Memoirous

Last week Donald Trump introduced a 2017 budget that de-funded the National Endowment for the Arts which assists individual artist but also grants monies to non-profits, arts training programs, public arts projects. He isn’t the first president to try and write the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities out of existence—that title would go to Ronald Reagan. I love how funding art becomes a political football, something to be booted back and forth. Of course Hitler loved art. In fact he fancied himself a painter. During his chancellorship he actively collected art, as did many in the Reich, much of it confiscated. The period before Hitler came to power in 1933 was known as Weimar. Weimar Germany was famous for an explosion in Modernistic expression—expressionism, Dada, cubism and impressionism. Artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, and Max Ernst  contributed to the avant-garde movement. Hitler had stated clearly in ‘Mein Kampf’ where his t...

I’ve wanted to write about Pussy Riot for a long time. Actually I’ve just wanted to write the words Pussy Riot. And maybe a long time just means lately. Outside loving the name of this feminista-punk-activist band, I know very little about them or the controversy they caused when they stormed an orthodox church in Moscow. Anti-Putin feminist punks on trial in Moscow Which caused me to think about how our society ingests, devours its female artist. Think Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston just lately. Which led me to thinking about artists in Weimar Germany. The fourteen years of the Weimar era were marked by crazy explosive intellectual and creative productivity. Found this at Wiki: Kirkus Reviews remarked upon how much Weimar art was political: fiercely experimental, iconoclastic and left-leaning, spiritually hostile to big business and bourgeois society and at daggers drawn with Prussian militarism and authoritarianism. Not surprisingly, the old autocratic Germa...