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Nancy Pelosi speaking at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention (photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.), said in a televised town hall meeting on December 5 that she thinks the arts will help heal an America profoundly fractured by the divisive political and cultural realities of life in the Trump era. When asked how the Speaker planned on unifying the country during impeachment, Pelosi answered, I myself think thatone of the ways that America will heal is through the arts. I truly believe thats something where we find our common ground. You enjoy music together, you see a play or movie, youlaugh, you cry, youre inspired, you laugh, you cry

But the arts are more divided than ever. Schismatic tribal factions generate and consume art and media thats increasingly characterized by blatant political partisanship, and overt contempt for ideological dissidents.

Two paintings of presidents completed in 2018 perfectly exemplify the opposing camps. The first, a portrait of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, was widely celebrated as a presidential portrait for progressives who, until that point, mostly rejected presidential portraiture as corny establishmentarianism. Its unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery became an artistic gathering as much as a political event, which the right interpreted as a clear declaration of the art worlds majority support for Obama. The painting drew near-unanimous disdain in conservative media which referenced Wileys earlier work: Judith and Holofernes in which a black woman beheads a white woman as a way to condemn Obamas portrait as radically progressive and maybe even racist. For Trumps 2020 reelection campaign, his action committee appropriated the image for satirical merchandise.

The other work by outsider artist Jon McNaughton is a camo-hued campy adaption of George Binghams painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, replaced with Trump and his cabinet entitled Crossing the Swamp. The painting received over 20,000 likes on Twitter and was featured on Fox News, ABC News, and USA Today as an example of trending contemporary conservative art. (I reached out to McNaughton, and his assistant declined to provide an image or more information about the work. She stated the artist didnt want the painting to be used for political purposes. Which is supremely ironic considering the subject matter.)

Old debates about the role of government in the arts are re-emerging, and once more a presidential administration is looking to put politics upstream of culture. Republican officials have been threatening to cut funding for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) for decades in part as a way to censor work the NEA funds, like the famously graphic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serranos Piss Christ. The Trump presidency has perpetuated this legacy by threatening to cut $126 million of NEA funding three years in a row.

This socio-political factionalism isnt exclusive to Washington partisan posturing though. The art world is itself experiencing divisive convulsions between conservative institutional policymakers and their progressive workers. Last year the Marciano Brothers promptly shuttered the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles and fired all of its staff after workers tried to unionize. Similarly, in the events leading up to the resignation of Warren Kanders from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the power players at the institution seemed at ideological odds with staff that produce some of the most progressive exhibitions in the world.

The so-called right has been eagerly constructing a conservative popular culture that counterbalances an arts establishment it sees as dominated by leftists and progressive values (despite evidence to the contrary mentioned above). But the left is also suspicious of the overbearing influence of conservatism in the arts. This impasse of perceptions precludes the possibility of Pelosis prognostication ever coming true.

If you do a quick Google search for articles related to conservative art you get things like The Rise of Conservative Art and Poetry on theepochtimes.com, or Conservatives Need to Start Taking Art Seriously on quillete.com, the first paragraph of which reads:

Conservatives, crack open some champagne and celebrate. A remarkable renewal of traditional painting and sculpture has taken place in the American art scene over the past 10 years. At last, a cultural movement has emerged that builds upon time-honored practices instead of deconstructing them.

Both authors identify an urgent need for conservatives to create an alternative to progressive culture with their own celebrities, writers, and artists, but also to define spaces where the right can share art.

This isnt the first time Americans have gone through culture wars, and perhaps todays iteration is just a continuation of the tumult experienced in the 60s and 80s. Theres always been a traditional ideological rift between urban progressives and rural conservatives in this country, but unlike past struggles, social media and search engine algorithms have intensified insular bubbles and soothing echo chambers.

Increasingly, people from both sides only see content with appealing values that are reflexively organized by convenient left and right-wing polarities. If you couple this with block, ban, unfriend culture, the effect is people are finding fewer opportunities to find common ground through art. As long as the arts continue this trend of inspiring parallel but opposite cultures, art will exacerbate our divisions, not heal them.

President Trumps recent tweet threatening strikes on Iranian cultural sites is a scarily literal expansion of the culture wars. Although Trump walked his statement back in a later press conference saying he would respect international law it seems thats the only thing stopping him. His tweet set an unretractable presidential precedent that arts institutions across the country unanimously condemn. We must, of course, unequivocally oppose virulent partisans from either faction weaponizing art for short-term political advantage, especially in exchange for the destruction of cultural heritage sites millenia old.

As this sort of discordant rhetoric intensifies, we must do more than just find commonality through shared culture, as Speaker Pelosi suggests. We must also recognize and resist self-serving politicians who use art to divide us.

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Nancy Pelosi Says the Arts Will Help Heal America, but They Can't - Hyperallergic

Lets turn our attention from the hypocrites and apparent monarchists in the Capitol, to the peculiar and embarrassing subset of gay Americans who proudly support Trumps reelection. This, despite the fact that Trump and the religious zealots his White House serves have rolled back rights for LGBT people, imperiled their health, and even endangered their lives.

How much hard-won ground has been lost? A report to be released Thursday by The Fenway Institute lays it all out, in distressingly vivid detail.

Among the lowlights:

The administration has rolled back rules protecting LGBT people from discrimination in employment, education, and housing, and proposed rules allowing health care providers to refuse to treat LGBT patients on moral or religious grounds.

And then there are the judicial nominations, a retrograde fanatics dream. According to the Fenway Institute report, almost a third of 2019 nominees to federal courts have expressed anti-LGBT sentiments, some arguing that gays and lesbians should be excluded from nondiscrimination protections. One nominee, Lawrence Van Dyke, was associated with a group that has advocated for the sterilization of transgender people, and for the criminalization of homosexuality here and abroad. Nice.

Trumps defenders point to his plan, announced in his 2019 State of the Union speech, to end the HIV epidemic by 2030. But how much does that mean, when the administration is making it harder for LGBT folks to access health care? When theyve acted to redouble the stigma on LGBT folks who might seek treatment?

Sure, Trumps ambassador to Germany announced a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality in 70 countries, but the administration has been very selective about it, the Fenway report points out, objecting to Chechnyas treatment of gays and lesbians, but remaining silent on similar brutality in, say, Saudi Arabia. And last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established a Commission on Unalienable Rights that seems designed to shrink the definition of human rights in US foreign policy to exclude gays and lesbians.

The administrations policies reflect the beliefs and priorities of small-minded religious conservatives including Vice President Mike Pence who hold massive sway in the White House: In addition to regularly laying hands on the unrepentant sinner in the oval office, they also lay them on the levers of power at every level.

Just this past Sunday, Pence promised members of a church in Memphis that he would stand strong for their values. Moments later, the bishop, in a sermon streamed by the White House, called homosexuality unnatural and demonic.

Who on earth could see all of this intolerance and inhumanity piling up and conclude the Trump administration is friendly to LGBT Americans?

Why, the Log Cabin Republicans, thats who or at least, whats left of them after several leaders resigned in protest after the group endorsed Trump last summer. The gay GOP group, which did not endorse Trump in 2016, explained its decision to do so in the 2020 election via an op-ed in the Washington Post. While acknowledging there is still work to be done, Log Cabin leaders touted Trumps new HIV prevention policy, and the efforts to pressure foreign governments to be more tolerant despite the fact that the administrations policies make a mockery of both initiatives.

Basically, it boiled down to their view that the GOP is no longer openly hateful towards gays and lesbians. They credited Trump with moving past the culture wars that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s.

Say what, now?

Either they are not paying attention, are woefully misinformed, or are misleading, said Sean Cahill, director of health policy research at the Fenway Institute, and a coauthor of the report.

Like others who enable Trump, the Log Cabin Republicans appear to have learned to hear only what they want to hear, and to see no evil. Even when it is staring them in the face.

Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com and on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.

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Hey Log Cabin Republicans, Trump is not your friend - The Boston Globe

Register for the THE World Academic Summit 2020

A leading scholar who has been described as the godfather of deep learning will join presidents of some of the worlds top universities among a prestigious line-up of speakers confirmed for the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit in September.

Geoffrey Hinton, distinguished emeritus professor at the University of Toronto and a researcher at Google Brain, who has led pioneering research on artificial intelligence, will speak at the event, which takes place from 1 to 3September 2020.

Meanwhile, Ronald Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University; Dame Nancy Rothwell, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester; and Michael Spence, vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Sydney will discuss how world-class research universities produce world-class cities.

The summit, which will take place at the University of Toronto, will be on the theme thepower of place. It will explore why place still matters in a globalised world, whether online learning is the answer to spreading educational opportunities and how branch campuses project power.

Michael Ignatieff, president and rector of the Central European University, which relocated to Vienna last year after being forced out of Budapest by the Hungarian government, will deliver a keynote speech on finding a new home, while Stephen Toope, vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, will explore to what extent universities are defined by their location.

Mamokgethi Phakeng, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, will discuss whether digital technology is redefining universities boundaries.

The summit will also include an exclusive reveal of the THE World University Rankings 2021.

Tim Sowula, head of content and engagement for the THE World Summit Series, said the summit would help to tackle the challenges that universities face as a result of their dual role in society.

Universities have to both direct their research on long-term global challenges, attracting and working with the best global talent available, and respond to the immediate needs and concerns of the community on their doorstep, paying attention to the local electoral cycle, the immigration policies of their host government, and the economic concerns of their public funders, he said.

By focusing on the power of place, this summit will bring together university leaders from across the globe to celebrate the impact of universities both near and far, question conventional wisdom about the contribution universities can make to their host communities, reveal what are the most important factors that can empower a research university, and examine what rebalancing the worlds higher education resources might look like now that we have a clearer picture of technological opportunities and the demographic and economic realities that this century will demand of universities.

Phil Baty, THEs chief knowledge officer, said: Now perhaps more than ever before, universities across the world are facing extraordinary political and public scrutiny of their role and value to society in particular with regard to their social and economic impact, including their relationship with the local communities they are part of. The rise of nationalism across the continents, campus culture wars and rows over free speech, populist challenges to the value of entire fields of academic research, and the need for major improvements to social mobility all combine to raise profound questions about how globally focused universities deliver public good in their neighbourhoods and communities, as well as for the world at large.

So the theme of the 2020 THE World Academic Summit, the power of place, could not be more timely or relevant to global higher education, and our host, the University of Toronto, as one of the worlds leading universities firmly rooted in its community, could not be better equipped to tackle these issues head-on.

ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com

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World Academic Summit 2020: speakers announced - Times Higher Education (THE)

In a centuries-long debate about gender and sexuality, 2020 could mark a turning point for abortion rights in the US.

In the coming year, the anti-abortion president, Donald Trump, faces re-election, and a conservative supreme court will take up its first abortion case, with potentially far-reaching consequences for a womans right to choose in America.

Supporters and activists on both sides of the divide pro-choice and anti-abortion are braced for a titanic fight that could change the face of abortion access in the States.

I dont think theres any doubt that the big issue this year is going to be the election in November, said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, an anti-abortion organization.

For activists like herself, the worst fear would be absolutely everything goes against us in the election, and we have a pro-abortion president and Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in charge of the House and the Senate, said Tobias. They could do some serious, long-lasting damage, but I really, really, really do not believe that is going to happen.

Meanwhile David Cohen, a pro-choice Drexel University law professor and co-author of Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America, described the coming election as an all-consuming news item this year. He said: We have two parties with starkly different views on abortion, so that is going to be a major issue in the presidential campaign.

This week marks the 47th anniversary of the landmark US supreme court case Roe v Wade, which legalized abortion in the US and has been a target for conservatives since the religious right adopted abortion as a cause in the late 1970s.

Hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion protesters will also gather in Washington DC on 24 January for the March for Life, the nations largest anti-abortion protest. And the evidence of recent years shows they are successfully rolling back access to abortion across the US.

Last year saw an unprecedented wave of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in decades, many blatantly unconstitutional. In 2019, so-called heartbeat bills, which ban abortion at six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant, became law in Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio and Mississippi. Alabama banned abortion outright.

In one case, an extreme bill proposed in Ohio would have charged doctors with abortion murder if they did not attempt to re-implant an ectopic pregnancy. There is no such procedure in medical science, and ectopic pregnancies that form in the fallopian tubes are never viable. They do, however, threaten womens lives.

None of these laws are in effect, as they directly contravene law set out in Roe v Wade. This is by design. Emboldened by Trump and funded by conservative Republican mega-donors, abortion opponents hope they can push the right-leaning supreme court to take up a case and overturn Roe, even though most of the public agrees abortion should remain legal.

The main takeaway is that the states will continue to be important players on abortion laws and regulation,said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

There will be an intense focus on the supreme court this spring, as it hears oral arguments in June Medical Services LLC v Gee. The case from Louisiana focuses on whether doctors should be required to obtain the right to admit patients to local hospitals and will have national implications.

The right to admit patients to hospitals, called admitting privileges, is meant to sound like it improves womens health. In fact, hospitals are already required to take all cases which come through the emergency department. Instead, admitting privileges often serve as an insurmountable hurdle for doctors who practice independently at abortion clinics, in effect closing their practices.

If it is ruled constitutional, the regulation could shut down two of Louisianas three abortion clinics, despite providing no measurable health benefits for women. Legal scholars were shocked the countrys highest court was even hearing the case. It ruled on an identical law from Texas in 2016, finding the measures unconstitutional and an undue burden to women seeking abortions.

The breadth of the outcomes is really wide, said Cohen. The case could result in everything from you can regulate a little more to you can outlaw abortion. So theres a lot we dont know about whats coming in the future.

But if the case in the supreme court could decide the legal fate of abortion rights, a womans ability to exercise her right is already in dire straits. Between 2011 and 2017, 4% of abortion clinics closed across the US. This modest change obscures a broader truth clinics are shuttering in large numbers in the south and midwest and opening on the coasts, leading to expensive logistical nightmares for many women.

Abortion is now central to Americas culture wars, one of a number of divisive issues shaped by a hyper-partisan political divide. Trump has played a key role in widening the gulf and attempting to exploit it for electoral gain.

Virtually every top Democrat also now supports late-term abortion, ripping babies straight from the mothers womb right up until the moment of birth, Trump told a booing audience at a recent rally in Toledo, Ohio. That statement is false but emblematic.

Abortion is a repeat topic as Trump campaigns for re-election at rallies, where his rhetoric often goes beyond what even the anti-abortion movement could have hoped for from past Republican candidates.

Tobias and other anti-abortion activists have worked diligently to spread news of Trumps amazing work to the broader electorate. She mentioned a list of his administrations achievements that the movement holds in esteem, including remaking the federal bench with ideological judges and preventing foreign aid from being used to advise women on abortions.

Im expecting more pro-life laws to be passed, and there will of course be more challenges in the court, but were moving forward, said Tobias.

That was not always the case. The Christian right only took up the mantle of abortion after Roe was decided and after the supreme court ruled against the segregationist policies of private Christian schools, many of which were founded to exclude African American students.

Southern Baptists even supported abortion rights at their annual conference until 1976. Until Roe, abortion was seen mostly as an issue for the Catholic church, and it was predominantly Democratic states that opposed access to abortion and contraceptives.

Now, most Americans nearly 80%, according to Gallup polling support legal abortion in at least some circumstances. However, abortion has historically been a motivating issue for conservative voters, less so for liberals. That has led to a virulent anti-abortion right, while the left has only begun to enshrine abortion rights in state law.

Loretta Ross is a reproductive justice activist and expert who has worked not just for abortion rights but against pregnancy discrimination and maternal mortality. We just have to keep on fighting the same way black people have to keep on fighting for voting rights for 400 years, she said.

Some older feminists in particular fear abortion rights, which younger women have grown up with, have been taken for granted since Roe v Wade. Doctors such as Mary Jane Minkin, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale School of Medicine, worry about a return to illegal and deadly procedures.

Unfortunately, the young women today dont realize how bad it was, said Minkin. When she was attending Brown University in 1968, I knew of a young woman a couple years before me, she got pregnant during freshman week.

She was subsequently infertile had an illegal abortion done, and couldnt get pregnant thereafter, said Minkin. There were, of course, even worse outcomes. One of Minkins mothers friends had a sister, a flight attendant, who died from an illegal abortion.

There were very dark times with people dying having septic abortions and people being infertile for the rest of their lives, said Minkin. We dont want to go back to that. We really dont want to go back to that.

Read more:
Will 2020 be the year abortion is banned in the US? - The Guardian

When I look back at the decade, I think of one event that polarized the country across extreme political lines, bringing massive cultural implications and a profound sense of loss for those who ended up on the wrong side: the 2016 all-women reboot of the classic 80s comedy Ghostbusters. Ostensibly a modern vision of a beloved intellectual property (which is about the movie industrys only idea these days), the reboot, directed by Paul Feig and starring Kristin Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Leslie Jones was instead pilloried by adult virgins who decried the films focus on women, opposed to a rough n tumble group of male slobs just trying to have a good time without making any statements about feminism, or white supremacy, or abortion, or whatever.

Adding to the monumental nature of this, all the intransigent pushback happened before the movie even came out. Its trailer, released eight months before the Donald Trump was elected, collected 1.5 million downvotes and deeply telling YouTube comments such as Garbage movie that should not exist my wife, mother, sister, and daughter (three of which have not seen the originals) and Is this movie all about women and feminism only ? A clash might have easily emerged the put-upon progressive cultural property fighting against the regressive whims of a fascist-adjacent fanbase, as happened with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Captain Marvel, and several other movies for children except for one inconvenient fact: Ghostbusters wasnt actually very good, adhering to the beats of the original too faithfully while somehow forgetting to include any jokes. By the time it was released, the momentum was gone; it was enough of a financial bomb to scuttle plans for a sequel.

However, the sustained anger proved one thing: There was organic interest in seeing a Ghostbusters reboot done right. Earlier in 2019, it was announced that Jason Reitman would be directing and co-writing a new film in the franchise, which would elide the fact that the 2016 movie ever happened. From the beginning, Reitman was clear about his desire to avoid futzing with the formula. This is gonna be a love letter to Ghostbusters... I want to make a movie for my fellow Ghostbusters fans, he said in a February podcast.

On the surface, Reitman might seem like an unconventional choice: Hes an alternately sentimental (Juno) and bracingly cynical (Young Adult, Thank You for Smoking, Tully) filmmaker whose best work skilfully demonstrates how we can never return to our past, and how the optimism of the young quickly curdles into adult bitterness, and thus fuck it. But most importantly, he is the son of original Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, and thus the right choice to steward an appropriately nostalgic movie, at least for all the angry adult babies. His movie is set up as a sequel to the 1984 original, with the grandchildren of original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, who died in 2014) picking up his legacy to bust a new outcrop of ghosts. Original cast members, including Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Sigourney Weaver will also join, reprising their roles.

The emotional antecedents of the first trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which was released Monday morning, arent from the first Ghostbusters, but one of its spiritual sequels: Stranger Things, the Netflix series that packaged cultural yearning for 80s into original content about what it was like to live in them. This is partly because the new movie repurposes footage, costuming, and set design from the original Ghostbusters; its also because floppy-haired Stranger Things actor Finn Wolfhard is one of the new movies child leads. But above all, the trailer endeavors to create reverence for a very irreverent film, in which Dan Aykroyd gets his dick sucked by a ghost, among countless other indelible gags. Paul Rudd plays Wolfhards teacher, whose role in the trailer is literally to tell us about how cool the Ghostbusters were. The tone might seem necessarily pretentious and blowhardy that is, unless, you wanted to appease one of the people irate about how unfaithful the 2016 reboot appeared to be.

The new Ghostbusters cant pay homage to the original in a vacuum; thanks to the blowback against the 2016 reboot, all its creative choices seem like explicit political decisions. Sick of lady Ghostbusters? Well, heres two white guys in lead roles. Sick of new stuff? Well, heres a bunch of the old. Declaring that your movie will be a love letter, as Reitman did, suggests that the previous movie was made with no heart or respect. Saying that you intend to hand the movie to the fans, as Reitman also has, is pandering.

Nonetheless, this is just how a lot of shit works these days. As weve seen with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Captain Marvel, and several other movies for the little humans in your life, a greater number of our political battles are fought online by cultural proxy. The clash of forward-thinking representative liberalism against retrograde, revanchist conservatism doesnt just happen at the polls, but at the box office, the Grammys, Comic Con, and high school newspapers. If this Ghostbusters fails financially, its not difficult to imagine the industry tugging the franchise back into the leftist future (perhaps a reboot thats half men, half women, and subtly pro-ghost), and if that movie fails then wed go back into the rightward past (all men, all adults, split between Biden and Trump, and explicitly pro-ghost genocide), and back and forth and back and forth until one side finally makes an un-critiqueable amount of money.

It feels metaphorically beneath us youre telling me I need to support or boycott fuckin Ghostbusters in order to declare myself politically? and yet unavoidably prevalent in modern culture. Back in 2016, even Trump weighed in on the ideological battle (Theyre making Ghostbusters with only women whats going on!?), during the campaign hed eventually win. I know where I stand, but I want to be clear: I wont be seeing the new Ghostbusters because it looks stupid, not politically stupid, just stupid-stupid. Its a franchise in which Dan Aykroyd got his dick sucked by a poltergeist. Its not that serious, and it doesnt need to be.

See the rest here:
'Ghostbusters' is the future of the culture wars - The Outline