in Culture Digest | 20 OCT 17

Weekend Reading List

Thoughts on #MeToo, Tom Hanks’ typewriter reveries and algorithmic citizenship: what to read this weekend

in Culture Digest | 20 OCT 17

James Bridle, Citizen Ex, 2015, screenshot. Courtesy: James Bridle

  • Barry Schwabsky writes in The Nation on how Alberto Giacometti and Alice Neel reckoned with the force of the gaze: ‘They show us, in different ways, not the face, but how the face is made.
     
  • In the wake of accusations of assault and rape concerning Harvey Weinstein, the online hashtag #MeToo took off, with women who have been harassed or assaulted posting it to underline the totality of sexual violence. Megan Nolan has a brilliant piece in Vice asking, is awareness-raising such as this useful in and of itself? There’s the danger that it merely shifts the burden of representation onto women – ‘the problem, really, with all of it is how violently present the victim is forced to be in the narrative and how utterly passive the perpetrator.'
     
  • Here at frieze, Maxim Edwards writes about the journey from the cultural innovations of the 1980s Greater London Council to ‘Acid Corbynism’.
     
  • ‘Every link clicked recalibrates the balance of our rights’: James Bridle on algorithmic citizenship and statelessness.
     
  • J.W. McCormack has a delightfully nasty take on Uncommon Type (2017), the new collection of typewriter-themed stories by movie star Tom Hanks: ‘so light on ideas, it practically hovers.'
     
  • Benjamin Martin’s book The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) shows us how, while we do not normally link Hitler and Mussolini with ‘soft power’, cultural concerns were key to their imperial projects.
     
  • And in case you missed it, Jonathan Bogart on how Kesha dares to imagine a better world.
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