exactly is meant by the term ” a good translation”. Is it a translation that stays as close as possible to the original, even if the two languages operate quite differently? Or is it a translation that stays close to the spirit of the book, while making good use of the language it’s translated into?

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Deutsche Welle: In search of identity: The new generation of photo artists from China

The Alexander Tutsek Foundation is now showing "About Us," an exhibition of contemporary photography from China, with works by internationally renowned artists such as Chen Wei, Ren Hang and Yang Fudong, as well as names that are still largely unknown outside China, such as Gao Mingxi and Liang Xiu.

Seventy photographs from the last 20 years by 14 Chinese artists are presented in the show — works reacting to the radical changes in Chinese society.

The themes of this new generation of artists revolve around self-perception, subjective experiences, and daily life. They look at memory and history, melancholy and resistance, dreams and visions, the body and individuality — and the common denominator for all of them is the search for their own identity. How can one anchor oneself in a country that is changing as rapidly as China?

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The Society Pages: Memory, Trauma, and Survival in Japan and Beyond: A Conversation with Ran Zwigenberg

First and foremost, historically, it’s an anachronism. People of different eras did not experience trauma the way we experience it today. It doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer or have anxiety and other symptoms that we may now see as PTSD. But we have to be very aware of the fact that we are taking a category we have now and retroactively putting it onto different historical situations. They are also neglecting the cultural ethnocentricity of their concepts. The concept of PTSD was developed in 1980 in the U.S. in relation specifically to the Holocaust, Vietnam, Hiroshima, and other places. It’s essentially an American notion, and it’s still not used as much in other cultural situations. To apply it to various places like Israel in the 1950s, France, Europe, the Soviet Union, Serbia in your case—culturally it doesn’t work. It’s doubly problematic when we talk about Japan and other non-Western contexts. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it has to be done very carefully, and you have to be careful about confusing individual experiences with social experience. The mechanism is different. [...]

Generally speaking, most people cannot discern, both the survivors themselves and doctors, what is somatic, for example, the physical impacts of radiation or starvation, versus the impact of mental shock, or what we now call mental trauma. For survivors, fatigue is the biggest category of symptoms: muscle issues, headaches, nightmares. They talk about their lack of ability to get up in the morning and continue with life. Sometimes people mention wounds of the heart. A lot of times and this is more from work about veterans, they try to rationalize what happened. They don’t really make the connection between their alcoholism and the war. They focus more on the connection between their alcoholism and their inability to find a job. Further, if you don’t believe your trauma is real, this has a mitigating effect. You think: “I shouldn’t be traumatized.” I mean, they did not even think in those terms because no one thought in those terms. If you don’t have the concept, you don’t interpret your experience that way. [...]

It almost went from something people were ashamed of to something people are proud of. Even though some people still don’t want to talk about it, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are highly regarded in Japan overall as a peace symbol. This is related to the way that the government is pushing the idea of Japan’s unique position as a non-nuclear country. At the same time, if you look at what happened to survivors of Fukushima, they are treated very similarly to how Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors were treated [i.e. discriminated against]. My good friend who works on nuclear production and accidents all over the world has said that radiation makes people invisible. It’s true—once people are contaminated, people don’t care about them. It’s amazing how immediate it is.

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The New York Review of Books: What Do We Want History to Do to Us?

Public art claiming to represent our collective memory is just as often a work of historical erasure and political manipulation. It is just as often the violent inscription of myth over truth, a form of “over-writing”—one story overlaid and thus obscuring another—modeled in three dimensions. In the United States, we speak of this. Discussions of power and erasure as they relate to monuments are by now well under way. The astonishing, ongoing absence of public markers of the slave trade, for example—of landing sites and auction blocks, of lynchings and massacres—is a matter of frequent public discussion, debate, and (partial) correction, albeit four hundred years after the first enslaved peoples landed on American shores. In the UK, meanwhile, we have to speak not simply of erasure but of something closer to perfect oblivion. It is no exaggeration to say that the only thing I ever learned about slavery during my British education was that “we” ended it. Even more extraordinary to me now is how many second-generation Caribbean kids in the UK grew up, in the 1970s and 1980s, with the bizarre notion that our families were somehow native to “the islands,” had always been there, even as we pored over the history of “American slavery.”2[...]

Take, for example, the Victoria Memorial, that marble white magnificence in front of Buckingham Palace, with which Walker’s latest piece of public art, Fons Americanus, a huge fountain installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, is evidently in discussion. As with so many British monuments, what appears to be an act of public storytelling is as least as much about silence as narrative. The self-conceived values of empire are confidently displayed, in the forms of classical figures embodying Peace, Progress, Manufacture, and Agriculture (represented by a woman in peasant dress with a sickle and a sheaf of corn; more to the point would be a black woman holding a stalk of sugarcane with a kerchief round her head). Cherubs abound, and mermaids and mermen and a hippogriff—symbolizing the nation’s nautical domination—but there is of course no representation of the peoples thus subdued by this famed maritime strength, and no tourist standing before this memorial would have any idea that a portion of the money used to build it was in fact raised by West African tribes, who sent goods to be sold, the proceeds of which went to the memorial’s fund. (The people of New Zealand, who also contributed to the fund, are acknowledged in an inscription upon the base.) [...]

I hope Walker is never ashamed to be the wrong kind of artist/woman/black person, or ever exhausted by our endless projections upon her. Twenty-five years after she exploded into the art world, I hope it continues to be her self-defined job to gather all the ruins of her own, and our, history—everything abject and beautiful, oppressive and freeing, scatalogical and sexual, holy and unholy—into one place, without attempting perfect alignment, without needing to be seen to be good, so that she might make art from it. And thus stand up for the subconscious, for the unsaid and unsayable, for the historically and personally indigestible, for the unprettified, for the autonomy of an imagination that cannot escape history, and—more than anything else—for black freedom of expression itself.

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The Calvert Journal: Tashkent's first documentary photo gallery is striking out into new and untested waters

Following the death of president Islam Karimov in 2016, Uzbekistan has liberalised some of its social, economic, and political life. Meaningful change, however, still needs time to take root. In a country where visual art is nascent and official censorship still exists, encouraging free expression is a crucial yet often risky task. The 139 Gallery, therefore, is a badly needed forerunner. [...]

But Karpov’s vision is wider than the 139 Gallery. Apart from showcasing the work of local and foreign artists, the space will also provide a platform for discussions about art, social and cultural issues, and the changing reality of Uzbekistan. “Our goal is to build a space where everyone — artists, journalists, filmmakers, communities, and the government — everyone can work together on issues that concern us. It will be a place of dialogue. I have chosen art as a kind of mediator,” he says.

Karpov believes that out of all the visual arts, documentary photography is uniquely positioned to help Uzbek society start to discuss issues facing the country today, as well as to act as a stepping stone to open up new forms of art. “The moment you start doing something uncommon, there are always misunderstandings and criticism from society,” Karpov says. “But from my experience, when you show people documentary photography, very true photography, in which they see the reflection of their own lives, they understand. They see it as part of their being. This is what is so great about documentary photography.”

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The Art Assignment: Why Do Corporations Buy Art?

Corporate lobbies and board rooms are often graced with impressive art, but why? What's the rationale behind this expense, and what impact does it have on the rest of the art world? We look at the history of corporate collecting, starting with Chase Manhattan Bank in 1959, trace its meteoric rise since, and work through the reasoning behind it.

BBC4 Analysis: A question of artefacts

How should museums deal with contentious legacies?

Two years since the French President, Emmanuel Macron, called for the restitution of objects taken at the height of Europe’s empires, some French and Dutch museums have started the process to hand back some artefacts. However, most of the UK’s main institutions remain reluctant.

Should we empty our museums to make amends for our colonial past? In this edition of Analysis, David Baker speaks to people on all sides of the argument to get to the bottom of a topic that is pitching the art world up against global politics.

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UnHerd: Does dirty money make the art world go round?

While drug use and abuse are not new, the remarkable thing about the Sackler scandal is the allegation that the Purdue Pharma knew about the widespread misuse of the drug. And even pursued it. The company was supposedly also engaged in comprehensive marketing schemes to ensure sufficient OxyContin proliferation to destroy their competition. They had determined that the base clientele of Oxy users were the perfect customers for naloxone, the drug that reverses the effect of opioid overdose. They realised they could increase their profits by selling treatments for the problem their company was creating. The implication is that the Sackler family was aware of and in favour of these profit making motives. [...]

They wanted the Guggenheim to refuse all future funding from the Sackler family foundations, and they wanted the name pulled off buildings and wings built with that money. It was not enough that visitors to galleries and museums funded by the Sacklers should know the corporate misdeeds of its patrons, but that the name and the money itself, should be scrubbed from institutional existence.[...]

Much of the American artistic, cultural, educational and medical infrastructure was funded by robber barons, tycoons of industry, and companies and families that had money to burn (hello, runaway capitalism). The Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and Astor families, to name a few, profited from unfair labour practices, not to mention slavery, the decimation of native tribes, exploitation of natural resources, all of which enabled an ultra-rich class that subsequently felt a noblesse oblige to provide at least some pittance to the lower classes.

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The Guardian: Should museums return their colonial artefacts?

Macron’s pledge and Killmonger’s heist had context. The preceding decade had brought growing demands for the restitution of artefacts taken from Africa by European colonists during the 19th century. If the case for the restitution of human remains to indigenous communities had been, by and large, acceded, the new frontier was works of art. The UN kickstarted the conversation in 2007 with article 11 of its declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, which urged states to restore “cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property” taken from indigenous people without their “free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs”. With that aim in mind, the Benin Dialogue Group was established the same year as part of an effort to get European museum curators talking to key representatives in Nigeria. [...]

A core objective of the Benin Dialogue Group was the creation of a permanent display in Benin City of objects once belonging to the former kingdom and now in continental hands. Last year, Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, called for international guidelines akin to the Washington principles (which address the restitution of Nazi-confiscated art to descendants of dispossessed, predominantly Jewish families) to help museums handle provenance research and repatriation of illegally acquired artworks in public collections. It is no coincidence that much of this thinking coincided with growing calls for western European nations to apologise for various “crimes” of empire, from the Germans in Namibia and the Dutch in Indonesia to the British in Kenya and India and the French in north Africa. [...]

At the same time, an exciting wave of new museums was announced across Africa. The Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, Senegal, was opened in 2018, with capacity for about 18,000 objects, alongside a clear demand for some of that space to be filled by items currently housed in European museums. New projects are also scheduled for the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, the Museum of National History in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the JK Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History in Lagos. The opening of the Benin Royal Museum in Benin City is scheduled for 2021.

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UnHerd: The nation desperate to join the EU

Demollari used to watch Italian TV stations through a reception ‘inverter’ her family had acquired. She was convinced it was the closest she’d ever come to experiencing another country, another way of life. International travel remained illegal throughout the 1980s, a hallmark of Enver Hoxha’s unique dictatorship. Each mile of the Balkan nation’s borders was enforced with bulbous barbed wire.[...]

A charm offensive has been building since 2006, when the government first accepted and passed a resolution from the European Council that the crimes of the nation’s Communist regime should be “held equivalent” to those of Nazism. Within three years, Albania had formerly applied for membership to the EU. But it took five years for the nation to be officially recognised as a candidate. Until 2014, EU leaders weren’t persuaded that Albania was committed to tackling a problem that the nation seems unable to shake: corruption. [...]

But has Albania’s progress been significant enough? Last year, the US Department of State identified “rampant corruption” in the nation. And just this weekend, thousands of protestors turned out in Tirana, calling for Rama’s resignation – accusing the man who was supposed to save the country from corruption of perpetuating it. In response, the Albanian president, Ilir Meta, cancelled the local elections due to take place on 30 June. He stated that the current politic chaos did not provide “the necessary conditions for true, democratic, representative and all-inclusive elections.”

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Aeon: African art in Western museums: it’s patrimony not heritage

The immediate paradox here is that, whereas objects from the periphery were welcome in the centre, people were very much not. Since the independence of West African countries throughout the late 1950s and early ’60s, the retention of objects and the simultaneous rejection of people has become ever more fraught. Young undocumented migrants from former French colonies stand metres away from the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a museum in Paris full of their inaccessible patrimony. The migrants are treated with contempt while the objects from their homelands are cared for in museums and treated with great reverence. The migrants will be deported but the objects will not be repatriated. The homeland is therefore only home to objects, not people. [...]

The objects taken from West Africa during the colonial period indexed many things, most of them problematic and racist. Some objects acted as a catalyst for the creative work of Western artists, and consequently entered the artistic canon as prompts and props (seen in the background of artists’ studios such as that of Pablo Picasso). The objects that Picasso encountered at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris were the impetus for his ‘African period’ at the beginning of the 20th century, which produced one of his most famous works, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). [...]

The acts of return in themselves are a symbol of strong contrition, re-opening the dialogue on past wrongs to better establish relationships for the future. It seems that behind proclamations of the complicated nature of the process of return lies this more difficult truth. Human remains have been returned from museums to be reburied with dignity. Nazi-looted art has been seized from unsuspecting collectors and returned to Jewish families. Now is the time for colonial patrimony to be reckoned with because patrimony indexes the biographies of those who made and acquired the objects, drawing their descendants into moral relationships in the present. It is now not a matter of if but when objects will be returned, and whether this happens with good grace or through a fractious period of resistance.

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Places Journal: Confucius and Mao at the Mall

State-sponsored public art has long been woven into the urban fabric of the People’s Republic of China, but such works have proliferated in recent decades as the country has embarked on the greatest city-building binge in human history. For residents of cities like Chongqing and Shanghai, propagandistic political imagery like that in Zhang Xiang’s An Bing series has become as ubiquitous as capitalist advertisements — in fact, the two often alternate in the ads that flash across flat-screen TVs in every subway car and city bus. One minute a smiling animated sheep is beckoning viewers to dine at a local hotpot chain; the next, a computer-graphics montage shows shiny molten metal pouring into a mold and emerging as a mighty hammer and sickle that rises triumphantly over the city. At first glance, the figure on the billboard looks like a happy little boy rendered in trendy kawaii style. Look again, and he is revealed to be rosy-cheeked Lei Feng, the model soldier of Maoist propaganda, wearing his trademark winter hat with ear-flaps and toting an automatic weapon.

Mao regarded his revolution as an historic rupture. But the Party now presents its regime as a restoration, returning China to its traditional place as the world’s largest economy and most powerful state. In the last fifteen years or so, official edicts have elevated numerous philosophers and statesmen from the ages of the emperors — including Confucius and An Bing — to secular sainthood, part of a growing pre-Communist pantheon that emphasizes parallels between the wealthy and powerful Middle Kingdom that endured for millennia before Western imperialism, and the nation eclipsing the West today. The government has an ambitious ideological agenda to push and full coffers from the state-capitalist boom. For China’s artists, there’s never been more money to be made in Communist art. [...]

China’s state-backed real-estate boom and concomitant public-art boom have attained a magnitude that is difficult to fathom: Consider that between 2011 and 2013, mainland China poured more concrete than the U.S. poured in the entire 20th century. 2 And even such stunning factoids fail to capture what it’s like on the ground, firsthand. Local and regional governments are spending lavishly to establish a new kind of public space in China, marked by a disorienting hybridization of Communist, nationalist, and capitalist symbols and functions that is, by turns, futuristic and nostalgic. Even the most pedestrian-hostile, neo-Corbusian developments include some officially-zoned walkable area, typically a shopping plaza, and here developers pay de facto in-kind kickbacks to officials in the form of sycophantic public monuments. Public spaces like parks are dotted with nationalistic art sponsored by flush municipal bureaus. The aim is to unify an ever-wealthier yet increasingly unequal society, as well as to exert the soft power of unelected authorities both Communist and capitalist.[...]

So much publicly-funded art has been produced since the turn of the last century that the nation is scrambling for places to put it all; a significant portion of all that freshly-poured concrete has gone to build new palaces of culture. In 2002, China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage announced that, by 2015, it would build one thousand museums. In classic Stakhanovite fashion, this audacious central-planning goal was met — and exceeded — ahead of schedule, and by 2013, China had founded nearly fifteen hundred new galleries. At the peak of the campaign, a new museum, invariably stuffed with Socialist Realist oil paintings, was opening every single day. 5 Among the most acclaimed is the China Art Museum in Shanghai, housed in the Chinese national pavilion from Expo 2010, a massive showplace along the Huangpu river.

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The New York Review of Books: Paris Pastoral: A City Recultivated

Located just north of Paris, the administrative department of Seine-Saint-Denis is France’s poorest and most ethnically diverse. Its Brutalist public housing complexes, once triumphant monuments to socialist modernism, are now sites of social marginalization. It’s the last place one would imagine seeing wandering shepherds tending their flocks. Yet here, and elsewhere in metropolitan Paris, an urban agricultural revolution is taking root.

That revolution has the blessing of the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. On her watch, the city pledged in 2016 to cover 250 acres of urban space with greenery by 2020. In 2017, the city launched Parisculteurs, a program that solicits bids for urban agriculture projects to ensure that roughly one third of that area is dedicated to agriculture. One winning project is BienÉlevées, a play on the French expression meaning “well raised” (as in well brought-up children), founded by four sisters who grow saffron on the roof of a Monoprix supermarket.[...]

Over the past century, exhibition curator Augustin Rosenstiehl told me, “the space reserved for nature in the Île-de-France doubled”—“yet, during the same period, the diversity of our biomass has collapsed.” The key to preserving biodiversity, essential to human survival and to making metropolitan Paris a resilient city, Rosenstiehl believes, is a new urban planning that restores the essential place that small-scale, ecologically sustainable agriculture formerly held in a habitat where people, plants, and animals thrive together.[...]

The exhibition labels this period one of “promiscuity,” in the sense of an indeterminate mingling. This promiscuity was wiped away during the second half of the twentieth century by zoning laws that formally separated urban, natural, and agricultural spaces, strictly defining which activities were allowed in each and forbidding, for example, the construction of housing on agricultural land or the grazing of livestock in forests. Small farming plots were consolidated in the service of large-scale, machine-based agriculture. Labor-intensive production of fruits and vegetables disappeared from the riverine valleys around Paris, which became natural corridors for new highways and rail lines, and the development of new urban hubs. In the Île-de-France region around Paris, nearly all the farming that is left is industrial grain production—acre after acre of mono-cropped wheat with nary a person, let alone a bee or bird or animal, in sight.[...]

The exhibition also imagines Paris’s tramway lines with dedicated trams for livestock, so that flocks like the one shepherded by Dubreuilh could be transported for grazing on public parks and meridians where gas-guzzling mowers and hedge trimmers would no longer be required. Abandoned factories and commercial warehouses could be converted into multi-use structures for performances, housing, food production, and restaurants, as could old barns and hangars for farm machinery, effectively bringing community and the arts to now isolated rural areas.

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Bloomberg: Britain’s a Small Country. Get Used to It.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a small country that is about to get even smaller. I know that this simple statement of fact will nevertheless infuriate many English people — and I do mean English people, not Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish. Last week, at India’s Raisina Dialogue, the Spanish foreign minister said that there were two types of countries in Europe: countries that are small and countries that do not know that they are small. Aside from the English, no Europeans in the audience were upset at this plain-speaking. Not even the French. [...]

May has resolutely ruled out another referendum, but this is more than just her failure. After all, even if somehow Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party manages to unseat her, Labour’s approach to Europe is as predicated on fantasies as May’s. Corbyn is on record as saying he wants a customs union with the European Union that allows Britain to negotiate its own trade deals; this is, quite simply, impossible. It reflects a notion of British indispensability that nobody outside England shares.

The British can blame no one but themselves. While they’ve never been enthusiastic Europeans, their decision to be the first country to withdraw from the EU is revealing of a basic inability to grasp their vastly diminished place in the world. That they are a member of the United Nations Security Council means little; that reflects merely the power that the British Empire had in 1945, not the U.K.’s power today. Nor is being a nuclear-weapons state much of a big deal any more: Such basket cases as North Korea have the bomb. Most of Britain’s foreign policy influence grows out of its loyalty to the U.S., and Britons’ disproportionate cultural influence derives from the fact that they happen to speak the same language as the world’s sole cultural superpower.  [...]

I write this column from Vienna, an imperial capital grander even than London and one that has also been long without an empire to rule. Austria’s capital, unlike Britain’s, has come to terms with its new status. A profoundly liveable city, it prospers as Western Europe’s bridgehead in the east, and it has an easy pride in its history of intellectual innovation and artistic excellence.

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Haaretz: Israeli Culture Minister's 'McJesus' Response Proves: Culture Is Now a Dirty Word Associated With Leftists

“McJesus” brought hundreds of angry demonstrators out into the streets in Haifa, protesting the offense to the religious feelings of Christian believers. Earlier someone threw a firebomb at the museum's exterior, and three policemen were injured in a confrontation with the protesters.

We may recall the case of a hamsa with the inscription “Idbah al-Yahud” (Slaughter the Jews) produced by Gal Volinez and displayed at Sapir Academic College, which aroused the anger of a student who destroyed it; or the portrait of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked in the nude at an exhibition of students' work at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, which ended with the removal of the work and the resignation of the head of the art department, Larry Abramson; and the video clips by Natali Vaxberg, who defecated on the Israeli flag; and the white flag that Ariel Bronz rammed into his posterior at a Haaretz cultural conference. Provocation always works and always arouses one of the major questions that preoccupies us here: Is freedom of expression an absolute value or it is it relative? [...]

Culture Minister Miri Regev was quick to contact the executive director of Haifa's municipal museums, Nissim Tal, demanding that he remove the work. She wrote that she had received “many complaints over the serious offense caused to the Christian community’s feelings” and that “contempt for symbols sacred to religions and many believers around the world as an act of artistic protest is illegitimate and cannot be displayed in a cultural institution supported by state funds.” She also added a threat that the Culture Ministry would withhold support from the Haifa Museum of Art. [...]

So not only freedom of expression is a liberal, Western value and therefore unnecessary in Regev’s opinion, but culture as a whole becomes a dubious idea. Culture has become a dirty word that is identified with leftists, and it is the antithesis of the most basic and important characteristic of the Jewish people in its own view, which is to be a special people.

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IFLScience: This Is What Ancient Egyptian Homework Looked Like

A wax tablet mounted in a wooden frame dating back to second-century-CE Egpyt, at that time under Roman Empire control, reveals the ancient lessons taught to elementary-school-age children 1,800 years ago. Though there is no name on the tablet, so the identity of the pupil is unknown, back then formal education was almost exclusively the realm of males from wealthy families.

The tablet reveals a lesson in ancient Greek, including a reading and writing exercise and multiplication table. Lines written presumably by a teacher have been copied out by a rather endearingly wobbly hand, though according to Peter Toth, curator of the exhibition to feature the tablet at London’s British Library, the sentences weren’t just for practicing the alphabet but also to impart moral lessons. [...]

That the tablet – about the size of a paperback book, or, again prophetically, your electronic tablet of choice – survived nearly 2,000 years is impressive. Wax typically breaks down in moisture so the dry clime of ancient Egypt would have helped preserve it.

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The New York Review of Books: Between Two Empires

The vibrant khachkars hit the eye in the exhibition’s rooms as the manuscripts do not. But they were both produced for the same reason. Behind each lies a heroic determination not to forget. Each manuscript volume carries a colophon—a final comment added by the scribe—that begs the reader to remember him (or her, for we know of at least one woman scribe) as well as the patron and family who had commissioned the book—usually a gospel or a hymnal. Like the khachkars, the manuscripts come from a society in which memory was not simply (as it often is with us) an attic of the mind—a neutral storage space of past events. Memory was loyalty, and forgetfulness was treason.

As we walk through the exhibition, somewhat bemused by the sheer beauty of bright color set on radiant gold leaf, we should remember the world revealed to us by those humble colophons. They were often written by scribes perpetually on the move across the uplands of what are now eastern Turkey and the Republic of Armenia (and on similar slopes in what is now northwestern Iran), against a landscape shaken by warfare and caught every year in the murderous grip of a mountain winter. As one scribe explains in a colophon to a copy of the gospels written in Erzincan, on the highway from Erzerum to Istanbul, which drops in a series of great slopes beside the quiet headwaters of the Euphrates: [...]

Hence a paradox: Armenia may have been the first country whose ruler converted to Christianity. King Trdat IV did so before 312, thereby preceding Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome. But this was a decision made at the royal court, and its principal beneficiaries were a narrow elite of Christian clergymen and unmarried ascetics. Armenian society continued to run on the richer, more explosive values of a pre-Christian society condensed in legend and song. In the fifth and sixth centuries AD, one would have had to travel as far as the Atlantic, to early-Christian Ireland, or to the headwaters of the Nile in the mountain kingdom of Ethiopia, to find such a bracing combination of saints and warlords, of literate scholarship and tenacious loyalty to non-Christian oral traditions. We are looking at a remarkable phenomenon—the birth of an authentically non-Mediterranean Christianity. It was in this distinctive form that the Armenian Orthodox Church has survived up to the present day as a dynamic member of the wide spectrum of Christian communities known to us as the Eastern Orthodox Churches. [...]

Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Armenia was like the Scottish Highlands of the eighteenth century—an overbrimming reservoir of military manpower and skilled adventurers of every kind. As soldiers, Armenians fought with equal vigor in the armies of Eastern Rome and Iran. They were not only military men. In the fourth century, the Armenian Prohaeresius was a leading professor of rhetoric in Athens. In the tenth century the engineer Trdat, who reinforced the supports for the dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was also an Armenian. The most remarkable evidence of this constant drift of a hardy and enterprising mountain people into the Mediterranean world was found on an Egyptian papyrus. It was a conversational handbook in which Greek phrases were transcribed into Armenian letters, so that the owner could discuss, in perfect Greek, the pithy sayings of Diogenes the Cynic, among others.

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