Culture Wars - University David Hamilton - bluecoffeeandbooks.com
Book Summary: Culture Wars - University David Hamilton ISBN: 9781481943321 Share the book of your favorite author. See more http://www.bluecoffeeandbooks.com http://www.youtube.com/subscr...
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The last 48 hours of political news -- the Supreme Courts (in)action on gay marriage, plus the slew of midterm debates -- has made this pretty clear: Republicans have largely retreated in the latest battle of the Culture Wars. At least for now. And especially in the blue and purple battleground states. As we wrote on Tuesday, Republicans were mostly silent when the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to consider gay-marriage cases, which effectively legalized same-sex marriage in several more states across the country. And at a debate last night that one of us moderated, Republican Ed Gillespie, whos running for the Senate in purple Virginia, said that while he doesnt personally back gay marriage because of his faith, he accepted the courts ruling. It is the law in Virginia today, he said. Of course I accept the ruling. Gillespie even went on to say that his support in 2004 of a constitutional amendment to enforce that marriage can only exist between a man and a woman was due to being chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time, and didnt reflect his personal views. Similarly, in Colorado last night, GOP Senate candidate Cory Gardner accepted the Supreme Courts decision. I have supported traditional marriage, but I also believe that people must be treated with dignity and respect, he said. And that is why I will abide by the decision of the courts.
On gay marriage, contraception, and personhood
And its not just gay marriage. In Virginia last night, Gillespie stood by his support of offering contraception to women behind the counter like Sudafed. Making the case for tweaking the Obama health care plan, he said: Talk about having faith in the women of Virginia -- I have faith in the women of Virginia, to make those determinations of what is the best plan and policy for them and their medical needs. And in Colorado, Gardner explained why he backed the federal Life at Conception Act but now opposes the state personhood ballot initiatives he once supported. I do not support the Personhood Amendment. Sen. Udall said that a good-faith change of position should be considered a virtue, not a vice.
But this doesnt mean the Culture Wars are over
Of course, none of this means that the Culture Wars are over for good; the parties will continue to clash over abortion. And its worth noting that these examples took places in the blue/purple states of Colorado and Virginia that Obama won in 2012 (though Republicans ALMOST HAVE to win those states to get to 270 electoral votes in the next presidential election). In North Carolina last night, by contrast, Republican Senate candidate Thom Tillis said he would defend the states same-sex marriage ban, and he railed against activist liberal judges who he says legislate from the bench, per MSNBCs Michael LaRosa. But what HAS taken place is Republicans -- for the most part -- have retreated on the culture-war issues that have largely dominated the last two election cycles: gay marriage, contraception, and personhood.
Also at last nights VA SEN debate
Meanwhile, here is our wrap of last nights Virginia Senate debate between Gillespie and incumbent Sen. Mark Warner: Gillespie sought to paint Warner as a partisan Democrat and stalwart Obama ally But Warner countered that Gillespie's former role as a top GOP lobbyist and party leader make him a partisan warrior for the Republican Party. More: During the debate, Warner highlighted his differences from Obama on the Keystone XL pipeline, on foreign policy -- arguing for a more aggressive response than the administration has enacted against ISIS -- and on reducing the deficit. Asked if he believes Majority Leader Harry Reid is the best possible leader for Senate Democrats, Warner replied: I think we could perhaps do better in both parties moving forward. (We wonder what Harry Reid thinks of that answer.) And: For his part, Gillespie suggested that the RNC's backing of a federal same-sex marriage ban during his tenure as chairman wasn't reflective of his personal views, and he said his party went too far in instituting mandatory minimum sentences for crimes.
And at last nights other debates in Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and West Virginia
And here is the wrap from MSNBCs Michael LaRosa on last nights FOUR other Senate debates -- in Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and West Virginia. In what has been called a Super Tuesday of U.S. Senate campaign debates last night, Democratic hopefuls in Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and West Virginia faced a relentless assault from their Republican opponents tying them to President Obama and accusing them of being his rubber stamp. All four debates sounded like re-runs of each other, as GOP candidates marched in lock step using the President's recent remarks, that his policies are on the ballot this year, to discredit Democrats with voters who are unhappy with the Obama Administration. Barack Obama even said this week that his polices are on the ballot, said Georgia Republican David Perdue, a line repeated by his Republican counterparts in Colorado, North Carolina and West Virginia.
You know youre probably not winning when
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GOP in Retreat: Are the Culture Wars Cooling Off?
It's becoming a rout.
The culture wars are drawing to a close and the liberals are winning. The latest ruling (well non-ruling, really) from the U.S. Supreme Court underscores what's happening.
It's still a very conservative court led by a very conservative Chief Justice. And yet even the justices could see the writing on the wall. Same-sex marriage is here to stay.
Chief Justice John Roberts was not going to be on the wrong side of history. He was not going to be the Roger Taney of his age. Taney was Chief Justice of the court that issued the Dred Scott decision, in which he wrote that African Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," and that therefore a fugitive slave could be returned to his owner.
Those were maybe the most disgusting words to come out of any official action of any branch or agency of the federal government. Roberts, who found a way not to overturn Obamacare, was not about to see himself assume a Taney-like infamy in history by upholding same sex marriage bans. He has found a way to escape that trap.
But the bigger picture is even more encouraging. The court only did what the public was demanding. And it was only a few years ago that this would have been unthinkable. It was pretty much only yesterday when no serious mainstream politician found it safe to come out for same-sex marriage. Now it's pretty much required of Democratic candidates, and most Republicans would just rather not talk about it.
And same-sex marriage is only the start. It comes out of a growing liberal majority rooted in demographics and geography. Cities are home to liberals and they are growing. An interesting op-ed in yesterday's New York Times argues that even Texas is becoming a state that is in play for Democratic candidates in part because of a rapidly growing Hispanic population, but also due to its growing cities.
But here's the problem we need to work on. Liberals concentrate themselves while conservatives spread out. That's why the Wisconsin Legislature and Congress remains so far to the right while the public as a whole is moving to the left. Part of it is redistricting, but a lot of it is also attributable to how we spread ourselves out on the physical landscape.
So what may be coming is increasing frustration as a liberal majority in the population as a whole finds itself stymied by entrenched conservatives in legislatures and in Congress. The culture wars may continue with a stubborn resistance holding on to heavily barricaded institutions while the masses gather around them.
The trick will be to ride this out until the next census when another round of redistricting might deliver more fair representation that reflects where the country is really at. Patience, more than ever, is going to be a virtue.
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Citizen Dave: Same-sex marriage and the culture wars
We are in the midst of a seemingly endless number of art world controversies, from the National Portrait Gallery's removal of David Wojnarowicz's video, A Fire in My Belly, and MoCA Los Angeles's whitewashing of a mural by the artist Blu, to the United States House of Representative's Spending Reduction Act of 2011. That bill proposed to end the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities (fortunately the crisis was averted, though both agencies experienced budget cuts of 7.5% each). These days, it seems like art has not been under such incisive fire since the 1980s. At that time, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, and others gave name to an incipient polemical debate that exploded into what we now know as the Culture Wars in the United States.
These instances, however, are just a few among many. After all, not only have artists raised eyebrows and stirred emotions since the days of Manet's Olympia, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and well before, but they also continue to grapple with hot-button topics even without the ire of political figures or institutional administrations. Even Art21 is not immune. In 2008, an effort to include our videos and educational resources in the official curriculum of the Dallas Independent School District was met with resistance by both teachers and parents, given the provocative nature of images by featured artists such as Sally Mann and Kara Walker.
In April 2011, Ai Weiwei was detained by Chinese authorities and held for 81 days before international outcry prompted his release. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987), one of the poster children for the Sensation-era Culture Wars of the 1990s, was smashed in April 2011 by Catholic fundamentalists while on display at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, France. Previous attacks on the painting took place in 1997 and 2007. And two weeks prior to the Serrano incident, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a visitor struck out at Paul Gaugin's Two Tahitian Women (1899) painting with her bare fists, decrying it as "evil."
How could an artist disappear? Or artworks find themselves besieged? Whether understood as blasphemous, outspoken activism, or simply provocation, art clearly does something to people. For better or worse, it affects them, moving them to act on their convictions. Art leads some to inflict violence, commit acts of censorship, withdraw funding, and even arrest artists. But it also encourages others to protest such behavior, insisting on a discursive sphere that protects artists' freedom of expression and the viewing public's ability to come to its own conclusions about the art with which it comes into contact.
This is an issue Art21 has addressed before. In fact, our very first Flash Points topic on the Art21 Blog in 2008 was titled "What's so shocking about contemporary art?" We spent three months exploring the question. But in light of recent events, we think it is important to revisit more of these seminal debates and the images that inflamed them. To this end, we've assembled a survey of texts, artworks, and related Art21 videos to further the discussion. Flash Points will continue the conversation as well, responding to the texts published here back on the Art21 Blog.
We are particularly pleased to share five newly commissioned essays on The Culture Wars, Redux.
In his essay, "The 1913 Armory Show: America's First Art War," Tom McCormack travels back to a controversial exhibition that long preceded Sensation. The 1913 Armory Show, with its legendary exhibition of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), polarized audiences over its instantiation of a new (now historical) avant-garde. But as McCormack argues, what really riled viewers was the question of whether the painting could even be called art at all.
Nettrice Gaskins's essay, "Polyculturalist Visions, New Frameworks of Representation: Multiculturalism and the American Culture Wars," connects the battles of the early Culture Wars to those of multiculturalism in the 1980s. Examining the ongoing crisis of representation in cultural institutions, Gaskins ultimately arrives at what she sees as a "polyculturalist" future for art in which it moves away from dialectical identity politics to a sphere of fluid identities. "In our age of accelerated technology," she writes, "artists can move culture, capital, and ideas between worlds."
Taking a close look at the controversy surrounding Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in "The 'Black Gash of Shame,'" Elizabeth Wolfson considers what it is that makes public memorials such charged sites for viewers and visitors of all stripes. Drawing parallels to the debates regarding recent memorials in our current moment, Wolfson examines the constellation of subject positions battling over a desire for socially useful and representational art.
Heading across the Atlantic to Poland, Russia, and Egypt in her extensive three-part essay, "Art and Morality under Neoliberalism: Reflections on 'Blasphemous' Art from the East," Ania Szremski finds myriad connections between the controversial practices of Eastern European artists in the 1990s and Egyptian artists in the early 2000s. Cataloguing the problematic receptions of their artwork, Szremski locates the crux of the conflict in the powerful conservatism engendered by national economies undergoing deregulation and privatization. Under late capitalism, she opines, the possibility of a truly open discursive space is all too often an illusory one.
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The Culture Wars, Redux | ART21
Egypt #39;s Culture Wars: Politics And Practice - Samia Mehrez - bluecoffeeandbooks.com
Book Summary: Egypt #39;s Culture Wars: Politics And Practice - Samia Mehrez ISBN: 9780415666879 Share the book of your favorite author. See more http://www.blue...
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Egypt's Culture Wars: Politics And Practice - Samia Mehrez - bluecoffeeandbooks.com - Video