The\u00a0Artnet Bulletin is our new daily digest of five items that are catching their eye from around the art world, picked out by a different writer each morning.<\/p>\n
A Major Museum Story\u2026<\/p>\n
This cannot go on: The Philadelphia Museum of Art ran a deficit of $10 million in the just-ended fiscal year, the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/a> reveals. The coming year, the shortfall promises to be at least that and could swell to almost $16 million\u2014all spent from emergency reserves. Museum CEO Daniel H. Weiss said he hopes to be \u201cwithin shouting distance\u201d of a balanced budget in three years, though there\u2019s no plan as yet. \u201cWe have real work to do to get there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n An Essay to Debate\u2026<\/p>\n Over at Artreview<\/a>, writer Michelle Santiago Cort\u00e9s decries the aestheticization of \u201cresearch,\u201d both online and in the museum. Does the glut of \u201cknowledgemaxxxing content\u201d\u2014social-media infotainment masquerading as expertise\u2014make us think differently about what we want from research-based art, which is such a dominant<\/a> style<\/a>? Cort\u00e9s speaks of \u201ca growing wave of suspicion around artist-led research,\u201d pointing to critic Emily Watlington\u2019s upcoming book Fables and Forensics<\/a>, which I was delighted to learn of.<\/p>\n An Odd Announcement\u2026<\/p>\n The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art returned to San Diego Comic-Con, this time to\u00a0unveil details about its soon-to-open attractions. Forget that you will be able to see original art by Frida Kahlo, Jack Kirby, and Norman Rockwell. Forget even that the museum will show off<\/a>\u00a0previously unseen Star Wars artifacts. The big news came from Austin Powers actor\u00a0Seth Green, on the panel to reveal<\/a> that an unaired \u201cSimpsons-style\u201d animated Star Wars parody he created with George Lucas would finally debut episodes within the L.A. museum\u2019s galleries. I don\u2019t really get it, but that\u2019s what they\u2019re going with.<\/p>\n A Conversation Worth Having\u2026<\/p>\n The august editor and critic Nick Catucci convened<\/a> culture observers to opine about where we\u2019re at with the \u201cvibe shift,\u201d \u201ccancel culture,\u201d and the \u201cwoke\/anti-woke\u201d wars (there\u2019s been a bunch of recent writing about this; see David Wallace-Wells in the NYT<\/a>). Lots of good insights here, though too much focus on celebrities, and in the end little consensus. Various respondents say the present is defined by \u201cWoke 2, definitely\u201d (Katherine Dee), \u201cdark woke\u201d (Kat Tenbarge), \u201dNouveau Despair\u201d (Scaachi Koul), or \u201cfragility\u201d (Parker Molloy). \u201cThere doesn\u2019t seem to be a coherent vibe,\u201d writes artist-trendcaster Sean Monahan, who touched off the whole Vibe Shift conversation<\/a> in the first place. \u201cI think the full fragmentation of attention after mainstream media\u2019s early 2020s decline precludes one.\u201d<\/p>\n A Modest Act of Protest\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n The saga of Baltimore nude artist Ham (a.k.a. F. Hambleton Sonnenfeld) continues, after a performance on July 4 got him arrested<\/a>. This time Ham took to a vacant pedestal that once held a sculpture of Supreme Court justice Roger B. Taney (1777\u20131864), notorious for his association with the Dred Scott case, hoping to spark a conversation comparing Taney\u2019s legacy to the present-day Supreme Court: \u201cI want to remind people that, behind the like veil of superiority, anyone that sits behind a bench on a chair is just a naked animal covered in robes,\u201d Ham said. This time, Ham wore a Speedo and so avoided arrest, the Baltimore Banner<\/a> noted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The\u00a0Artnet Bulletin is our new daily digest of five items that are catching their eye from around the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[108153,108152,65033,108149,108151,108150,69,71,12634,70,80736],"class_list":["post-253591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-artnet-bulletin","tag-artnet-news","tag-ham","tag-lucas-museum-of-narrative-art","tag-michelle-santiago-cortes","tag-nick-catucci","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-museum-of-art","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}