in Culture Digest | 23 JUN 17

Weekend Reading List

Nicholas Serota profiled, Zadie Smith on appropriation, and the theological support for Trumpcare: what to read this weekend

in Culture Digest | 23 JUN 17

Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003, installation view, Tate Modern, London. Photograph: Commonorgarden/Flickr; Creative Commons

  • In a Guardian long-read, Charlotte Higgins profiles Nicholas Serota, and details the absorbing story of how he remade the Tate: 'there is no one in the British cultural world more single-minded, more monkishly devoted to the arts as a civic and public necessity, more able to bend events to his will.'
     
  • Dafen Village on the outskirts of Shenzhen used to make 60% of the world's paintings. Now ‘the world’s art factory’ faces a precarious future, and its migrant painters are at risk.
     
  • In the 1970s, Erkki Kurenniemi stated: ‘our true descendants will be algorithms’. Read our frieze profile of the Finnish composer, visionary thinker, pioneer of multimedia art and techno-utopian, who died in May.
     
  • 'Write a screed against it. Critique the hell out of it. Tear it to shreds in your review or paint another painting in response. But remove it? Destroy it?' Don't miss Zadie Smith's excellent Harper's essay on the question of who owns black pain in Jordan Peele's Get Out and Dana Schutz's Open Casket.
     
  • Complaints that the American Health Care Act serves the interests of 'the billionaire class' don't get right to the heart of the matter: Angela Mitropoulos has a great piece in The New Inquiry on the theological underpinnings of Trumpcare.
     
  • In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Emmett Rensin on the 'blathering superego at the end of history'.
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