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Two exhibits at MoMA (2026)

  Two exhibits at MoMA (2026)   I just saw two exhibits at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Their contents were as far removed from each other as could possibly be, but as I was absorbing them the same day, I recognized there were ideas that demanded we recognize an overlap if not a connection. One was a big retrospective of Marcel Duchamp, the other, “Ideas of Africa” was of Portrait Photography by multiple Artists in Anglophone and Francophone West and Central Africa, mostly from the 1950s-1970s, with some forays into the 21 st c.   1.     Marcel Duchamp   It’s a retrospective spanning more than six decades (1900-1968) and kept rigorously Chronological, showing Duchamp’s development from a struggling Painter and talented Commercial Illustrator (he called these works “swimming lessons”) and then going on to and explorer into fields of the Visual Arts that had never been trod before. It’s the first survey of his work in North America in more than 5...
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  There’s a lot of lessons in Trump’s ascendancy that illuminate much of what we don’t want to admit about race relations in the US. One thing we don’t want to admit is how recently did racism become a vice; before a certain point, all American Presidents, including those who were Civil Rights heroes (Lincoln, Grant, Coolidge, FDR, Truman), were publicly and unapologetically, racist. Racism was so normal, certain, and essential, that civil rights stands were not in contradiction to a racist character, but being non-racist was weird. The first President who we can safely say was not racist was Republican Eisenhower, and he was elected very recently, 1953, so I know some people reading this remember him. He began the Civil Rights Revolution that Democrat Truman before him attempted to spark, but failed to, because of Democratic Party infighting. The last President to get away with public racism was Democrat Johnson, Eisenhower’s ally in the Senate and the greatest of all Civil Rights...
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Contact (1997)

  Contact (1997)   I think everyone who loves SF started with loving Spaceships. As we grew, we might’ve been drawn to other narrative Sub-Genres more, Near-Future, Post-Apocalyptic, Time-Travel, etc, but in the English-speaking world it was almost always about the Spaceships, and there are Historical reasons for this.   Between 1937 and 1949, there was virtually no SF cinema in the English-speaking World except Children’s Serials, and the most beloved of these was the Space Opera “Flash Gordon” (Serial Film Franchise began in 1936, continued to 1940, and there were many imitators that followed). Film Serials, brought into a new media, became the cornerstone of SF on TV when that technology first became culturally important in the USA (around 1948) and the first regularly broadcast, original to TV, SF program in the USA was “ Captain Video”  (first aired 1949) which was one of those “Flash Gordon” imitators.   SF would return triumphantly to cinema w...
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