BY frieze in Culture Digest | 17 MAY 19

Weekend Reading List: Michel Foucault and LSD; The Legacy of Doris Day

What the frieze editors have been reading this week

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BY frieze in Culture Digest | 17 MAY 19

Michel Foucault and Michael Stoneman, Death Valley, 1975. Courtesy: David Wade; photograph: © Simeon Wade

  • ‘In May 1975, Michel Foucault watched Venus rise over Zabriskie Point […] Just a few hours earlier he had ingested LSD for the first time’. For the TLS, Eric Bulson on the philosopher’s (supposed) experimentation with hallucinogens.
     
  • ‘Everything I write wants to be with something else.’ At Granta, a conversation between the American writers Niina Pollari and Lucy Ives.

    (Stay tuned for the forthcoming summer issue of frieze, in which Ives writes about the cultural legacies of the summer of 1969, and what it meant to survive a decade of such dashed promise.)
     
  • In the New Yorker, film critic Anthony Lane pays tribute to the matchless presence of Doris Day, who died this week at the age of 97.
     
  • ‘There’s also a scary deep in Fisher, a darkness, a left-Lacanian Real’. Jenny Turner reviews k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, for the LRB.
     
  • How much of the internet is fake? A lot of it, actually. For NY Mag, Max Read writes about online authenticity – or the lack thereof.
     
  • ‘Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American’. Why Facebook should be broken up, by Chris Hughes, its co-founder.

Laure Prouvost, ‘Deep See Blue Surrounding You/Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre’, 2019, film still. Courtesy: the artist, Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris – Brussels), carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Lisson Gallery, London and New York

  • Did you miss the 58th Venice Biennale? Do you crave ‘interesting times’? Fear not: you can relive the week here, as our editors guide you from the Giardini to the Arsenale and beyond.
     
  • ‘When the mask was torn off, the response of Kavanaugh and his defenders was not embarrassment or shame but instead a hysterical and rabid defence’. Alex Pareene on Trumpism’s brand of boy power, for The Baffler.
     
  • For Harper’s, the novelist Marilynne Robinson asks: is poverty necessary?
     
  • ‘Technology is as biased as its makers’: An excerpt from Lizzie O’Shea’s book, Future Histories (forthcoming with Verso), on the legacy of Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine and the Paris Commune.
     
  • How should we shop, cook and eat in a warming world? At the New York Times, Julia Moskin, Brad Plumer, Rebecca Lieberman and Eden Weingart answer your questions about food and climate change.
     
  • A variation on that same theme: at Verso, Eleanor Penny analyses eco-fascism and asks what it will take the left to deal with the scale of the climate crisis.
     
  • ‘At first sight, it makes sense to link the decline of social democratic parties to the rise of populist radical-right parties. But correlation does not always equal causation.’ For the Guardian, Cas Mudde explains why copying the populist right won’t save the left.

Lutz Bacher, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’, 2018, installation view, K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen. Courtesy: the artist and Greene Naftali, New York and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; photograph: Achim Kukulies

  • Electronic Pop for the Surveillance Era: Hua Hsu profiles the electronic musician Holly Herndon’s new collaborator: an artificial neural network.
     
  • ‘Harper Lee […] was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries’. At The Paris Review, an excerpt from Casey Cep’s forthcoming book, Furious Hours, an account of Harper Lee’s first and only work of nonfiction.
     
  • John Waters and Edmund White discuss death, sexting and the flaws of Dalí, for Document Journal.
     
  • For the New Republic, Maggie Doherty explains how sexism and machismo shaped the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
     
  • At Jacobin, Matthew Lau looks at the relationship between the 40th anniversary of Apocalypse Now and how the real victims of the Vitnam War are forgotten in its cheap thrills.
     
  • From the frieze archive, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith tracks the legendary and elusive artist Lutz Bacher, who died this week at the age of 75.
     
  • The New York Times’ chief fashion and art critics Vanessa Friedman and Roberta Smith discuss the Met’s new, Susan Sontag-inspired show.

Contemporary Art and Culture

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