When I die, burn my journal
Arts & Culture News for the week starting 17/02/2025
Welcome to La Miccia! Arts & Culture News is a weekly roundup of what’s happening in the world, through the lens of art. Thanks for reading!
Do you ever have those weeks where you promise yourself you’ll get all this stuff done and then you blink and it’s Sunday and you haven’t even gotten to one thing on your list? That has been my entire February so far. I swear this month has lasted 5 minutes. The sun came out this weekend for the first time in what felt like forever so I am slowly defrosting. We’re 25 days away from the spring equinox.
In this week’s letter I talk a lot about the British Museum.
Joan Didion’s archive is going on view at the New York Public Library. By “archive” I mean her diary and personal notes taken after meetings with her psychiatrist. This diary will also be published in April. Didion left no instructions about should be done with it all, so her literary trustees took it upon themselves to unearth and share her most private thoughts. I’m no Joan Didion, but if anybody published even a page of my journal for everyone to read (let alone my post-therapy thoughts), I would simply pass away. I’m thrilled for those who have turned Didion into an aesthetic. They finally get their step-by-step manual to work on becoming full carbon copies.
Trump’s relentless push to control the arts continues, shaping what will be one of the defining aspects of his second presidency. Just this past month, he mandated neoclassical architecture for all federal buildings, took control over the Kennedy Center, and halted an NEA grant for underserved communities. Now, he’s removed the acting archivist and inspector general of the National Archives and is considering installing stone patio instead of grass in the White House Rose Garden…
…but people are not having it. This week, people mobilized to protest the extreme right-wing policies of the new administration. Hundreds of artists signed a letter demanding the NEA reverse policy changes resulting from the recent executive order. A group of dancers staged a performace outside the Kennedy Center to oppose its leadership changes. And in front of New York City’s Stonewall National Monument, queer rights activists and organizations gathered to protest the NPS’s decision to erase references to trans and queer people from its website.
London might introduce a tourist tax to help its cultural sector. The proposal, suggested by V&A director Tristram Hunt, comes in response to the significant decline in public investment in the arts. He also floated the idea of charging international tourists an entrance fee for museums. Adding tourist fees sound suspiciously similar to what Venice is doing to manage it’s tourist flows (despite being for other reasons). I wrote about Europe’s tourism problem in the article below:
I hope the entrance fee idea doesn’t materialize. I remember living in London for a month in 2018, and it felt like such a luxury to visit museums for free. Museum tickets are $30 here in NYC. It’s silly to moan and complain about people being increasingly disinterested in art, culture, and heritage while simultaneously adding more barriers to entry. These things should be a public good. And let's not forget, the UK spent a large chunk of its history looting and stealing cultural artefacts from other countries. They literally built their museums with other people’s stuff, and now they want to charge those same people to see their own heritage? Are you trying to tell me that a Greek person - who would have to travel to the UK to see the Parthenon Marbles in person at the British Museum - shuold pay an entry fee? There’s a report coming out from the Cultural Policy Unit which should provide a bit more info on this. I’ll keep you posted.
Drawing of the east front of the Parthenon. Source: British Museum The Netherlands is returning 113 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. The British Museum still has over 900. It’s interesting how repatriation remains so contested, I have two thoughts on this: 1) Does cultural property belong to all of humanity or to the specific groups from which it originates? Seems like we still haven’t decided who owns the past. 2) Does ownership even matter when entire cultural institutions insist they can take better care of an artefact than the people it actually belongs to? This is called stewardship, by the way, and it’s pretty much the BM’s favourite way to keep hoarding everyone’s stuff.
One last thing about the British Museum, it's Western Range galleries are getting revamped. The project has been assigned to Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh who designed the 2023 Serpentine Pavilion in London.
Lina Ghotmeh submission. Source: LG—A Artwork of the week
