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High art becomes body art as visitors to Amsterdam’s Rembrandt House Museum get inked

By in Native

High art becomes body art as visitors to Amsterdam’s Rembrandt House Museum get inked


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Victoria Hospital looking for Indigenous artists to decorate new Children’s Hospital rooms

By in Native

Victoria Hospital looking for Indigenous artists to decorate new Children’s Hospital rooms

Children’s Hospital has put out a call for First Nations, Inuit and Métis artists to submit their work and ideas to decorate new rooms being built for Indigenous patients.

“Wellness is about the whole child and we really want to create spaces that are familiar to Indigenous people,” said Nicole Yawney, the Youth Indigenous Wellness Consultant for Children’s Hospital at Victoria Hospital.

The goal is to design and shape the new rooms to be more welcoming to Indigenous patients through art, especially since the Children’s Hospital already offers specialized care to many Indigenous children from across the country — including those from remote northern communities, she said. 

“So many folks are just transplanted and they experience culture shock,” said Yawney. It can also be difficult for family members who are trying to process whatever illness their children are experiencing.

nicole yawney
Nicole Yawney is the Youth Indigenous Wellness Consultant for the LHSC. (Submitted by the LHSC)

‘Where are we in our spaces?’

One of the barriers that impacts Indigenous children is the lack of support for cultural healing processes because of how the hospital is currently built, according to Yawney.

“If kids can’t leave their rooms, if they’re hooked up to machines and they want specific ceremonies and teachings by their elders and knowledge keepers, we need to have these spaces created for them,” said Yawney.

Hospitals aren’t always welcoming to Indigenous people and displaying the artwork will be empowering for kids and families who need to use and stay in those spaces, she said.

“I’ve had some kids who are just being really on guard and as soon as they hear I’m Indigenous, they’re like ‘Oh, you’re Native!’ and immediately their guards are let down and I’m able to kind of be that bridge.”

“It really does make a difference to see a space that kids can identify with and I’ve heard that time and time again. It’s like ‘Where are we in our spaces?’ This area is unique and specific to the local First Nations,” said Yawney, who added she is hoping to see art submitted from many Indigenous traditions from all over Canada.

“We’re really wanting to create these spaces that tell the story from each population.”

Proposals can be sent to nicole.yawney@lhsc.on.ca with the subject line being “Attention: Youth Indigenous Wellness Program.” The deadline for artists is July 15.

Josiah Moktar is a photographer who is all about “playful and elegiac” portraiture

By in Photography

Josiah Moktar is a photographer who is all about “playful and elegiac” portraiture

London-based photographer Josiah Moktar brings a gentle energy to everything they capture with their lens. “I don’t see style as separate from content but as a way to manipulate or arouse feelings in the viewer,” Josiah tells us. That isn’t to say Josiah’s work is not beautifully stylish (it is), but there is something emotionally stirring in each photo that prioritises its subject over strict adherence to form or composition. “Research and interview techniques are at the heart of my process,” Josiah adds. “I try to understand the history of the person I’m making a portrait of, or the history and context of the ideas or emotions I’m trying to communicate.”

As such, a lot of Josiah’s work feels documentarian, like a visual diary of sorts. Some photos of theirs may be cleverly staged or shot-listed, yet it never differs from that personal and somewhat candid style we so love about Josiah’s eye. Subjects covered by Josiah often include the dialogue, history and solidarity between LGBTQIA+ communities. “I‘m starting to see a lot of my work as more generally about feelings of belonging and displacement,” Josiah adds. They’re all, in one way or another, “playful and elegiac” photos. “Lived experience is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, and I’m just trying to make sense of my life.”

Most excitingly, we can expect to see Josiah’s work in Oestrogeneration‘s first print issue out on the 2 June and in the Camp Trans group show and fundraiser from the 17 to 18 of June at Ugly Duck in London.

How Denver Native Troy Walker Went From Law School to Standup to Jimmy Kimmel

By in Native

How Denver Native Troy Walker Went From Law School to Standup to Jimmy Kimmel

More than 11,000 screenwriters have been on the picket line since May 2, causing production to stop on sets all over Hollywood and the nation. Some of the first casualties of the writers’ strike were live, late-night programming, such as Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night With Seth Meyers and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.

While Jimmy Kimmel’s nightly monologue and witty interviews with famous guests are no longer available live, the Denver area will get to see the folks behind the show’s humor when several members of the writing staff come to Comedy Works South in Greenwood Village. Jesse Joyce, Devin Fields and Troy Walker will be there for live performances from Thursday, June 22, through Sunday, June 25.

Walker is a Denver native who began his standup career in the city and also holds a law degree from the University of Denver’s Sturm College. We caught up with the comedian about his professional path, how his time in Denver affected his style, and his favorite jokes he created for Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

Troy Walker has been doing standup since college.  
Courtesy of Matt Misisco” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge image

Troy Walker has been doing standup since college.

Courtesy of Matt Misisco

Westword: How did you make the switch from practicing law to comedy?

Troy Walker: Actually, it was kind of the reverse. I started doing standup when I was going to [Metropolitan State University of Denver] as an undergrad and just doing open-mics. I kept doing it while I was getting a political science degree, which is one of those degrees where you are sort of like, “What do I even do with this?” But I took a bunch of legal classes at Metro as part of that degree, and I always really liked them. I had professors tell me I should consider law school. I didn’t really know what to do with this degree, and I also figured it’ll be easier to keep doing standup in school than out of it. I decided to take the LSAT, and I got a decent score, so I applied to CU Boulder, the University of Denver and the University of Arkansas, because I had a cousin who was going to undergrad down there. Even if I knew I didn’t want to live in Arkansas, I felt like I should keep my options open. I got into all of them, but DU gave me a scholarship. That was my first choice, because I got to stay in Denver and focus on law school while trying to do shows and stuff at night to continue to pursue comedy.

Where does your love of comedy come from, and what are some of your inspirations?

I like to think that I have a really broad comedic sensibility. I probably first started with cartoons, like everybody else. I watched so much TV as a kid, like the Nickelodeon stuff, and then when it would flip over to Nick at Nite, I was watching Bewitched, the original Get Smart, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Golden Girls and The Cosby Show — obviously pre-nightmarish stuff, or at least before we all knew. I used to watch Letterman with my dad, and I really liked the Top Ten List as a kid. And I would watch hours of The Simpsons. … My voice comes from all these different things that I enjoyed as a child, so when I started watching standup, I was already comedic-minded. I remember watching the original Def Comedy Jam when I was young, and I would just watch any special I could. I remember when Comedy Central came out and they were doing all that premium stuff, and that was a game-changer. My influences as a kid came from Jerry Seinfeld, Mitch Hedberg, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, George Carlin, Damon Wayans, Martin Lawrence and all these different people. I love Eddie Izzard. Dress to Kill is kind of slept on, but I think it’s one of the greatest specials ever. John Leguizamo had those one-man shows on HBO, like Freak, that were influential. I also just adore Living in Color. I was just soaking up all this different stuff, and when I would run out of stuff, I would go search out even older stuff and find old Bob Newhart records, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family and just all these things. I was just steeping myself in comedy — not intentionally, necessarily, but because I enjoyed it.

Troy Walker on stage at Comedy Works.  
Courtesy of Kendall Chapman” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge image

Troy Walker on stage at Comedy Works.

Courtesy of Kendall Chapman

How has your comedic voice evolved as you’ve done more standup and written for larger projects?

The more standup and comedy you absorb, the more you realize there’s a sort of music to it. It’s like you have your own ways of doing things and your own voice, but you learn how to write the music from observing all these different comedic troupes in action. For instance, the rule of three in comedy is something you end up picking up through osmosis from all of these different sources because you’re always seeing comedians do things in sequences of threes. You’re always seeing misdirects — the ways you hide certain information in storytelling until the perfect moment — and all these little technical things came from observing others perform and studying it. And then, once you start doing it yourself, you’re figuring out how to do your own version of these universal comedic principles. What you discuss in your standup set gets to be pretty unique to you. You’re basically taking your worldview and what you think is funny and trying to figure out how to make it funny for people from disparate backgrounds.

Did your upbringing in Denver influence your comedic style?

Denver is one of the best places to start doing standup. I honestly believe that because there’s a ton of stage time, and nothing helps you get better more than just being on stage all the time. Denver is in this unique situation where you’ve got all these different elements in one place. It’s right in the middle of the country in a state that’s a rectangle, but it looks like a square, and there’s not much around it. You’re kind of isolated, and I think that’s helpful, especially because you’re going to stumble and try out a bunch of things that aren’t really you, but they’re all things that help you figure out your voice. Denver also has all kinds of audiences: Comedy Works Downtown is the yuppie crowd; Comedy Works South is a little bit older and more family-oriented; the Denver Improv has a little more Black and Hispanic audiences; and then you’ve got the mountain shows with rural audiences out in Sterling, Fort Morgan and the eastern plains. At the end of the day, a lot of what standup is to me is being able to look at a room full of bikers and be like, “I’ll be fine. I’ve got material for this.” I think that it helps what I do now, because Jimmy Kimmel’s show is for a national audience, and being able to write stuff that works for everyone was essential. … For the first six years I was doing this, I never thought I’d turn it into some kind of real career. Like, if you had told me at 21, when I started, that I’d be living in Los Angeles, it would have blown me away.

Troy Walker poses with Brett Saxon, Guillermo Rodriguez, Todd Jean Pierre and Steve Garrett, his Kimmel “comedy family,” at the 2022 Academy Awards.  
Courtesy of Brett Saxon” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge image

Troy Walker poses with Brett Saxon, Guillermo Rodriguez, Todd Jean Pierre and Steve Garrett, his Kimmel “comedy family,” at the 2022 Academy Awards.

Courtesy of Brett Saxon

How did you end up securing your current gig as a staff writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live!?

After I went to Montreal’s New Faces in August 2014, my agents told me to move to L.A. So in January 2015, I moved out for the pilot season. I hit the city and was auditioning pretty much right away. I did commercials and classes, and I was just trying to meet people. Every once in a while, people get really lucky and instantly take off as soon as they get to town. For me, it was a lot of ups and downs. Times were hard for six years or so; I just couldn’t seem to figure out how to make stuff catch fire for me. … My first three years, I didn’t really have a day job, and I was just kind of piecing it together from a variety of different sources, and then I couldn’t really do that anymore. I had to go back to having a day job, and I was working at a bank, which is what I was doing in Denver before I left, and that was a hard transition. I don’t come from money or any kind of thing like that. My mom is a principal; she helps me as much as she can, but I had to work.

One of the things that helped convince me to stay in L.A. was advice I got from my agent, who said, “If you feel like you need to go back, that’s okay. We’ll figure that out, but I think you should bet on yourself.” And she was right. The pandemic hit while I was working at this bank. I was lucky to be working at the bank because we were essential, so I was employed during the whole pandemic. As the pandemic started to let up, they started to send out writing packets again. One of my friends, Bryan Cook, who’s another writer at the show, sends me a text one day while I’m at the bank and he’s like, “Oh, are you writing the Kimmel packet?” I didn’t even know there was a Kimmel packet, but he told me more about it, and I submitted my clips that week. I never thought I was going to get it. And then the next week, they asked for my credits, and I sent those. Then they asked for my references, and I sent those. I started hearing from the references that they had contacted them. Finally, they asked me to do an interview, and the next thing I knew, I received a call from the Kimmel team with some of the best news of my life.

What has your experience been like writing for Jimmy Kimmel Live!?

Working at Jimmy Kimmel Live! is easily, without question, one of the absolute best things that has ever happened. I love it. I love everyone there. It’s like one of those things you hear about that makes you feel kind of crazy. My job doesn’t feel like work; it kind of feels like every day I’m going to hang out with my friends. We’re a pretty tight-knit little comedy family.

Troy Walker stands in costume as the Kwanzaroo in between Joe Tracy, Gary Greenberg as the Chanucorn and Jimmy Kimmel for a sketch on Jimmy Kimmel Live!  
Courtesy of Danny Ricker” class=”uk-display-block uk-position-relative uk-visible-toggle”> click to enlarge a sketch on jimmy kimmel live

Troy Walker stands in costume as the Kwanzaroo in between Joe Tracy, Gary Greenberg as the Chanucorn and Jimmy Kimmel for a sketch on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Courtesy of Danny Ricker

What is your favorite joke you’ve written for the show?

Individual jokes are hard for me to say because you write so many that it’s kind of like sending them off and letting them go, you know? I think. My favorite bit that I got to co-write and be a part of was the Kwanzaroo. We do this bit every year called the Chanucorn, which one of the head writers, Gary Greenberg, created a long time ago. It’s basically this mystical Hanukkah unicorn, and then the gag is basically that he interrupts Jimmy in the monologue at some point during Hanukkah every year and Jimmy’s like, ‘The Chanucorn is not real; Gary made up this dumb thing.’ For my first Hanukkah in 2021, I pitched the idea of the Kwanzaroo interrupting the Chanucorn’s yearly appeal to Jimmy with another, totally real holiday character based around Kwanzaa. Gary and I worked together on that, and I had a lot of fun performing in that one. … The coolest thing, among many, that I’ve gotten to be a part of since I started working at the show was, of course, getting to write for the Oscars. I’ve been a movie fan my entire life, so getting to be a small part of Hollywood’s biggest night is, of course, an incredibly surreal, once-in-a-lifetime experience that I only got to have because I’m lucky enough to work at Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

What can audiences expect from the show that you and your fellow Jimmy Kimmel Live! writers will be performing at Comedy Works South?

There are a few standups on the show who are writers on the show: me, Jesse Joyce, Devin Fields, Rory Albanese and my friend Bryan Cook, whom I mentioned earlier. Before I got there, they were talking about doing this standup show together at Jimmy’s Comedy Club in Vegas. Obviously, those plans were derailed by the pandemic, but when I got there, the staff started loosely talking about doing it again. We did a test run of it at a local L.A. show, and we had such a good time that we started thinking about it again. I thought, “Well, maybe I should ask Wende [Curtis] at Comedy Works about dates.” Wende is the awesome owner of Comedy Works, and she’s always up for some kind of new idea. We set up some dates; Bryan and Rory unfortunately couldn’t do it with us this time, but me, Devin and Jesse will be at Comedy Works trying to give people a great show. I wish I could tell you it was a little deeper than that, but we have a good crew of funny, experienced guys, and I honestly think our show’s tremendous, so I hope people come out ready to laugh.

Writers of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, June 22-25, Comedy Works South, 5345 Landmark Place, Greenwood Village. Find tickets ($16 for Thursday, June 22, $24 for all other dates), times and more information at comedyworks.com.

How the Many Dilemmas of Hannah Gadsby’s Anti-Picasso Show Feed Our Contemporary Cultural Doom Loop

By in Art World News

How the Many Dilemmas of Hannah Gadsby’s Anti-Picasso Show Feed Our Contemporary Cultural Doom Loop

To read Part 1 of “It’s Hannah-matic,” click here.

Art museums, incidentally, do have a problem with over-romanticizing artists, and not just Pablo Picasso.

“This artist is a creative hero” is an easy entry point for modern audiences, particularly when you are dealing with experimental art that might require a lot of context to get into. In reviewing a show, I often find myself trying to undo some degree of myth-making, as museums sculpt an artist’s biography to fit the presumed identifications of the art audience (I’m thinking, for example, of how the recent Alice Neel show treats her Communist politics).

Picasso died in ’73, just as museums were taking their turn towards blockbuster-ization. Certainly the success of Picasso’s media legend inspired the way modern art came to be marketed and presented to a mass public. Indeed, the Big-Name Artist Blockbuster era was the context for Rosalind Krauss’s essay from 1981, “In the Name of Picasso,” arguing that the obsession with the “Autobiographical Picasso” flattened our ability to see the artworks as artworks.

But that reference itself shows that there is a long critical history of viewing biographical readings of Picasso’s paintings as kitschy—which is, among other reasons, why many observers view Hannah Gadsby’s singular focus on Picasso’s biography as obtuse.

Personally, I am not so much of a formalist. Historical background does matter. It also matters if, in selling us an artist, a museum creates a distortion of the past. But saying that biography matters is different than saying that biography is all that matters. It seems to me that the Gadsby way of thinking simply flips the museum’s “good artist = good art” default marketing pitch on its head.

And this logic—simplifying the art, the life, and the relationship between the two to make a point—leaves us with all kinds of dilemmas in “It’s Pablo-matic.”

Pablo Picasso, The Crying Woman (1937) in

Etchings by Pablo Picasso in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

To make an exhibition, however, the Brooklyn Museum has to show actual artworks, so it needs a more concrete argument about stakes when it comes to viewing actual art. “It’s Pablo-matic” throws any and every anti-Picasso talking point into the mix, including some brief remarks on Picasso and cultural appropriation.

But mainly, the show homes in on how Picasso’s real-life relationships with women matter particularly for judging his art because he so often depicted women and sex.

The specific Picasso images brought in to serve the prosecution are mainly ones depicting nudes or sexual encounters, usually in classical or mythologizing settings, with the argument being that they encode Picasso’s demeaning ideology about women.

Pablo Picasso, Model and Sculptor Drinking with Minotaur (1933)

Pablo Picasso, Model and Sculptor Drinking with Minotaur (1933) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

Hence, Gadsby’s one-sentence commentary on Picasso’s use of the imagery of sleeping female figures: “It is terrifying how benign this subject is considering how unsafe it would be to be an unconscious woman around someone like Picasso.” Or this, made about an etching showing a sculptor shaping a female figure, “No head. No arms. The sculptor shapes only what is necessary… for him.”

The theory that classical nudes in art have serviced the “male gaze” is not a new one. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing made it—on TV—more than a half-century ago. In fact, the position is so old that there is a long tradition of critics trying to nuance or complicate it (as Berger himself did).

Most importantly, feminist artists have had complex relationships—sometimes critical, sometimes ambivalent, sometimes recuperative—with images of female sexuality produced for the “male gaze.” One of the more provocative curatorial aspects of “It’s Pablo-matic” is how the curators lean in to showing graphically sexual work made by women, directly recalling these debates.

But it’s at exactly this point where the Brooklyn Museum’s too-deferential relationship to its celebrity guest curator really garbles its message.

Porn and Picasso

The Picasso works shown here may not be all that memorable. But what visitors will likely remember from “It’s Pablo-matic” is Betty Tompkins’s big 1972 acrylic showing, in precisely painted black and white, a graphic close-up of (heterosexual) anal penetration, appropriated from a porn mag. “The world was not ready for Tompkins’s utter lack of self-consciousness or modesty,” the wall text notes, adding that French authorities deemed her “Fuck Paintings” obscene in the ‘70s.

Sure—but it seems important to note that other feminists criticized Tompkins as well, not just “the world.” After all, just one room over, the show features a beautiful canvas depicting two lounging nude figures by Joan Semmel. As Alison Gingeras has noted, “Semmel objected to Tompkins’s appropriation of these images on the grounds that they form an exploitative, misogynist industry, and could not be redeemed, even through their cooption by a woman artist.”

Betty Tompkins, Fuck Paitning #6 (1973)

A gallery of “It’s Pablo-matic” with Betty Tompkins, Fuck Painting #6 (1973) at center. Photo by Ben Davis.

To this show’s credit, allusions to the internal battles among feminist artists in the ’70s and ’80s over how they approached the “male gaze” are sprinkled elsewhere and throughout, with some sense that these bitter fights damaged careers and undermined what should have been solidarities.

A text accompanying Marlyn Minter’s Big Girls (1986) highlights how the artist “found herself at odds with heated opinions about pornography among feminist artists,” even though the fact has little to do with actual content of the featured painting. Minter had to close a show of porn-inspired paintings in 1992 early, demoralized by the fierce condemnation she received. (In an oral history with the Smithsonian, she recalls being reduced to tears by a friend, Deborah Kass—the artist behind the Brooklyn Museum’s beloved OY/YO sculpture—who chastised her: “I hate this work. You can’t show this. It’s an affront to feminism.”)

Carolee Schneemann, Infinity Kisses II (1990-98)

Carolee Schneemann, Infinity Kisses II (1990-98) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

The show’s texts nod to these controversies so often that it feels meaningful, but they do not clearly spell out why they are relevant in a show that takes Nanette as its jumping-off point. There’s a large, all-caps quote by Minter, randomly placed over a case with an ancient Aphrodite statue (itself a semi-random inclusion), that reads: “No one’s fantasies are politically correct.”

But why the reference to the perils of political correctness? The quote just hangs there, a loose thought.

Unidentified Greco-Egyptian artist, Female face and neck, and Unidentified Greek artist, Torso of Aphrodite

Unidentified Greco-Egyptian artist, Female face and neck (Ptolemaic Period-early Roman period) and Unidentified Greek artist, Torso of Aphrodite (1st century B.C.E.-1st Century C.E.) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

It’s convenient today to recall the ‘80s and ‘90s “culture wars” as a period that was only about a berserk religious right. But it also saw a movement of anti-porn feminists led by the late Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon make common cause with the pulpit-pounding religious right to reanimate censorship laws. Their argument was that there could be no ambiguity in how such images were read: “pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.” The moral absoluteness of these debates split the feminist movement: “the censorial climate they have fostered has caused untold harm,” argued Cathy Crosson.

Artists like Minter and Tompkins—whom Gingeras has dubbed the “Black Sheep Feminist Artists”—had to wait years for the kind of acclaim they get now, basically until a new generation of feminist thinkers made space for their appropriations.

The reason this is relevant background in “It’s Pablo-matic” has to be that Hannah Gadsby very much seems to argue that images of passive female nudes or mythic orgies can only be received as an apology for male domination of women (Hilton Als noted, “Gadsby often sounds like warmed over Andrea Dworkin.”) Too-rigidly insisting that any pleasure taken from certain “problematic” sexual images is evidence of complicity has been divisive, and had costs.

Mickalene Thomas, Marie: Nude Black Woman Lying on a Couch (2012), Dinga McCannon, Revolutionary Sister (1971), and Marilyn Minter, Big Girls (1986)

Mickalene Thomas, Marie: Nude Black Woman Lying on a Couch (2012), Dinga McCannon, Revolutionary Sister (1971), and Marilyn Minter, Big Girls (1986) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

A cautionary note about the hazards of Gadsby’s argument seems clearly implied. But in a show that has Hannah Gadsby’s name over the entrance, not many viewers are going to stick around to decode the fine print.

Our “Pablo-matic” Moment 

I have spent a lot of time unpacking this odd, muddled show. Why? I know that for one part of the audience, I will be guilty of man-splaining feminism, and I do not enjoy that thought. Then another part of the audience would prefer that I take much more dismissive delight in tearing apart this show’s “feminist cringe,” as meme-maker Jerry Gogosian put it.

I do not really relish taking apart this show. It makes me depressed about the moment we live in. Let me explain why.

Pablo Picasso, The Shadow (1953)

Pablo Picasso, The Shadow (1953) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

Nanette, and the adulation around it, was clearly a product of the early Trump era, explicitly drawing a line from the celebration of Picasso to the celebration of Donald Trump. Terrified and disempowered at the electoral level, liberal commentators turned to culture—where they are, conveniently, overrepresented anyway—as the arena where some progress could be made.

Gadsby’s argument in Nanette, which plays looped in the galleries at the Brooklyn Museum, was clear on this mission:

You won’t hear too many extended sets about art history in a comedy show, so… you’re welcome… Comedy is more used to throwaway jokes about priests being pedophiles and Trump grabbing the pussy. I don’t have time for that shit. I don’t. Do you know who used to be an easy punch line? Monica Lewinsky. Maybe, if comedians had done their job properly, and made fun of the man who abused his power, then perhaps we might have had a middle-aged woman with an appropriate amount of experience in the White House, instead of, as we do, a man who openly admitted to sexually assaulting vulnerable young women because he could.

The argument contains a subreption, in that Hillary Clinton, the “middle-aged woman with an appropriate amount of experience,” happened also to be the wife of Bill Clinton, “the man who abused his power.” And Hillary Clinton’s inability to ever address this fact satisfactorily was something that Trump had exploited to excuse himself.

Nevertheless, the message was heard: Calling out abuse of power was more important than jokes.

Gadsby’s comedy-special-that-refused-to-be-a-comedy-special was perfect for its moment—the one where Kate McKinnon had responded to Trump’s election onstage at Saturday Night Live by dressing up as Hillary Clinton and tearfully performing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Late-night comedy became anti-Trump therapy. Even late night’s own writers would say (anonymously) that it felt as if “whatever I’m doing now, it doesn’t really feel like comedy” and called the situation, by early 2021, a “masturbatory rage ouroboros.”

Guess what happened next? Five years on from Nanette, most of the anti-Trump comedy shows have been canceled or have declined. People used to mock the very idea of mainstream conservative comedy. Now Gutfeld!, Fox News’s answer to the Daily Show, is the biggest thing in late night.

In art, this penny hasn’t dropped, but there’s a definite percolating fatigue with “woke” culture. I’ve said for months that “It’s Pablo-matic” might be the moment when the mainstream art institutions had to grapple with just how uncool moralism had become.

A visitor reads a wall text in

Marisol, Saca la Lengua (1973), with a clip from Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette playing in the background. Photo by Ben Davis.

But the hour is late. What’s scary is that we live in the middle of a gathering super-storm of political reaction. Women’s rights have been decisively eroded, and gender non-conforming people are at the center of a nasty campaign of bigoted scapegoating. But exhaustion, disaffection, and recrimination are gaining steam on the cultural level.

Gadsby’s co-curators at the Brooklyn Museum seem to intimate some kind of alienation from a certain image of social-justice discourse. “One of the really important takeaways that we are stressing, and that we know is really important to Hannah, is that the idea of ‘cancellation’ is not remotely the point of this exhibition—nor is it mostly anyone’s goals in anything these days—as a simple, reductive kind of gesture,” Catherine Morris told Ben Luke before “It’s Pablo-matic” opened. Morris added that the show was about “giving complicated things the space to be complicated.”

But in the audio guide, Gadsby says plainly: “I don’t have much hope that the needle is going to move on ‘P.P.’—and by ‘P.P.’ I mean ‘Pablo Picasso.’ A cancellation of P.P. is an incredibly unlikely outcome.” Well, arguing that the patriarchy won’t let you cancel Picasso is not the same as saying that you don’t want to cancel Picasso. Morris may argue for complexity, but Gadsby’s arguments about what Picasso’s art means today are so totalizing and limiting that the majority of the feminist artists in the show explicitly disagree with them!

Clearly, the curators are trying to soften Gadsby’s argument—their own act of myth-making image-management when it comes to the Big Name at the center of the show. The Brooklyn Museum wanted to do an exhibition with a Netflix celebrity, so the institution is just not going to say anything too plainly about any flaws in Gadsby’s arguments, even though it seems aware of them. Gadsby, meanwhile, admits in the audio guide that they participated, even though they hate the show’s subject, because “I thought it would raise my profile.” It’s a crazy-quilt of faulty incentives, from end to end.

What alarms me about the spectacle of “It’s Pablo-matic” is the evidence that art institutions aren’t able to make better arguments, aren’t able to adjust, aren’t able to assess what has happened in the last five years or where they stand in the doom loop of “woke” and “anti-woke” factionalization that is intensifying.

One final note: As recently as April—presumably as “It’s Pablo-matic” was coming together—the Brooklyn Museum’s staff has been forced to picket their own institution, demanding livable wages. “The whole bargaining process has been very frustrating,” a union rep told my colleague Sarah Cascone. “The museum likes to cloak themselves in social justice.” Can we get a couple of Hannah Gadsby quips on this?

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‘Shoot Through’ Creative Flower Photography Technique

By in Photography

‘Shoot Through’ Creative Flower Photography Technique
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$30 for JC Raulston Arboretum members and $40 for nonmembers

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Mary Louise Ravese, owner and principal photographer for Bella Vista Photography, will lead a session on the “shoot through” flower photography technique. We will use flowers positioned close to the lens of a camera to creatively frame flowers in the distance. When photographed with a telephoto lens and an appropriate aperture, the framed flowers will become an undefined “wash of color,” producing a creative photographic effect for a flower portrait image.

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