James writes:
I am honored to find the Wall Street Journal has picked my article for City Journal, on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's approach to dealing with the homeless mentally ill, as its "Notable and Quotable."
Viewing entries in
In the Press
James writes:
Last week I was delighted that Arts and Letters Daily picked up on Hard Not to See, my feature on the new Whitney Museum and the direction of museum culture. The editors of AL Daily also asked me to be the featured reader, with my own pick for the week. My selection was “History by Exclusion, Illuminating the 'Dark Matter' of the Art World,” a manifesto that was published in 2006 but which has been gathering wider notice among artists this season. Written by the artist Loren Munk, the piece has become a rallying cry for art's DIY generation, with the conclusion "We are our own art history." You can read about it here.
View of the Brooklyn Museum's Eastern Parkway façade, showing the museum lit up for Hudson Fulton Centennial, 1909.
“The persons now in this room have it in their power to decide whether in the future intellectual progress of this nation, Brooklyn is to lead or to follow far in the rear.” —George Brown Goode, “The Museum of the Future” (1889)
James writes:
Last December I wrote "How Brooklyn Missed Brooklyn," a critique of the museum's curious apathy to the art of its own borough and a reflection on history of its once illustrious past. With the announced retirement of Arnold Lehman, the museum's director since 1997, I signaled
the changing fortunes of the borough now call for a director who can draw on Brooklyn’s civic strengths to build the museum into what its founders intended. The time has come for a Brooklyn Museum that is truly “worthy of her wealth, her position, her culture and her people”—and her artists.
This week we learned that Lehman's successor will be Anne Pasternak, the president and artistic director of the public arts organization Creative Time. In "Does Anne Pasternak Have What It Takes?" written by Mostafa Heddaya for ARTINFO, I and others offer some thoughts on the museum's "creative choice" of a director who has received much fanfare for hosting contemporary-art events—but little experience tending to an arts institution with a history and its own important permanent collection. A museum is more than an event space, I say. It's a house for art. Now it remains to be seen if she can make it a home.