Recent links of note:

“Alice Walton Creates Art Bridges, a Foundation That Supports Exhibitions of American Art”
Alex Greenberger, ArtNews

Alice Walton, the heiress of the Wal-Mart fortune and the founder of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, has made a name for herself as a leader in arts philanthropy that reaches beyond the “elite” cultural centers of America’s East and West Coasts. (Read our executive editor James Panero’s article from January 2017 for more on Crystal Bridges.) On Wednesday, the patron announced plans for a new project: “Art Bridges,” a non-profit foundation that will collect and loan American art in order to assist exhibitions across the country. Already, the foundation has contributed to multiple shows and has partnered with a number of big-name cultural institutions such as the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Smithsonian. Consider Walton’s new project a win for art and private philanthropy, as well as those regions of the country typically passed over by our best traveling exhibitions.


“Ah Yes, Harvard, that Conservative Traditionalist Citadel!”
Jim Geraghty, National Review Online

A pair of administrative decisions has put Harvard University in the bad graces of the ever-belligerent radical Left this week. On Wednesday, The New York Times published a story on Michelle Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University who was denied admission to a similar program at Harvard for murdering her four-year-old son in 1992, and (more importantly?) for declining to fully elaborate on the matter in her application. Jones served twenty years out of a fifty-year sentence for her crime, but now Harvard is facing relentless criticism by the Left for refusing to accept recommendations for her admission by the relevant department.

In similar news, Harvard rescinded its invitation to Chelsea Manning to serve as a visiting fellow at its Kennedy School of Government after general outcry and the resignation of the Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morrel from his own academic post in protest. Manning responded with a deranged and incoherent rant on Twitter, thus proving the folly in Harvard’s proposing the fellowship in the first place. Catch Jim Geraghty’s response to this latest farce in the academy at National Review Online.
 

“Art for all”
J. C., The Times Literary Supplement

In the back pages of its most recent issue, The Times Literary Supplement responded to an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books that asks in its headline “is cultural appropriation ever appropriate?” To our delight, the TLS queries a biting response: “is cultural appropriation ever inappropriate?” Like so many examples of the ideological fallout created by identity politics, the taboo of “cultural appropriation,” insofar as it limits one’s imaginative range to first-hand experience, strips the artist or writer of all his creative and empathetic powers. As the TLS sagaciously puts it: “If the art is good, it justifies its own creation. If bad, it predicts its own oblivion.”


From our pages:
Podcast: David Pryce-Jones & James Panero discuss “Miłosz among the ruins.”

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