Dear Whitney:


I am a parent of a student in Ms. F.'s third grade class, and I accompanied the class on its visit to the Edward Hopper exhibition today. I want to thank the museum for accommodating us and for giving the students the opportunity to see the work firsthand and in an uncrowded setting.

Edward Hopper, Barber Shop (1931)

I know that the Whitney has always placed great import on arts education and for that I am also grateful. Because I know the high value you place on education, I am moved to write to implore you to reevaluate some of your approaches. Today's guide was a sweet person who clearly valued her charges but also did them a bit of a disservice in her talk. 

On the first painting they looked at, my son mentioned that the bridge in it was the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the Queensborough Bridge. Rather than correct him, the guide praised him. This set the the tone for the talk. Her theme was that Hopper was intentionally ambiguous in his paintings to leave interpretation open to the viewer''s imagination. While mystery and ambiguity no doubt play a large part in Hopper's work, there are certain clues in his paintings that are incontrovertible. Allowing kids to miss those clues grossly undersells the work and underestimates the students.

Since my days as art critic, I have been teaching a good deal of art and English literature. I find that many students seem to deplore both. I believe that a lot of this loathing stems from students being taught that any interpretation is valid. Instead, it would be far more beneficial if students were taught that artists and writers often make choices for very specific reasons and that those choices suggest meanings that could take students beyond their own subjectivity [even eight year olds want to learn something more than the contours of their own minds].

After many years, the self esteem movement at large has taken a few steps back. It is time for it to do so in arts education as well. It is all right for children to lose occasionally and it's also all right for them to be told that the Queensborough Bridge is not the Brooklyn Bridge or that a painting called Barber Shop is not set in a science lab. Instead of leading the students to see that masterpiece as a character study of a manicurist in repose, a minor character idle in a busy barbershop elevated to heroic stature by her central placement in a shaft of brilliant light, our guide let the students go on about her being a painter, someone waiting for a haircut, etc...

Ugh.

Thanks for your time and efforts.

Atomic-holes

Flint & Frum -- Complicit A-Holes

Lobbyists, pundits and  think-tank shills routinely escape taking responsibility or paying the price for either being obscenely wrong or for pushing for causes they know to be obscenely wrong [“Free markets will regulate themselves!” “Once we invade Iraq, democracy will flourish!”].  It is galling that these people are allowed to spew their toxic propaganda with impunity especially when it is hard to believe that they are not aware of the criminal negligence inherent in their words. On the heels of the snowballing nuclear disaster in Japan, the atomic lobby has released a  rapid response team into the media and the halls of Congress with a fervor usually reserved for fighting actual nuclear meltdowns. These creatures however, are not fighting to save lives, but to save $360 billion in Federal loan guarantees.

Yesterday,  I absorbed a fair amount of nuclear poisoning from both tv and the radio. CNN covered a day in the life of Alex Flint, a lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute, as he ran around Washington putting out anti-nuclear fires. He held a closed information meeting which 150 members of Congress attended and spent the rest of the morning sitting directly behind Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu as he testified before Congress. One of the talking head type A-holes, David Frum, speaking on Marketplace, even used the conceit that he just bought stock in uranium shares on the grounds that, “If the danger from this shock is contained, nuclear will have passed its most extreme test.”

Frum’s commentary is not just wrongheaded but also criminal. Forget the growing fear  that nuclear will NOT pass this test, and the horrible dread we are all beginning to feel that Japan will, literally, be living with the fallout from this catastrophe for decades. Even if all radioactive leakage were to stop this instant, there is no way to know that this will be nuclear’s  “most  extreme test.” Of course that is the biggest problem with nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy should not be allowed to continue as it is currently constituted precisely because the consequences of an accident at a nuclear power plant are so dire and because the world is fraught with so many “unknown unknowns.” What if instead of targeting the World Trade Center, the 9/11 hijackers had aimed their jets 70 miles north at the Indian Point Nuclear facility? Or what if, oh I dunno’, there’s an earthquake in California [that’s kind of a known known]? Or what if....well, you get the idea.

Later in his chat, Frum goes on to say that  “the principal alternative to nuclear power is coal, and that the hazards of coal are less spectacular than the hazards of nuclear, in just the same way that the hazards of driving are less spectacular than the hazards of flying.” When Frum, a seemingly intelligent man [he used to write economic speeches for George W. Bush] starts tossing around such specious syllogisms, I begin to speculate that perhaps he bought those uranium shares with money from the uranium industry and notions of true criminality dance through my head.

Freedom of speech is a hallowed and inalienable right, but you still can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater or, in this case, “No Fire!” in a nuclear meltdown.