Elon Musk and his fellow travelers and lickspittles are convinced that nobody actually has political beliefs to their left, so their appearance in the discourse must be some kind of (((Soros)))-funded conspiracy. This delusion had inadvertently hilarious results when Laura Loomer convinced him to let everyone see where poasters come from:
For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior—particularly foreign influence operations. They’ve insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is actually just “censorship” with various forms of cover, whether academic or operational.
Then Elon Musk rolled out a feature often used by trust & safety teams internally, looking at where accounts were created and/or where they normally post from. Except Musk made the info public. And within hours it revealed exactly why platforms had been doing this kind of work internally in the first place.
And, no, it wasn’t about “censorship” of ideological viewpoints.
On Friday, X began rolling out a feature that revealed where users signed up from and where they were posting from. The feature came following the request of MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, who asked Musk back in September to add country-of-origin labels to help identify foreign influence operations. We noted the irony at the time—Loomer and her friends spent years attacking the trust & safety teams who were actually working on this problem.
Whether it was because of Loomer’s request or it was already in the pipeline, Musk rolled it out.
And, within hours, the feature revealed that a ton of super popular “MAGA” accounts were actually posting from all over the globe, with large numbers posting from Eastern Europe, West Africa, or Southeast Asia.
Taibbi knew exactly what the ideological valence of treating any kind of enforcement of terms of service or study of disinformation “censorship” is likely to be, which is why he was the perfect choice to run the TWITTER FILES con.
…pretty much:
At this point X is like 1950s Vienna, a whole place made up entirely of spies, running ops against other spies, with no non-spy people. Or maybe like a 1971 Black Panthers convention where 3/4 of the attendees are conintelrpo.
Is this about how ppl born in the late 20th century have a unique and fluid experience of navigating barriers to information access and its our responsibility to teach the younger folks how to tinker with technology to avoid being spoonfed everything we experience in order to have critical skills that keep us informed, autonomous, and able to hold power despite looming threats of authoritarianism or……….???
i love love lOVE the additional element of “the only information that’s free is the ‘how we’re going to hell’” BS. Chef’s kiss.
I have the baseless headcanon that Mary Poppins is Maleficent.
Maleficent reforms sometime in the fourteenth century, greatly reduced. She wanders the countryside in the shape of a harridan, another bogeyman to warn children of.
The peasantry - who remember Maleficent as the fey who inexplicably sent her minions to inspect every cradle in the kingdom - think that she is another of these goblins.
They call her La Mauvaise Paysanne.
***
She arrives in England in the eighteenth century on the back of a fairy tale.
Fairies take the shape of the stories told about them. The myth has changed, and so has she. She takes the shape of an enchantress, the punisher of naughty children, the rewarder of the good.
The English people call her the Merry Peasant.
***
By the nineteenth century, the edges of her myth have been sanded off entirely. She’s known as a fairy godmother who blesses good children.
She doesn’t mind this, but when she gets the chance to reshape her wand, she gives it a crow’s head in memory of her old familiar.
They’ve started calling her Mary Pauper.
***
By the twentieth century, Mary Poppins is more powerful than she’s been in centuries.
She’s also changed completely. She understands this to her core, and mostly she’s fine with it.
She misses it every now and then, of course. The palace, the minions, the mistress of all evil. She sniffs and says these are are ridiculous thoughts, but she thinks them nevertheless.
This is partly why she enjoys being a nanny. It’s a good compromise. She can be strict but fair with her charges, and every now and then she meets a particularly incorrigible parent who she can curse into oblivion.
Windows 11 comes with an "agentic AI" feature, which is to say a built-in chatbot that can make changes. Microsoft warns that it might install malware on your PC: "Only enable this feature if you understand the security implications."
Microsoft has issued an important warning about its upcoming agentic AI capabilities that are coming soon to Windows 11.
Good explainer here from Steve Vladeck about the inside baseball procedural game that’s being played at the SCOTUS now in regard to funding SNAP. Specifically, he addresses the question of why KBJ issued an administrative stay late last night, temporarily staying the district court’s order requiring the program to continue to be funded:
As for why Justice Jackson did it, to me, the clue is the last sentence. Had Jackson refused to issue an administrative stay, it’s entirely possible (indeed, she may already have known) that a majority of her colleagues were ready to do it themselves. I still think that this is what happened back in April when the full Court intervened shortly before 1 a.m., without explaining why Justice Alito hadn’t, in the A.A.R.P. Alien Enemies Act case. And from Jackson’s perspective, an administrative stay from the full Court would’ve been worse—almost certainly because it would have been open-ended (that is, it would not have had a deadline). The upshot would’ve been that Judge McConnell’s order could’ve remained frozen indefinitely while the full Court took its time. Yesterday’s grant of a stay in Trump v. Orr, for instance, came 48 days after the Justice Department first sought emergency relief.
Instead, by keeping the case for herself and granting the same relief, in contrast, Justice Jackson was able to directly influence the timing in both the First Circuit and the Supreme Court, at least for now. She nudged the First Circuit (which I expect to rule by the end of the weekend, Monday at the latest); and, assuming that court rules against the Trump administration, she also tied her colleagues’ hands—by having her administrative stay expire 48 hours after the First Circuit rules. Of course, the full Court can extend the administrative stay (and Jackson can do it herself). But this way, at least, she’s putting pressure on everyone—the First Circuit and the full Court—to move very quickly in deciding whether or not Judge McConnell’s orders should be allowed to go into effect. From where I’m sitting, that’s why Justice Jackson, the most vocal critic among the justices of the Court’s behavior in Trump-related emergency applications, ruled herself here—rather than allowing the full Court to overrule her. It drastically increases the odds of the full Supreme Court resolving this issue by the end of next week—one way or the other.
The background reality here is that this is all purely voluntary on the part of the Trump administration: Even Trump’s lawyers haven’t come up with an argument to the effect that the administration can’t continue to fund SNAP — they are merely going to court to vindicate Trump’s legal right to starve Americans in the service of the plutocracy.
This is a point for a separate post, but I think it’s always it’s important to emphasize that food scarcity in a nation as unimaginably wealthy as the United States has become — we are three and a half times wealthier per capita than when JK Galbraith pointed out that we had become a crazy rich country in The Affluent Society 67 years ago! — is 100% a purely political choice, as opposed to something imposed on us by any kind of actual scarcity, in the economic or environmental senses of that word.
Vladeck’s plea that “we should be doing everything we possibly can to feed those who can’t afford to do so themselves” unfortunately replicates the standard frame for discussing this issue, which assumes that hunger in a place like America is something that can be ameliorated but not eliminated. And that’s false. Eliminating hunger in America in 2025 would be a simple thing to do, and we don’t do it because we affirmatively, as a society, choose not to do it. Donald Trump’s disgusting personal cruelty regarding this issue just puts an exclamation point on that.
A denial of service vulnerability report was filed against a program, let’s call it Notepad. The actual text of the report was very hard to understand because the grammar was all messed up. I’ll give the finder the benefit of the doubt on the assumption that they are not a native English speaker. Here’s a cleaned-up version:
If you open multiple documents, one very large document and several small documents, and then try to exit all of them at once, the program will take a very long time saving the large document, resulting in a denial of service against the small documents.
I’m not sure what the point is here. The program does eventually finish saving the large document, so everything works out in the end. Are they suggesting that the program should save the smallest documents first? But then wouldn’t that be a denial of service against the large document if you had lots of small documents?
But wait, let’s ask the standard questions.
Who is the attacker?
I guess the attacker is the person who opened the very large document.
Who is the victim?
The victim is the person who is unable to save their small documents because the large document is hogging the program.
What has the attacker gained?
The attacker has annoyed the victim temporarily.
But wait, the attacker and the victim are the same person!
It’s not a security vulnerability that you have the power to annoy yourself. Other ways include “Putting itching powder in your pants” and “Throwing your glasses in the trash.”
Furthermore, there is no impact on other users, or even to other apps by this user. The only person you’re denying service to is yourself.
If you’re concerned about the order in which files are saved on close, you could explicitly close them in the desired order, like, I dunno, most important files first? Removable drives first?
And really, it’s not clear what the finder was expecting here. You loaded a large file, and now you’re saving it. Why is it surprising that this takes a long time?
This was resolved as “Not a vulnerability” with the subcategory “By design.” But sometimes I wish there was subcategory “So what did you expect?”
The 729-foot ore boat Edmund Fitzgerald, shown in 1972 file photo, in Marie, Mich.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
No one was more surprised than Gordon Lightfoot when his ballad "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" became one of the biggest hits of 1976, less than a year after the disaster it commemorates. The Canadian musician had agonized over writing the song in the first place.
"He feared being inaccurate, corny or worse, appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit," writes John U. Bacon in his new bestseller, “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” "But more than that, as a fellow sailor and a child of the Great Lakes … this song — whatever it was — was deeply personal."
The success of Lightfoot's song elevated the Edmund Fitzgerald's place in popular history. But its tragedy was hardly unique.
"From 1875 to 1975, there were at least 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes," Bacon told NPR. "So that is one shipwreck a week every week for a century. That is one casualty every day for a century."
While shipwrecks may have been common, the Edmund Fitzgerald was not. Named — perhaps ironically — for the president of the insurance company that paid for its construction, the freighter has been described as a freshwater Titanic.
"It was, in fact, the greatest ship on the Great Lakes when it launched in Detroit in 1958," Bacon said. "Fifteen thousand people came out to see the launching. When it went through the Soo Locks or Detroit or Duluth, people would wait half a day to see this ship come through. It was a rock star."
The largest and longest vessel ever built on the Great Lakes, the 729-foot ore carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald, slides into the launching basin, on June 7, 1958, in Detroit, Mich.
AP/AP
Great Lakes maritime trade first took off in the 1770s, as wealthy Europeans clamored for luxurious beaver pelts. Two centuries later, hundreds of long ships crowded the five inland seas carrying lumber, limestone, copper, cars, crops, and iron from Canada and the Midwest down to the Saint Lawrence Seaway that eventually leads to the Atlantic. The Edmund Fitzgerald was loaded with 26,000 tons of pellets containing iron ore when it sank. To slip through the narrow Soo Locks, such ships are only 75 feet wide.
"That's less than the space from home plate to first base," Bacon observed. "What's the problem with that? They can't handle rough seas." And the Great Lakes do get rougher over the winter, even more so than the ocean. Salt helps regulate and weigh down waves, so freshwater waves can become huge and erratic. The Edmund Fitzgerald was caught in a savage storm with hurricane-force winds around 100-mile-an-hour and waves up to 60 feet, crashing down on the freighter every four to eight seconds, says Bacon.
When Gordon Lightfoot read news accounts of the tragedy, it didn't feel far away. He was an experienced Great Lakes sailor who knew those waters well. He kept noodling with a ballad about the disaster during breaks while recording his album Summertime Dream in 1976. His bandmates and a studio engineer eventually talked Lightfoot into trying it out. In The Gales of November, drummer Bill Keane said that the first take — also the first time the band ever played it — was the version that ended up on the album.
Musician Gordon Lightfoot performs onstage in 1978.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
"We all just played what we felt," he said.
And that's how a six and a half minute folk dirge with no hook, no guitar solo, and 28 two-line stanzas became a hit. When it came out in 1976, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" was the number two song on the Billboard Hot 100, right after Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night."
Today, Lightfoot's song is treasured by the families of sailors who died. The singer became close to these families and attended their reunions to commemorate the tragedy. And he established a scholarship fund at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy, which lost a cadet and an alumnus when the freighter sank. "On many occasions, cadets had an opportunity to meet him when [Lightfoot] performed in the area," the Academy's superintendent, Jerry Achenbach, told NPR.
Ultimately, said author John U. Bacon, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald helped change safety standards. There has not been a single major commercial shipwreck on the Great Lakes, he says, for the past 50 years.
Greetings from your friendly neighborhood National Park Service worker.
The government wants you to think a shutdown is no big deal. It’s is. They want things to keep running in the meantime. They will- but not safely and not paid. Because not everyone is necessarily aware what a shutdown means for Gov workers, this is how it works…
Employees fall into one of the following three categories:
Excepted: Unpaid, required to work (those needed to protect life and property).
Exempted: Paid, required to work (those funded by non-lapsed sources)
Furloughed: Unpaid, employees that are neither excepted nor exempted. These employees have been ordered to “expeditiously complete orderly shutdown activities” then head home. This may be a few minutes for some employees or a few days depending on their job duties and what it takes to perform an “orderly shutdown” of their activities.
Who is furloughed? Legit everyone but “safety” workers. So fees, maintenance, timekeepers, facilities, everybody. And no, those thousands of people will not be paid for whatever amount of time they aren’t working.
Who is Exempted? In my neck of the woods (pun intended) it’s law enforcement, fire, ems, search and rescue and dispatchers. Hey that sounds like a lot? Guess what - almost all of the law enforcement in the park are simultaneously EMS, search and rescue and the Fire department. One person, four jobs. That’s the way… It always is by the way, which is HIGHLY PROBLEMATIC (but that’s a different rant). We will keep doing those four jobs, unpaid and unsupported. When will we get paid for our work?- who knows. You may ask yourself - why do we have to keep working when everything is shutdown? Because they’re not closing the national parks. Yeah. So people are going to keep coming, keep using the bathrooms that won’t be cleaned, keep using the roads that won’t be maintained safely, keep getting hurt and in trouble.
Right now, there is a massive rollover DUI car accident on one side of the park and someone just got gored by an animal on the other side of the park. So all of us (the three people on shift at the moment) will be figuring out which one to heading out to. We have to choose. And it’s going to be extremely dangerous when we do get on scene because those “non-essential workers” that were furloughed? -Those are the people we count on daily to go above and beyond their own normal duties and help.
Those are the people who manage traffic around the accident for us so we don’t get hit. Those are the people that get extra resources for us (lights for night time, blankets, Gatorade if it’s a long extraction on scene). Those are the people that make sure we get paid for being called out in the middle of the night, the people that make sure all the protocols are being followed so everyone is safe, the victim advocates that talk to the families, they are the essential hands needed because- if you haven’t all forgotten- they already gutted our limping agency staff by like 30%.
What can you do?
The usual things you see - pester your local and government officials. Pester your money makers though even more - the businesses that give money to your local officials. But more immediately? Please do not come here. Please do not further burden the system. Tell other people not to come. Don’t let the government think we can make it work still- we can’t. Do not make us have to function as if things were okay, because they are really really not.
Greetings from Week Five of the shutdown.
What’s new?
Well, for a small group of us first responders, the government has now ordered that we be paid… from our park’s admission fee money fund. The admission fee money fund that is supposed to go directly towards improving the park – fixing roads, cleaning and fixing facilities, visitor experience stuff. The admission fee money fund that’s supposed to cover those improvements for the entire year… Is now being used to pay us. So guess what happens when that runs out? A.) no more pay, B.) no improving the park.
But the parks are still open? So wouldn’t the fees of people still coming in cover part of that? No. Because we’re not allowed to collect fees during the shutdown. The parks are open, not gaining any revenue, burning through their reserves, and becoming significantly more unsafe and generally trashed and destroyed, by the day.
What does that look like?
Last week it was very icy and a tour bus of 50 people slid partially off the road, blocking a whole lane of traffic. This was on the MAIN ROAD, on a blind curve, only 10 miles into the park.
We only have one remaining, non-furloughed plow/sander driver. For reference, we normally have 4-5. He was 50 minutes away (and then the sander broke so he had to go back to the garage for a bit to try and fix it.) The one remaining tow truck driver was almost 90 minutes away. There was only me and my coworker on shift to deal with traffic and we couldn’t direct people around the accident because the road all around it was still icy because the sander hadn’t gotten there and someone was bound to slide off again. So we had to just keep traffic stopped. For almost a two hours, every single visitor to the park was in stopped traffic. About 10 miles worth of cars just sat, parked in the road. Hundreds and hundreds of people.
Some of them turned around to go back to the entrance, but an RV slid off the road going the other way, so now traffic was blocked in both directions. Which meant when the sander WAS fixed, it couldn’t get through the traffic. And because it was just me and my coworker, we didn’t have anybody who could leave the scene of the accident to go down and clear that traffic for the sander.
As I stood there in the cold (thankful that I had pulled my yaktrax out of storage soon enough to use them for the occasion because the road was SOLID ICE) people kept getting out of their cars, coming up to me, and complaining. I’m not allowed to give political opinions at work, but I was able to provide them facts:
Fact: We only have one plow truck driver, because everyone else has been furloughed. If we had our normal amount, all the roads would be sanded and this probably wouldn’t have happened.
Fact: We only have two officers on right now. Usually, we can try to pull some people from other divisions to help with traffic- those people are also furloughed.
Fact: The reason you are in traffic right now is directly caused by the government shutdown.
The main thing I want to communicate to the general public, though, comes from the repeated question I got “Well, if the roads were so dangerous why didn’t you just close the park?”
Ma’am?
Fact: The administration has forbidden us from closing National Parks.
We were ordered to “Continue operations and services as normal”… with at least 65% of our staff furloughed.
Fun epilogue to the story is that 2 hours in, just as the sander and tow truck finally arrived, another car went careening off the road about 30 miles from there, blocking traffic for both lanes. I left one scene and came to that one we discovered the drive was HURT, and needed an ambulance. My coworker and I are also the EMTs/ambulance drivers (and fire department and search and rescue and…) so we had to have our dispatch center start calling people at home to come in and help. (Their overtime won’t be paid until the government restarts by the way).
Five people came in on their day off and we managed to transport to the hospital, do the crash report, clear the road… and deal with SEVEN MORE slide offs in the following two hours.
What are the takeaways from all this complaining I’m doing:
Fact: 65% or more of National Park Service staff that are furloughed and have no income right now. They still have bills though, and some people are in significant trouble financially (because it’s not like they paid us much in the first place).
Fact: Coming to your national park right now is not only extremely dangerous for you, but also causing significant and irreparable damage to the park- to the actual natural resource, to our infrastructure, and to our facilities.
Fact: Parks were ordered to use the finances that we usually would put towards keeping up said facilities and infrastructure, to pay the people we are forcing to work right now. BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FORBIDDEN PARKS TO CLOSE THEIR DOORS AND SHUT THEIR GATES.
Please don’t come here. Please contact your local representative. Please spread the word
Because it looks like it’s going to be another busy day.
“Poisoning Pigeons In The Park” was the sort of song a nerdy young girl needed to hear in 1959, along with “The Old Dope Peddler.” He provided a large number of songs devoted to our nuclear fears as well. “We Will All Go Together When We Go.”
The world changed and so did he, becoming quieter. Recently, as we find many fears, his songs have had a revival of popularity. And now he’s gone, after a 97-year run.
He was a mathematician who might have gone to Los Alamos, but he went in a different direction. His songs helped keep many of us more balanced than we might have been. A nice summary with songs at the New York Times.
Most queer people aren’t privileged with having queer parents, so many of us look to those who came before as role models. In Homage: Queer Lineages on Video, artists draw upon the legacies of folks who opened the doors we now get to walk through. It’s worth a visit for anyone to broaden their horizons of what queerness might mean, and to discover histories often left untold.
Located at the Wallach Art Gallery, in Columbia University’s new, Renzo Piano-designed Lenfest Center for the Arts, Homage takes advantage of the building’s high ceilings and flexible configurations as compared to the gallery’s former, more cramped quarters. In this exhibition of eight pieces by seven artists, drawn from the Akeroyd Collection, four pairings emerge. Comparing and contrasting them can open a window into the show.
Tony Cokes, “SM BNGRZ 1 + 2” (2021)
Works by both Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kang Seung Lee approach nature from a queer, nonlinear perspective. With “For Bruce” (2022), Weerasethakul, a legendary Thai filmmaker, presents an homage to Bruce Baille, whose films superimpose and overlay footage in innovative ways. Weerasethakul’s similarly unorthodox landscapes, inspired by Baille, can become a foil to the unorthodox queer narratives in his own films. For “Garden” (2018), Lee performs rituals in the gardens of the respective homes where English artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman and Korean poet and activist Oh Joon-soo lived. Lee draws on sheepskin parchment at each garden, digs a hole, and then buries the parchment as a form of exchange and kinship with these artists, both of whom died of AIDS.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “For Bruce” (2022)
Kang Seung Lee, “Garden” (2018)
Lee shifts his focus to dance with “The Heart of a Hand” (2022), in which Filipino dancer Serafin pays tribute to choreographer Goh Choo San. The latter was born in Singapore, but became a singular presence in the American ballet scene in the 1970s and 1980s before succumbing to AIDS in 1987. Tony Cokes also looks at the ways people express themselves through dance, in this case turning to nightclubs. In “SM BNGRZ 1 + 2” (2021), house music backs a parade of brightly colored words that explain the genre’s origins as an alternative to disco for Chicago’s Black and Brown queer communities.
Kang Seung Lee, “The Heart of a Hand” (2022)
Tony Cokes, “SM BNGRZ 1 + 2” (2021)
P. Staff’s “The Foundation” (2015) and Rirkrit’s Tiravanija’s “United (John Giorno reads)” (2008) both examine how we discover queer forebears through the archives we’ve inherited. Staff alternates footage of the Tom of Finland foundation in Los Angeles and its custodians with an experimental theater set to ask questions about who creates, cares for, and stages the archive of such iconic figures. In 2008, Tiravanija collaborated with John Giorno to create a 10-hour video compendium of the latter reading his poems and memoirs, and performing his music.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, “United (John Giorno reads)” (2008)
P. Staff, “The Foundation” (2015)
Both Carolyn Lazard in “Red” (2021) and Dineo Seshee Bopape in “a love supreme” (2005–6) lead with abstraction to explore identities outside of the White, ableist cisgender patriarchy that structures our society. Bopape licks streaks of chocolate that suggest abstract expressionist brushwork off a transparent pane of glass, owning her eroticism as a queer woman of color. Lazard pays homage to Tony Conrad’s warning about epileptic risks in his strobing film “The Flicker” (1966) by creating flickering red iPhone footage of their thumb, along with a warning screen that says “strobe on.” As noble as the artist’s intentions are to raise questions around access, ableism, and being immunocompromised, the work lacks the impact of the artist’s “A Recipe for Disaster” (2018) or a clear connection with queerness.
Dineo Seshee Bopape, “a love supreme” (2005–6)
Carolyn Lazard, “Red” (2021)
These are small quibbles in relation to the overall show, however. What’s truly brilliant about Homage is how curator Rattanamol Singh Johal uses video art’s nonlinearity to present the nonlinear ways that queer people draw on the legacies of those who came before them. In doing so, they create their own definitions of queerness.
Homage: Queer Lineages on Video continues at the Wallach Art Gallery (615 West 129th Street, 6th Floor, Manhattan) through October 19. The exhibition was curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal.
It is perhaps a testament to the enduring power of the titular British artist’s oeuvre that, even at a substantial 272 pages, Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures still feels as if it is only scratching the surface of her work and life. Though critically celebrated during her lifetime, Chadwick gradually fell out of the contemporary discourse after her death in 1996; this publication coincides with her first major retrospective exhibition in more than 25 years, originating at the Hepworth Wakefield.
Chadwick was only 42 when she died unexpectedly, yet she had already built a compelling body of work and became one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner Prize. As a teacher, she was an important influence on the Young British Artists of the late 1980s, including her students Tracey Emin, Anya Gallaccio, and Sarah Lucas. Chadwick exhibited consistently throughout her career; her acclaimed 1994 exhibition Effluvia at the Serpentine Galleries broke the institution’s visitor record and brought international recognition, and a 1995 solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art led to invitations for 10 other exhibitions across the world.
Reading Life Pleasures was, for me, a delightful reencounter with works that transgress the boundaries of traditional materials. Chadwick deftly employed the organic and mundane — raw meat, rotting vegetables, pig intestines, human hair, dead fish, bubble bath, and bubbling chocolate — to confound our notions of desire and disgust and challenge the primacy of sight over our other senses. While such material adventurousness no longer shocks, contemporary conversations seem to have developed a collective amnesia for one of its foremost pioneers.
“Her art was mischievously unruly and luxuriously disruptive,” Laura Smith, director of collection and exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield and editor of the book, notes in her survey of Chadwick’s output through the decades. “Her endeavor was to stimulate an individual’s intuitive, involuntary reactions and sensations as a way of destabilizing the conditioned and constructed aspects of contemporary culture around sex, gender, death, beauty, class and power.”
Smith’s essay traces the evolution of Chadwick’s practice, beginning with student exhibitions at Brighton Polytechnic and her 1977 master’s thesis show, In The Kitchen — in which Chadwick and several female classmates performed in the nude, covered partially by handmade sculptures resembling kitchen appliances. She chronicles Chadwick’s first major solo exhibition, Of Mutability at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1986 and what is arguably her most famous work: “Piss Flowers”(1991–92), painted bronze sculptures cast from the mounds of compacted snow onto which Chadwick and her husband, David Notarius, had urinated.
Other contributions in Life Pleasures offer deeper analysis of key aspects of Chadwick’s work or biography. Philomena Epps takes a critical look at the role of desire, sexuality, the fetish object, and the erotic; Maria Christoforidou sheds light on the Hellenic influences in Chadwick’s work (the artist’s mother was a refugee from Athens and Chadwick later bought a small cottage in the Greek Peloponnese); and Katrin Bucher Trantow, Kunsthaus Graz chief curator, focuses on the artist’s use of flowers to disrupt cultural gender norms. While the essays sometimes overlap in the works they discuss, each contains the gift of a new perspective, much like how Chadwick prodded audiences to reconsider social constructs so pervasive as to be invisible. Decades before transgender and nonbinary people would become the targets of mainstream political attacks across the world, Chadwick was not only affirming the fluidity of gender, but also refuting rigid categorization and thinking of any type.
These commentaries are rounded out by Smith’s conversations with Notarius and Louisa Buck, an arts writer and friend of the artist who explains that Chadwick “was an intellectual Titan, she really had an incredible reach, an extraordinary brain and vast knowledge across science, art, popular culture — and when you were with her, this just bubbled up.”
Brief remembrances by nine of Chadwick’s students, friends, and collaborators provide moving testimony to both her warmth and intellect, while Chadwick’s own poem, “Piss Posy,” written in 1992 as a companion to “Piss Flowers,” offers a glimpse of her delightfully libidinous side.
The book’s inclusion of several sketches from her journals and contact prints, while illuminating, only stimulates the desire for more — to know more intimately this artist who, as Smith writes, “has been described variously as wicked, raunchy, funny, clever, fierce, brilliant, tough, confronting, provocative, meticulous, a genius, ahead of her time.”
Helen Chadwick, “Fancy Dress and Sculptures Photograph Book” (1974) (photo by Anya Fiáine-Fox, courtesy Leeds Museums and Galleries, Henry Moore Institute Archive of Sculptors’ Papers)
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures (2025), edited by Laura Smith, is published by Thames and Hudson and available online and through independent booksellers.
MONTEREY PARK, Calif. — “EN CADA BESO UNA REVOLUCIÓN.” “LESBIANAS. UNIDAS. ¡FELICES!” Such battle cries embody the poetic optimism of Latina lesbian activism across borders at the Vincent Price Art Museum’s On the Side of Angels. Captured by posters for marches in Mexico City and Washington, DC, respectively, and made nearly 20 years apart, they chart an ongoing struggle for liberation. Importantly, these activists rallied not around a single issue but against intersectional forms of oppression: sexism, racism, homophobia, and classism.
Presented in partnership with the Latina Futures 2050 Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, the exhibition diligently utilizes the archives of its Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) to extend a legacy of Latina lesbian activism in Los Angeles, spanning the 1980s to 2000s. It also illuminates the hemispheric nature of the movement — efforts from the privileged economic position of the United States, for instance, expanded care for peers in Mexico, as seen in a 1989 interview published in the women’s quarterly Connexions. It shows that Latina lesbians sat at the heart of a swirl of sociopolitical issues that continue to affect millions of people today — unjust labor practices, LGBTQIA+ discrimination, and housing insecurity — and that these oppressions are linked worldwide.
As just one example of the exhibition’s emphasis on collectivity, it sources its name from archivist and former CSRC librarian Yolanda Retter Vargas’s 1999 dissertation. In it, she in turn nods to the gargantuan effort of those before her: The first generation of activists had to unearth, piece by piece, a continual lesbian presence in 400 years of documented United States history. The show includes a video interview between Retter Vargas and Civil Rights advocate Laura Esquivel — whose archive is also prominently featured — in which the former speaks candidly about her experience within activist circles, emphasizing the importance of their intersectional activism and relationships to one another.
Installation view (left) and detail (right) of “Primer Encuentro de Lesbianas Feministas Latinoamericanas y Caribeñas” (1987), poster
This feeling of communality reverberates throughout the varied sections of the show, including one focused on Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), the first organization to advocate for both LGBTQ+ and Latina/o/x communities. (Esquivel became the organization’s first female president in 1984). Copies of GLLU’s newsletter, Unidad, are seen alongside a flyer in which a sultry Betty Boop beckons the public to an event at Kitty’s bar in Montebello, hosted by the Lesbianas Unidas (LU), a task force that separated from the organization in 1994. Members of LU, in turn, went on to lead Connexxus, a women’s center that provided professional development workshops, counseling, and support groups. It also partially funded Chicana lesbian photographer Laura Aguilar’s prodigious Latina Lesbians (1986–90)series, which continues to reshape contemporary perceptions of this community. On view is an invitation to an exhibition Aguilar staged at the organization’s West Hollywood location, drawn from tenant rights attorney Elena Popp’s papers.
Co-curators Vanessa Esparza Quintero and Jocelyne Sanchez’s careful handling of these remarkable archives weaves intricate narratives that both sprout from and culminate in Retter Vargas’s ardent compassion for her kin. A restoration of the herstorian’s Lesbian History Project, a community bibliographic research repository, for instance, is browsable on an antiquated iMac. And if her words, voice, and technological archive were somehow not enough to convey the depth of her compassion, there is also an altar to her consisting of a bandana, pins, and tool belt that she regularly wore during her shifts as a librarian. Such presence and visibility cannot be overstated in a time of persistent crisis. As the curators and activists in the exhibition make clear, only we have the power to advocate and organize for ourselves, especially in the face of those who refuse to accept our existence.
Installation view of iMac on which users can access the Lesbian History ProjectToolbelt and pins belonging to Yolanda Retter VargasInstallation view of “Lesbianas Unidas Felices” (1993), paperLydia Otero, “Lesbians of Color Conference Date” (1980), photograph
On the Side of Angels: Latina Lesbian Activismcontinues at the Vincent Price Art Museum (1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, California) through August 30. The exhibition was organized by the Latina Futures 2050 Lab, an initiative of the University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, in collaboration with Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College. It was curated by Vanessa Esperanza Quintero and Jocelyne Sanchez.
Politically right now things are looking really bad, which is especially interesting if you cast your mind back five years. 2020 saw massive protests against racist policing and systemic racism in general, with statues of Confederate generals being torn down and a prevailing spirit that we as a society were going to do some root and branch changes. Trump was voted out of office, and when he tried to overthrow the government in January of 2021, the public responded with an overwhelming wave of opposition and disgust. Major League Baseball players, not known for being progressive, got the All-Star Game moved from Atlanta after that state passed voter restrictions.
There seemed to be a real feeling that certain bigoted ideas were finally getting weeded out of American life. Biological racism was banished while gender was widely being understood as a social as opposed to biological category. Supply-side and austerity economics both looked defeated by the successful Keynesian response to the pandemic economic crisis. Right-wing populism looked like a dead end. This feeling carried on for awhile, with Barbie, a movie drenched in feminist consciousness, becaming the biggest grosser of 2023.
Now four years after 1/6, Trump is in office and trying to destroy every official acknowledgement of gender, race and racism that exists in the country, on down to scrubbing Harriet Tubman from a website on the Underground Railroad. He is actively punishing universities, extorting liberal law firms, dissolving HUD and the Department of Education, and sending immigrants to detention for their opinions or to a gulag in El Salvador on dubious or even mistaken grounds. Misogyny is cool again, openly expressed in private and public forums.
This change gives me whiplash. It’s what happens when you go after malevolent political forces but don’t finish the job. If you come at the devil, you best not miss. Because 2020-2021 was the turning point that failed to turn, the reactionaries got the chance to strike back harder than ever.
What makes me angry rather than sad is that it did not have to be like this. Trump should have been removed when he was impeached in January of 2021. Republicans scuttled that, but Democrats should immediately have had Trump prosecuted for his crimes, but they didn’t. They should have made sure Biden was a caretaker president and elevated a younger party member, but didn’t. In their complacency they thought the evil witch was dead and that they didn’t have to do anything else. As all of the current collaboration shows us, our elites are very good at climbing the greasy pole of success, and will throw their souls in the gutter in order to stay on top of it.
It’s not a surprise that the Democrats have been feckless and lazy, but what about the street movements? Because the 2020 protests, like Occupy, followed the “leaderless movements” template there was no organizational structure created to follow up on it. We are faced with a horrible political situation, but few leaders or organizations that can get people on the march. It’s so bad that I’ve often wondered if the “leaderless movements” was planted by an FBI informant to undermine social movements a la COINTELPRO.
Well, preach it brother about bullshit horizontal leadership ideas that lead to nothing at all ever sustaining itself. But also, let’s not forget just how bad the Biden administration blew any chance of solidifying what had happened in 2020. Biden never could get his head around the seriousness of the problem. He found Trump disgusting of course, but he clearly also thought his election was a repudiation of Trump, which it was not. It’s one thing to have picked Merrick Garland as AG, but to stick with him for 4 years of doing absolutely nothing. He then misread the politics of Covid big time, seriously underestimating both the stupidity and selfishness of the American people.
Now we are in the joys of counterrevolution, where even a pretty anodyne political critique provided by Barbie seems outright impossible.
When I first saw a trailer for Sinners, I was intrigued by what appeared to be Western Vampires, but I was simultaneously disinterested because the trailer made it look like a horror movie, and a goofy one at that. There were so many cringe jump scares and silly effects that horror movie trailers always tend to use. Now that I have seen the movie, I feel confident saying the trailer did it a disservice.
I was surprised when I started seeing a huge amount of positive reviews for Sinners, because like I said I just thought it was some forgettable horror movie. But everything I saw about it was seriously hyping it up, to the point where I knew I needed to go see it, and I now had some pretty high expectations for it. I tried not to keep my hopes too high, as I was afraid of being disappointed, but I couldn’t help but be excited after seeing so many glowing reviews.
I was not disappointed.
Sinners was absolutely enthralling, truly a wild two-hour ride. With its gore, fight scenes, and moments that made me laugh out loud, it was a strange yet evocative blend of horror, comedy, and adventure, with the vibes of a western. It is bizarrely romantic, yet gothic and bloody. But I suppose those things are not so different.
It is also a film that is not necessarily made for me. Of course, I can watch it, fully enjoy it, and there’s lots of things I can take from it, but it is not for me. And that’s great! Seeing such different stories be told is part of what makes art so great. In my research before writing this post, I saw a critic on Rotten Tomatoes say it was a sort of like a “blaxploitation” film. It was a term I’d never heard before, and had to look into.
There’s a whole art movement that I never even knew about! I love that I got to learn something new, and I think it would be ignorant of me to not give proper acknowledgement to the roots of these types of stories told by such incredible black filmmakers.
Long story short, I am a very whitey white girl, and all my thoughts on this film are coming from a place of being a basic white girl, so just keep that in mind as we go through this.
I really enjoyed Sinners, there was never a part that felt slow or boring, or like the movie was dragging, which is impressive because it’s over two hours long. It did feel like a two hour movie, but not in a bad way.
I loved every performance in Sinners, everyone did such a good job and really brought their A-game to this film. Each character was so interesting and fun, and the side characters felt surprisingly three-dimensional and didn’t give that sort of classic “side character” energy. All the characters felt like real people, and made a lot of choices that seemed like something real people would do. I think what I’m getting at here is that usually horror movie performances are cheesy and the characters make a lot of questionable or downright silly choices, but that wasn’t the case here.
The cinematography of Sinners was quite interesting, with a significant amount of one-take shots. The atmosphere and lighting was a total vibe, the sets were great, the costumes were super cool, everything was so immersive and overall looked awesome. It’s just a really pretty film with some really pretty people and I love it for that.
I respect what they did with the lore and rules of the vampires, every fiction is different in that way but I like what they did with their vamps. Man, I really love vampires.
I seriously think you should catch this one on the big screen if you can, it’s a great time and I think even if you don’t like horror (like myself) or Western types, you’ll enjoy Sinners.
I usually don’t do, like, out of ten ratings for movies on the blog, but for me Sinners was an 8.5/10. And if you made me choose a whole number, I’d round up, not down. Awesome film.
Have you seen Sinners? What did you think of it? What other vampire movies do you like (I’m partial to Fright Night (2011))? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
P.S. The one thing I didn’t like about this movie (and most movies) is there were some seriously loud parts. So it goes with seeing movies in theaters these days, but just be prepared for some rather sharp, loud noises. It’s not horrible but there are a few occasions of it.
“In 1881 the doctor overseeing President James Garfield’s recovery from a gunshot wound repeatedly probed the president’s wound with dirty instruments and his fingers, prompting assassin Charles Guiteau to plead not guilty of the murder by claiming, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.” But just four years later, germ theory was so widely accepted that the U.S. Army required medical officers to inspect their posts every month and report the results to the administration, and by 1886, disease rates were dropping. By 1889, the U.S. Army had written manuals for sanitary field hospitals, and the need to combat germs was so commonplace medical officers rarely mentioned it. And now, in 2025, the top health official in the United States, a man without degrees in either medicine or public health, appears to be rejecting germ theory and reshaping the nation’s medical system around his own dedication to a theory that was outdated well over a century ago”
K-pop icon Lisa of Blackpink became the subject of controversy during the Met Gala last night, May 5, after netizens incorrectly claimed that she wore an outfit displaying an image of Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks across the crotch. There were indeed dozens of faces embroidered across her translucent black-lace jacket and strapless bodysuit from Louis Vuitton (LV) — but these likenesses were all created by contemporary artist Henry Taylor, and Rosa Parks was not among them.
Though Lisa has yet to speak out on the matter after countlessnewsreports and viralsocialmediaposts, Hyperallergic confirmedthat the lacy ensemble bore the faces of people close to Taylor — friends, family members, acquaintances — as is also typical of the artists’s signature paintings, which foreground Black individuals in intimate and community settings. The bespectacled portrait on Lisa’s body suit that many mistook for Parks is actually of the artist’s neighbor.
Installation view of Henry Taylor: B Side at the Whitney Museum of American Art (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)
Taylor had collaborated with Met Gala Co-Chair Pharrell Williams in 2023 for the latter’s debut collection upon his appointment as LV’s creative director for menswear. The artist provided the fashion house with samples of his existing portraiture, which in turn converted them into micro-embroidered embellishments that appeared on some of Pharrell’s collection looks. Taylor also painted Pharrell’s portrait for the cover of Vogue’s May issue.
Taylor also attended last night’s Met Gala, which was themed “Tailored For You” to celebrate the Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition. He was styled by Pharrell, and wore a white button-down featuring his own embroidered portraits.
Henry Taylor at the Met Gala on May 5, 2025, wearing a shirt printed with his portraits (photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
Pharrell also styled Lisa for the gala, along with rising popstar Sabrina Carpenter, Grammy-winning breakout rapper Doechii, and actor Jeremy Allen White. Lisa’s custom look deployed the same portraits included in Pharrell’s debut collection, except they were presented as black outlines rather than colorful embroidery.
This controversy comes months after alleged videos of Lisa and other members of Blackpink reciting the N-word while singing along to several songs during their training days were leaked and shared across social media, adding fuel to the recent fire. The group has not issued an official statement about the controversy.
I’ve covered the Met Gala from a meme standpoint in years past, and I intended on doing so this year as well — except … Where are the memes?
The morning-after meme frenzy has followed the Met Gala for at least a decade now, with allegations of Jason Derulo falling down the red carpet stairs re-emerging annually since 2015. Maybe it’s actually funny, maybe it’s just our way of punching up at the elites in an era of gaping class chasms, but either way, latching onto styling gaffes and shady moments is a canonized audience response to the glitzy fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Halloween is only six months away … (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via @deliclit on X)
Apparently, the answer is yes.
To be fair, the way that most (but not all!) attendees interpreted the theme “Tailored For You” — namely, a conference for pinstriped shirts and zoot suits sans zoot — didn’t leave much for us screen-sick little imps to work with.
Perhaps, after years of internetteasing, those who regularly showed up to the Met Gala in plain black suits have finally turned the joke back on us, as those boring fits are actually on theme this year, or close enough.
But it’s the broader lack of inspiration, risk-taking, innovation, agency, and personal flair — particularly while celebrating the legacy of the Black men who embodied all of those facets as a means of survival, personal dignity, and self-expression for the last few centuries — that has let the air out of the tires, so to speak. When the majority of the ultra-rich defaults to surface-level interpretations of one of the more interesting and incisive Met Gala themes in years, what’s left to laugh at?
Their effort isn’t even worth the sass.
It gets even less funny when I consider that just one avenue away from the Gala, some 200 pro-Palestine protesters were gathered outside in the pouring rain to rally, chant, and drum for Gaza for the second year in a row, largely ignored by the majority of outlets and online commentators.
Having made the journey uptown to get the story first-hand, I can safely say that whatever came from the Gala wasn’t worth standing in the pouring rain and getting clocked in the head by an errant umbrella in the rabies-coded press pit.
You know it’s a problem when even the TSA tries to play along … (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via Instagram)If Anna Wintour has no haters, it’s because I’m dead. (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via @betchesluvthis on X)????? (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via Instagram)
Low hanging fruit, and a bit misogynistic at that …As you can tell, the theme and guest list were decided before Trump moved to dismantle DEI on a federal level. (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via @bottomjail on X)When everyone flops so hard that people have to resort to this as content for engagement … (screenshot Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic via @willfulchaos on X)Pro-Palestinian protesters close to the Met Museum in New York (photo Rhea Nayyar/Hyperallergic)
In the anti-rational world of the fascist, transgender servicemembers, who each have more patriotism in the tip of one pinky finger than DOD Sec. Pete Hegseth has in his entire gin-pickled body, are an intolerable threat to U.S. security. But a debauched shudder of fascist clowns using easily hacked apps to transmit sensitive information is no big deal.
A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.
The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.
Data related to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, and other financial institutions are included in the hacked material, according to screenshots of messages and backend systems obtained by 404 Media.
According to the hacker who contacted 404 Media and was interviewed for this article, they didn’t acquire any messages sent or received by tRumpgoons. That just leaves anyone else who had the curiosity, skill and attitude required to poke at the app.
The hacker did not access all messages stored or collected by TeleMessage, but could have likely accessed more data if they decided to, underscoring the extreme risk posed by taking ordinarily secure end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and adding an extra archiving feature to them.
“I would say the whole process took about 15-20 minutes,” the hacker said, describing how they broke into TeleMessage’s systems. “It wasn’t much effort at all.” 404 Media does not know the identity of the hacker, but has verified aspects of the material they have anonymously provided.
I wonder how many foreign intelligence agencies have scaled back their U.S. sections?
Street artist Matthew Courtney, a founding member of the grassroots Lower East Sidearts nonprofit ABC No Rio and host of its celebrated Wide Open Cabaret series, died last week in his Brooklyn apartment at the age of 66. A police investigation found that the cause of death was an accidental overdose, a member of the collective told Hyperallergic.
Born in 1959, Courtney grew up in Portland, Oregon, before eventually moving to New York City in the early 1980s, where he helped foster the growth of ABC No Rio, then an artists’ squat. From the mid-1980s through early 1990s, he hosted the weekly anything-goes open-mic event Wide Open Cabaret at the art collective’s historic 156 Rivington Street address.
The series was an underground hub for New York outsider artists and dissident voices, and known for putting on eccentric, radical, and raw performances spanning ten-minute political ramblings, spoken word poetry, and experimental music and theater. As writer Rebecca Moore wrote for Mirabella Magazine in 1990, “Sometimes it’s horrible, sometimes it’s a glimpse of emerging brilliance.” Courtney had just one stipulation for those who signed up to participate: “You are on your honor to be amazing!”
Courtney making a cardboard sign at his Soho sidewalk gallery Steps to Nowhere (photo by and courtesy Fly Orr)
ABC No Rio member and comic artist Fly Orr told Hyperallergic that she was “blown away” by Courtney’s presence the first time she attended one of the Wide Open Cabaret events.
“The audience was his co-host, but he was always the one in the spotlight,” Orr said, recalling how audience members would frequently chime in to offer words of encouragement, sing alongside performances, or voice their opposition. Amid all the loud chaos, “[Courtney] always knew how to rein it all in and get everyone back to a manageable state … with his very commanding, mellifluous baritone.”
Courtney’s theatrics were captured in readings of his original poetry, such as “Car Poem Number 1” and “Honey, I’m Home!,” the latter of which saw him walk through a yellow doorway and curl up on the floor in imitation of a buttered scone.
“He was beloved and admired by all who met him,” Orr continued. “He shined as much off stage as he did onstage.”
Courtney’s visual art repurposed found objects including cardboard and newspapers. (photos by Matthew Courtney, courtesy Fly Orr)
Courtney was also a longtime fixture of Soho’s street community. Beginning in the early 2000s, he erected his makeshift, sidewalk-based Steps to Nowhere Gallery outside storefronts and restaurants on Prince Street, including metal steps that led into the wall of a now-defunct J.Crew, the Apple Store, and Fanelli Cafe, showcasing brightly colored Pop Artportraits and humorous poetic meanderings. Many of his artworks were produced on repurposed found materials like cardboard boxes and segments pulled from the New York Times (hisfavorite was the weather section, according to a 2008 Blogspot post).
“I used to draw on the front page of the New York Times, but the screaming headlines and dramatic photos used to rattle people and I’d stopped doing that,” Courtney said in a 2013 video interview filmed at the Steps to Nowhere Gallery. He turned toward other immediately accessible material:A 2021 photo posted to Instagram depicts a painting made on a paper subway notice, and other images demonstrate that he frequently used slabs of wood as canvases.
“Matthew, we carry forward the memory of your presence,” ABC No Rio wrote in a Facebook post. “You made room for the voices others overlooked, and reminded us that art is not just something we make, but something we live by.”
In commemoration of Courtney, the collective is distributing copies of the self-published zine documenting the Wide Open Cabaret series this week; those interested can acquire these publications from its library at 107 Suffolk Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Fly Orr’s depiction of Courtney as host of the long-running Wide Open Cabaret event series (image by and courtesy the artist)Matthew Courtney’s Steps to Nowhere gallery traveled up and down Prince Street, stationed outside storefronts and restaurants. (screenshot Maya Pontone/Hyperallergic via @matthew_courtney_art on Instagram)
Amy Sherald, “Untitled (Opal)” (2019), oil on linen, from the artist’s solo exhibition American Sublime at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (photo Hakim Bishara/Hyperallergic)
This spring, four solo exhibitions by Black artists — Amy Sherald at the Whitney, Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim, Jack Whitten at MoMA, and Lorna Simpson at The Met — opened across New York City’s leading museums. Though each show is institutionally led and distinct in tone and scope, they share one commercial throughline: All four artists are represented by the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. As a result, the media has bundled these exhibitions into a neat label: “Hauser Spring.”
The phrase is catchy, but also revealing. It reframes independent institutional success as part of a commercial gallery’s seasonal programming, flattening curatorial histories and artist legacies into a convenient narrative of market dominance. In doing so, it exposes a broader discomfort with autonomous Black success, especially when that success operates beyond the direct control of galleries, studios, or auction houses.
This reframing is not limited to the art world. In film, a parallel case unfolded just weeks earlier with the release of Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending vampire epic. The film opened at number one at the box office, earning $45.6 million in its debut and becoming the highest-grossing original film of the year to date. But unlike similarly ambitious films by white auteurs, Coogler’s success was met with guarded headlines. Variety described its profitability as uncertain, and industry insiders expressed concern about the film’s historic deal, which granted Coogler final cut, first-dollar gross, and ownership reversion after 25 years. Some executives reportedly warned that this could set a “very dangerous”precedent.
This reaction stands in stark contrast to the reception of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which had a comparable production budget, a lower opening weekend, and no intellectual property advantage. That film was framed as a risk worth taking, a visionary’s passion project. Coogler’s film, despite outpacing it in performance, was framed as a potential liability.
In both cases, the same pattern emerges: When Black creators reach the highest levels of visibility while asserting structural autonomy, their success is not simply celebrated. It is managed — the institutional framing shifts from recognition to risk assessment.
Installation view of Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)
“Hauser Spring” is not, strictly speaking, an act of appropriation. The artists in question have all been represented by the gallery for several years, and it is reasonable that Hauser & Wirth would feature their successes in its public communications. What is more telling, however, is how press coverage has framed these exhibitions as part of a coordinated gallery-driven moment, rather than as the product of long-standing curatorial planning within the museums themselves. This reframing subtly shifts credit away from the institutions and artists and toward the commercial infrastructure that surrounds them, revealing the soft mechanisms by which power recenters itself in the gallery system.
To be clear, Hauser & Wirth is not exploiting these artists so much as absorbing their visibility into its ecosystem. The gallery represents these artists, and they will undoubtedly benefit from the attention. But we must ask: Who actually produced the conditions of this moment? What does it mean when a museum’s programming, built on years of dialogue and planning, is absorbed into a mega-gallery’s seasonal strategy? And what happens when Black artists’ institutional relationships are made legible primarily through the lens of market alignment?
These questions become sharper when placed alongside a third example: the recent art market boom and bust involving young artists, many of them people of color, whose works became speculative assets before their practices had time to develop sustainably. A New York Times article published in August 2024, “Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust,” documents how galleries and collectors inflated demand for these artists, pushing them into the auction spotlight. When the market cooled, many were left unsupported, with diminished value and little institutional backing.
This kind of market acceleration, followed by institutional abandonment, is not new. But when aligned with the “Hauser Spring” and Sinners coverage, it begins to suggest something more structural. In all three cases, Black creative labor is celebrated — but only when it reinforces the legitimacy of larger systems. When that labor pushes beyond those systems, whether through a film deal that grants ownership, a museum show that sidesteps gallery origin stories, or a career that spikes too fast to be controlled, it becomes framed as unstable, exceptional, or risky.
Installation view of Jack Whitten: The Messenger at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (photo by Jonathan Dorado, courtesy MoMA)
This is not to say that these artists are victims of the institutions that represent them. Sherald, Johnson, Whitten, and Simpson have long held strong, self-directed practices, and their collaboration with Hauser & Wirth is likely beneficial in material ways. Similarly, Coogler’s deal is a model of contractual power. But what is notable here is not the artists’ position, but the framing of their success. The institutional and media narratives surrounding these achievements rarely allow Black excellence to stand on its own. It must be contextualized, often neutralized, through association with traditional arbiters of value — galleries, studios, collectors.
If we take these three examples together, a clearer picture emerges. Black visibility is not inherently threatening to institutions. In fact, it is often welcomed, particularly in the post-2020 art world, where equity is part of the branding strategy. What becomes threatening is Black authorship, especially when it comes with leverage, longevity, or the ability to dictate the terms of engagement.
The lesson here is not to reject the role of institutions altogether. Galleries, museums, and studios can be important platforms. But we must remain vigilant about how narratives are constructed. When four museum retrospectives are framed as a gallery season, when a record-breaking original film is labeled a financial risk, when a young artist’s market surge is followed by silence, we should be asking not just who is visible, but who controls the frame.
Until we can disentangle visibility from institutional co-optation, Black cultural authority will continue to be celebrated, but only on someone else’s terms.
Dumb guy even for MAGA standards Doug Collins — currently the head of Veterans Affairs, which would tell you how much Trump values veterans had he not made that abundantly clear already — appeared before Congress with the expected results:
The GOP chairman, Jerry Moran of Kansas, told Collins that there is “understandable concern among veterans and VA staff, as well as many of us here on the dais.”
Yet, asked by Moran to name the “most significant areas of concern for the VA,” Collins returned to whining: “I think one of the most interesting things for me in the first 100 days is constantly fighting rumor and innuendo.” Moran objected to Collins’s goal of eliminating 83,000 jobs, saying there “ought not be a set number that you’re trying to reach.” And the chairman cautioned that those “who entered public service to care for veterans” should be treated “with gratitude and respect.”
Collins couldn’t manage to adhere to such sentiments, as he repeatedly condemned the “broken” bureaucracy and systems of the agency he runs. Instead of reason, he reacted to the senators with Trumpian rage. He informed Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), the ranking Democrat, that “you have no knowledge of what you just said.” When Moran made a simple request for Collins to pull the microphone closer, the secretary snapped: “So I’m going to have to swallow it, okay?”
But the hapless secretary got tangled in his own fury. “There’s not been 83,000 people targeted for firing,” he raged, mocking this as nothing more than “a nice talking point.”
“It’s your talking point,” Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire) pointed out. “We’re quoting you saying that’s your goal.”
“It is our goal,” Collins shot back.
Not for the first time, I found myself wondering: As Trump and his appointees try to vandalize the U.S. government, could the Republic be saved by their incompetence?
Sadly, that’s about the best we can hope for,
Speaking of ineptitude, trying to distract myself from the pending horror of a Leafs/Oilers* Stanley Cup finals I flipped over to watch some of the Celtics collapse du jour. Their 4Q shooting chart is amazing:
I am not a basketball savant, but 1)that does seem like a few too many low-percentage 3s when protecting a large lead, if less extreme than Game 1, 2)the bigger problem would seem to be being unable to hit shots from anywhere. I know Thibedeau is a great defensive coach but wow.
*As an incompetence footnote, 17 white was given a penalty for “embellishment” on this play. NHL playoff officiating!
When I first saw a trailer for Sinners, I was intrigued by what appeared to be Western Vampires, but I was simultaneously disinterested because the trailer made it look like a horror movie, and a goofy one at that. There were so many cringe jump scares and silly effects that horror movie trailers always tend to use. Now that I have seen the movie, I feel confident saying the trailer did it a disservice.
