View of the ceiling paintings in the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, partially by Paolo Veronese, 1554-1556 (Palazzo Ducale, Venice).

Sometimes one’s best ideas are simple. At the end of the twentieth century, I spent the academic year in residence as a Getty Scholar in Los Angeles, writing about the art museum. I read in the vast literature the memoirs of curators and directors, the histories of various institutions, and also the theory-heavy accounts of academics. And I had the privilege of walking every working day through the Getty Museum, and so I got to know the collection. With so much right at hand to read and see, it’s no wonder that it took me a while to orient myself.

The histories explain that the European art museums were created by moving artistic masterpieces from their original sites, churches, into these public sites. Hence the link of this institution with modernism and the French Revolution, 1789, which turned the king’s palace into a public art museum. (That, at any rate is a useful generalization.) And this movement also led to the birth of art history, which orders and interprets the collections of the public museums. (That is another useful generalization.) When an altarpiece is moved from a church to the gallery, that same object is viewed differently. Viewers no longer come to pray. Now they study the artwork, setting it in art’s history. And so the very same object is understood very differently. What may seem obvious is that so long as the physical object is preserved, so that the same artifact that was in the church is put in the museum, that the artwork has been preserved. However, starting in the late eighteenth-century and continuing more recently a great many ‘museum skeptics’ have denied that conclusion. The object, they allow, is preserved, but the sacred altarpiece is not. In arguing that we cannot understand artworks without taking into account their settings, these theorists thus are skeptical about the survival of art in this move. To put their claim in a phrase: In the museum, the altarpiece has become a work of art, a subject for art historical study.

In my reading, I discovered that there were many museum skeptics. And I was surprised that there was no systematic critical analysis of this position. Some museum skeptics were leftist critics of the art market, while others were conservative critics of secular modernism. The name ‘museum skepticism’, which was my invention, was meant to underline the philosophical implications of this analysis. As epistemological skepticism questions our claims to have knowledge, and moral skepticism the grounds of our morality, so museum skepticism denies that art is preserved in these institutions. Philosophers have a great deal to say about skepticism. And so, when I worked out this analysis, what most surprised me was that no one had developed such a discussion. My Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (2006) fully develops an analysis. At that stage, I was only interested in the very general effect of art museum settings. Then I realized that I needed to say more about the various diverse settings of artworks. I needed, first, to consider the unusual setting of the historic center of Naples. (See my In Caravaggio’s Shadow: Naples as a Work of Art (2025). And still more recently, I have discussed Venice as a site for old master art.

Many commentators note that you cannot understand Venetian art, without talking into account its highly distinctive setting. In 1971 in his survey of sixteenth century Italian painting S. J. Freedberg said:

Nature combined with the work of man to enhance the fascination of the sensuous world. The atmosphere of the sea-borne city heightens the existence of seen things. Color is deepened on the damp-saturated air and sharpened by the sea-reflected light, which also may make complicating interactions among colors. The air has an apparent texture which it lends to surfaces perceived through it, and the atmosphere accentuates the sensuous skin of substance.

The situation of painting of this period in land-locked Florence and Rome was very different.

In his more recent account, similarly, developing that idea in more detail, Paul Hills writes:

To the Venetian patrician, the lapping of water at the walls of his palace placed his domicile in touch with the keel’s way, and reminded him of the sea-borne traffic that was carried to and fro over the horizon, moving between the visible and the out-of- sight.

In his account of Venetian painting, John Steer noted, the distinctive features of the art are presented in the very way it depicts its subjects:

The painters of Venice only rarely illustrated their city, and when they did they tended to seize on its permanent characteristics rather than its flux; but its unique visual qualities entered into their whole way of seeing and, fused with the decorative traditions inherited from Byzantium, determined the direction which Venetian painting took.

And Daniel Savoy, focusing on the entry into Venice, has observed:

the builders of medieval and early modern Venice devised a series of water-oriented urbanistic practices to shape the visual and metaphoric image of their city from the open waterway of the lagoon to the narrow canals of the island proper.

Although these scholars offer quite diverse perspectives, they do agree about the need to understand Venice’s site. Entering Florence or Rome is a very different experience. Anyone who visits Venice, even if only briefly, is aware of these essential features of its site.

I was (and am) interested in understanding museum skepticism for two different reasons. I thought it important to consider why the public art museum faces this inherent problem. Too often, critical discussion focuses on just sociological issues or the important political concerns. And I thought that this was an excellent way to link museum studies to more general philosophical concerns. Philosophy, as I understand it, is centrally concerned with skepticism: epistemology with Cartesian skepticism about knowledge; ethics with skepticism about reasoning for right actions; and so on. (I build upon ways of thinking associated with my teacher, the Columbia University philosopher Arthur Danto.) It’s highly worthwhile, I think, to understand what specifically philosophical problems art museums raise. And because the arguments about museum skepticism are structured like those other familiar skeptical questions, we can imagine in advance how debate should proceed.

Museum skepticism is a general analysis the significance of whose claims need still to be understood. Should we be skeptical about the powers of museums to preserve older artworks? The answer to that question is unclear. Descartes thought that his skeptical epistemology made knowledge more secure. But other philosophers disagree. Here, however, I want to turn discussion of the implications of museum skepticism in a different direction Without offering a general conclusion about the plausibility of museum skepticism, let’s consider what this focus on the original site of artworks tells us about the art of Venice. Founded in 826, the Venetian Republic survived (and prospered) until 1797, when it was destroyed by Napoleon. The goal of philosophical aesthetics, as I understand it, should be to understand the relation of Venetian painting to this setting. And so here I offer a very tentative sketch of such an analysis.

When art historians discuss French Impressionism, they are interested in how these painters depict their subject, contemporary urban and rural life. It’s important to observe what is literally left out of the picture. You need to discuss gender, politics and class struggle to understand these paintings. But none of our four writers are centrally interested in the ways that painters depicted the highly distinctive Venetian cityscape. Not until we get to the eighteenth-century masterworks of Canaletto and Guardi do major artists generally focus on that site. (There are some exceptions to this generalization: the narrative cityscapes of Giovanni Bellini and Carpaccio treat the city as a stage setting.) What does concern them, however, is how Venice did influence the ways of visual thinking found in painting produced there. The ever changing reflections created in the lagoons, the dematerialization of sold forms in the canal waters and the ripples produced by the constant boat traffic affect everyday experience. And as Jean-Paul Sartre notes in a marvelously mischievous essay, looking across the city baffles anyone accustomed to mainland reality,

Those princely houses opposite are rising out of the water, are they not? It’s impossible for them to be floating — houses don’t float — or for them to be resting on the lagoon: it would sink under their weight. Or for them to be weightless: you can see they are built of brick, stone and wood, .You cannot but feel them emerging.

Sartre’s “Venice from my window” describes how from an upper floor window, we normally expect to see the buildings in the distance, within obvious walking distance. But in Venice typically such expectations are foiled. To go across the Grand Canal, for example, we need to walk to one of the three bridges, or take a boat across. And when looking at the water in the canals, we see the buildings dematerialized, transfigured into mirrored surfaces, broken by the ripples in the canals. Venice, in short, is an extended exercise in perceptual defamiliarization. Looking around is like experiencing an exotic pictorial space—it is like seeing an artwork as has of course so often been said.

In different, not incompatible ways all of these four scholars indicate how the very special site of the art on the lagoon heavily influences experience. Venetian painting is made in that special visual setting, where it was intended to be displayed. And that means, following our account of museum skepticism, that we need to ask how that specific setting enters into understanding these pictures. But that’s the subject for another, future essay, in which I will take up some accounts of that important concern.

Note:

Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries. S,J, Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500-1600; Paul Hills, Venetian Colour; John Steer, Venetian Painting: A Concise History; and Daniel Savoy, Venice from the Water: Architecture and Myth in an Early Modern City. And Jean-Paul Sartre, Venice and Rome.

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Bronze Horse, 1983, Jesus College. Still from Peter Bach’s “Flanagan’s Wake.”

Someone recently watched a film I was lucky enough to make about the late artist and sculptor Barry Flanagan. They asked me how the idea came about and I told them that 16 years ago I was travelling from Kabul to Helmand via Kandahar and Camp Bastion on my way to Lashkar Gah, staring out of a Chinook at a dry universe unimproved in the end by any of the Western weapons and soldiers there. I said I had been dreaming not only of a safe return to my young family in London but of finding a long-term project that had nothing to do with war.

I travelled with my family to Paris where outside our hotel stood this tall, mysterious Barry Flanagan sculpture. As I knew Barry, I made a note to tell him of this coincidence once back in London. Before I did, however, Barry got in touch, ominously saying he had just been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. I felt so bad for him. He said he wanted to lunch with me at The Ivy and hear all about Afghanistan. I was more concerned about him than the latest promise of more troops for Afghanistan.

Over dessert with Barry and his partner Jessica, I discussed the idea of filming a kind of picaresque homage, visiting as many of his public works as possible, speaking to lots of different people. Barry took to this and promptly introduced me to gallerist Leslie Waddington for a breakdown of their different locations worldwide. At Barry’s nearby hotel on Regent Street, I met his son Alfred, and spent the rest of the week reading up on the many books given me by Leslie Waddington, before Barry departed with Jessica back to Ibiza where they lived.

Official filming began in Wiltshire at the Barry Flanagan exhibition at Roche Court, where friends, family and collectors gathered in Barry’s absence. As a filmmaker more used to hostile environments at the time, I hid behind my kit, quietly recording Barry’s legacy, while flitting from work to work and person to person like a grasshopper with a lens. A second visit was made to Roche Court with Shakespearian actor Peter Hamilton-Dyer who let me film him down a long country lane by two giant bronze hares seven meters high. Another day in Cambridge, I filmed late poet John James, a friend of Barry’s who recalled them both working at a local Bristol bakery in their youth and Barry ‘sculpting’ the dough. He even described him as shamanistic. This was followed at with an interview, also in Cambridge, with writer, pilot, organist and academic Michael Bywater by Barry’s well loved San Marco Horse in a wisteria-clad First Court at Jesus College.

The film found its feet. Next up was a trip to the US for the first time since I lived there for five years in the 1980s. I met up with gallerist Paul Kasmin and picked up on our 25 year-old conversation about Bruce Chatwin. The next day I shot and interviewed writer Adrian Dannatt who was recounting bumping into Barry in New York one late summer night while Adrian was wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown in the street after popping out to post some letters. I travelled south to Washington DC to the National Gallery where I discovered Barry to be Hillary Clinton’s favourite artist.

It was as good a moment as any to travel to Ibiza with my family to see and film Barry, and to show my loosely edited footage from across the Atlantic. I filmed him viewing this first batch. Unfortunately Barry’s speech had deteriorated badly. His movements were much slower. But his mind was sharp as a silver dart. Poignantly, he communicated on camera with handwritten notes— ‘It’s a bugger!’—which I also filmed. Even the loops of his lettering felt oddly substantial. One day we visited his second Ibizan home deep in olive-green countryside where he suggested my family enjoy a swim in the pool. I was too busy filming but was made by Barry to promise to swim there next time I visited. ‘Naked,’ I joked. He laughed.

Filming continued. In Belgium after Ghent, I was on my way to the dunes in Knokke-Heist to capture the holidaying activities of tourists around one of Barry’s vast hare sculptures there. This was at the sight of a former World War Two gun emplacement that had once pointed to England. I was next in Strasbourg. In Madrid, I met an Australian, a former soldier, who so gelled with Barry’s work outside the British Council that he planted his face in front of the camera one time with two raised thumbs and a brazen message for Barry: ‘Go Bazza!’ he said. ‘You’re a good bloke!’ I was then all of a sudden in Dublin, a city dear to Barry’s heart. His work was everywhere.

I returned to the US for a filmed road journey through the midwest. I was driven by underground writer Peter Nolan Smith. It was like having Neal Cassady at the wheel. After Chicago, we took in Barry’s public works in St Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Minneapolis, then Chicago again. Native American reservations were visited. The spirit of the hare was matched with the freedom of the buffalo. Fireworks were purchased and let off in Barry’s honour in the middle of nowhere. We ate doggy-bags of cold ribs by wild rivers. We were stopped one time by a polite state trooper and plans were made for a further trip to the West coast. I was quietly planning on Japan and Armenia too.

The important backdrop to all this however was Barry’s worsening health. The film became a race against time. I badly wanted Barry to see this homage. Academic and curator Jo Melvin pointed me in the direction of Venice where I filmed two curiously organic marble works of Barry’s in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection next. But I was by now feeling oddly restless. It was not just the swine flu. I had this rotten feeling in my gut. In fact, as soon as I returned to London I heard Barry had died.

I filmed the memorial service on Ibiza, the wake afterwards too, where I fulfilled my secret promise to Barry to swim naked in the pool. Finally, I made one last trip to Paris, where I interviewed a more introspective Adrian Dannatt this time. He was outside the hotel where I had stayed with my family. I eventually finished the edit. A director’s cut was selected by the Irish International Film Festival in Dublin. It showed at various film festivals in the end. The BBC bought it and changed the name to The Man Who Sculpted Hares—Barry Flanagan, A Life. (I had called it Flanagan’s Wake.) Barry never did get to see it. Maybe you can see it for him. As the Australian said, he was good bloke.

The director’s cut of Peter Bach’s film Flanagan’s Wake is available for free on YouTube

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Shaboozey puts the pedal to the metal on his way past the big Billboard of fame and fortune. (YouTube screenshot)

Released only the day before the election, will.i.am’s sonic squib, “Yes She Can,” was the final political misfire of the musical campaign, the cannon’s weak report barely heard as evening fell on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and the routed troops fled her standard.

But there is another mournful melody that continues to waft across early November’s electoral battlefield soaked in blue blood. Carrying over the vanquished candidates’ carcasses is Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” his lament not for dead donkeys and their fallen riders but for decimated purchasing power, ransacked consumer confidence, and savaged aspirations to luxury. The song is now enjoying its eighteenth straight week atop the Billboard charts. If it holds its position for another few days, it will match the all-time record of nineteen weeks still tenuously held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.”

“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” claimed the no. 1 ranking the week before doddering Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run for a second term after all, the sitting President kicked down the White House backstairs by an Entertainment Industry cabal led by Democratic loyalist turned putschmeister, George Clooney. Kamala Harris mounted the war donkey and curveted ahead in the polls.

Shaboozey’s hit spanned Harris’s heady weeks in command of Democratic forces and resounds still in the aftermath of her political demise. Like a colorizing gloss applied to a vintage Civil War daguerreotype, the guitar strumming and hollow whistling impart an elegiac finish to the singer’s reverb-boosted plaint, one that lulled Democrats into the complacent assurance that the song was cooly apolitical. Obama put it on his summer playlist, but he wasn’t really listening to it either. Like the buzzards above, the harmonies and auto-tuned incantation circle endlessly, even aimlessly. The song will be on perpetual replay until, and probably after, Disney buys up the entire site and sound of the Democratic Debacle.

It can be no coincidence that both contenders for the dubious honor of longest stretch at Billboard no. 1 are basically country songs by Black artists whose music is inflected by, even reliant on, Hip Hop sensibilities and diction.

Lil Nas X’s nineteen-week Billboard run traversed the summer of 2019. His “Old Town Road” begins with a ten-second tribute to Blind Lemon Jefferson, then clip-clops ahead into a sing-song, rattle-snake-ratchet-driven beat backing a navel-gazing catalog of the accessories of the urban cowboy lyricist riding his horse through the hood: “Hat is matte black / Got the boots that’s black to match.” The musician didn’t need to say that he was Black too.

Lil Nas X delivers the raps, while the country singing is done by diehard Trumper, Billy Ray Cyrus, who arrives in the video in his MAGA-red Maserati. Lil Nas X ditches the nag and hops in the convertible and the unlikely pair head to a barn dance in a strip mall in which Black and white (though mostly white) are united by music, movement, illusion, and love of luxury brands mashed-up with the everyday:

My life is a movie
Bull riding and boobies
Cowboy hat from Gucci
Wrangler on my booty

The track’s constricted melody was similarly spare of ideas. Its default misogyny matched the mores of Trump 1.0. Never mind that another Lil Nas X song, “Donald Trump,” imagines the president in the trunk of a car—maybe that Maserati—and its unclear whether he’s dead or alive, though it’s probably the former. Neither that image nor the song’s rampant gunfire and exploitation (“Got a bad bitch with a thick ass / She a stripper ho, yeah, she get cash”) got the “artist” called up on terrorism charges. But in “Old Town Road” there is no talk of “niggas” and “bitches” and “Glocks” but instead of “tractors” and “horses” and “babies.” Shaboozey wisely kept his no. 1 hit clean.

It wasn’t an upscale Italian sports car Lil Nas X drove through the border wall separating Country from Hip Hop. It was a bulldozer. Beyoncé then rode the white steed of Cowboy Carter through that gap and to the top of the Billboard in March of 2024: the first Black woman to have a no. 1 hit on both the Country and Pop charts. Shaboozey ascended to the top spot after her, and he now sits at the controls of the bulldozer. The dismantling of that border wall has been fabulously lucrative for all three.

With melody and chords unable to get out their own way, the “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” captures, if gently, the feeling of claustrophobic despair at closing time. That fear of having to leave and head out into the night and towards working reality can quickly tip towards panic if not for the balm alcohol.

“Someone pour me up a double shot of whiskey
They know me and Jack Daniels got a history
There’s a party downtown near Fifth Street”

The artist couldn’t help but write his own name into the bar ballad: “I’ve been Boozey since I’ve left,” he croons, the Shaboozey brand as sonic reflux.

In concentrating on the genre-busting strategies of these Black musicians who have so smoothly crossing over into Country and up the Pop charts too, commentators, including me, failed to note the predictive punch of Shaboozey’s seemingly unthreatening mega-hit.

At the Democratic National Convention in August the bosses thought that their political triangulations would be enhanced by the usual musical kill coordinates: soulful stalwarts Stevie Wonder and John Legend balanced against country contributions from Maren Morris and Jason Isbell with a few rounds of Springsteen thrown in to soften up the targets.

Shaboozey would have seemed a likely fieldpiece to add to these howitzers of hope. A child of Nigerian immigrants, he grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs. His stage handle is a transliteration of his family name, Chibueze. From early on he was a musical omnivore whose inclusive appetites allow him the ease with which he moves between and mixes together styles. At the time of the DNC he was well into his no. 1 run, his song offering sounding proof that the winner-take-all American Dream is real. Shaboozey’s dominance on Billboard was a potential harbinger of a Harris victory.

After Taylor Swift endorsed Harris in September, Shaboozey was asked at the MTV Music Video Awards what he thought of her declaration of support for the Democratic candidate. He extolled his celebrity colleague’s music, thus proudly displaying his own catholic tastes, but deflected the interviewer’s attempts to lay bare his own political affiliations: “I’m a huge Swfitie,” he beamed, “And she should walk in her truth.” His “truth” remained hidden. Could it be that Shaboozey didn’t want to make waves in Nashville, sink his standing on the charts and his future prospects? Could he have been one of the many young Black men who went red? One could easily think so after watching the video of “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”

Whatever the case, the opening stanza, delivered in no-fault auto-tune, was a declaration of disaffection, and though unnamed, Democrats were clearly the ones responsible for the people’s plight:

My baby want a Birkin, she’s been tellin’ me all night long
Gasoline and groceries, the list goes on and on
This 9 to 5 ain’t workin’, why the hell do I work so hard?
I can’t worry ’bout my problems, I can’t take ’em when I’m gone, uh

The rich, Shaboozey among them, buy $40,000 Hermès handbags while working folk—Black, brown or white—can’t even afford the basics. They don’t turn to the ballot box but to the bottle.

All through the summer and into the fall a Black man sang from the pinnacle of Pop of discontent, inflation, wage slavery, and consumer envy. Yet tone-deaf Democrats only wanted to hear their own in-house music. The Legends and Wonders of make-believe sang of joy instead of jobs.

If Kamala heard Shaboozey’s hit, she didn’t hear its message. Does she hear it now as she nurses her electoral wounds and her political hangover?

There are more lessons to be learned from the bitter medicine of this deceptive, easy-listening anthem than the most obvious one: that it’s easier for a Black singer to succeed in White Country than for a Black woman to win the White House.

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Image from the Reap What You Sow playbill, courtesy of Robert Shetterley.

In mid-November, New York’s Catholic Worker community, located in lower Manhattan, opened their sizable auditorium to host “Reap What You Sow: Don’t Lose Heart!” a two act play with two actors which debuted, for two nights, on the Maryhouse stage.

Prior to the performance, preparations included selecting the sturdiest wooden chairs for audience seating, carefully cleaning furniture and floors, and rearranging the space so the next issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, stacked and ready to mail, wouldn’t interfere with access to the theater. Producers created a set which included curtains made of sheets, an assemblage of donated lights, and a small coffeemaker complete with loud gurgles.

Above were the exposed beams of a building which once functioned as a music school in turn-of-the-century New York City before Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, founders of the Catholic Worker, appropriated it for works of mercy, feeding hungry people and, as much as possible, housing people in the building’s former musical practice rooms.

It was a fitting spot for the play’s debut. Jack Gilroy, the main author, had created earlier versions. Now the play, authored by Gilroy, zool Zulkowitz, and Olivia Gilroy incorporates the dynamics of “living theater” as actors and activists have fed Gilroy their edits.

The audience were mainly elders who knew one another. Catholic Workers welcomed  Maryknoll Mission sisters, Veterans For Peace, Raging Grannies, and people from Peace Action, World BEYOND War, Code Pink and FOR.

A sprinkling of students from Columbia U. and Fordham, along with a prof from Manhattan College, accompanied by his small son, were also in attendance.

Before the play began, producer zool Zulkowitz played the Beatles’ iconic song, Imagine. Following this came Olivia Rodrigo’s song, Brutal.

Ellie (played by Grazia Saporito) then broke into athletic, riveting dance moves to open the play.

She and her mother, Major Mom, (played by Pat Russell), were winning characters. Tears glistened on Major Mom’s cheeks when she spoke of her experiences as a mother, a widow, and a woman warrior who deeply regretted having killed civilians during missions in which she piloted weaponized drones. The audience learns she was married to Lieutenant Colonel Sean Golden, a marine who died during combat in Iraq. The Major eagerly awaits a promotion to full “Bird Colonel.”

Showing remarkable patience, Major Mom listens to Ellie divulge childhood disappointments, teenage angst, and her current rage over the roles her parents played in “service” to the U.S. military. At one point, Major Mom says “Whoa,” and accuses Ellie of going too far in her accusations.

But Ellie, a debate team champ, doesn’t back down. She has evidence to show that her mom’s “arsenal of democracy” rhetoric and revitalization of World War II themes don’t stand up to actual events in the recent past.

In a way, the play’s two characters are each proxies for fully developed viewpoints. Major Mom represents the Merchants of Death who develop, store, sell and use vast arsenals of weaponry. Ellie champions viewpoints laid out in Howard Zinn’s comprehensive historical outlay, “A People’s History of the United States.”

With Ellie rebelling against revival of World War II rhetoric, the play becomes quite timely. She insists that the good Germans who supported Nazis have counterparts in the U.S. militarists who “take out” women and children in multiple war zones. The claim, “I was only following orders,” eerily enters the script.

Many of the people in the audience have, in the past, supported activists who were recently imprisoned in U.S. federal lockups for having trespassed at a U.S. base harboring nuclear weapons. One of the activists, Carmen Trotta, came to both performances. Plowshares activists literally beat swords into plowshares, damaging nuclear weapons and pouring their own blood over the decommissioned weapons. They believe in making sacrifices, themselves, on behalf of nonviolence, a theme which recurs in Gilroy’s play.

During a dynamic talk back session, actors, producers, and audience members grappled with questions about conscience and pragmatic steps forward. Ellie, still acting in character, urged people to use their imagination and practice empathy. Art, she said, will be the force that carries us through to a new, safe time. Major Mom, (Pat Russell) pointed to the damage caused by structural and systemic violence. Audience members repeatedly voiced outrage over U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians, noting that democrats dared to warn of fascist encroachment while at the same time enabling and provisioning Israel’s mass killing spree, across the Middle East. Israel’s usage of weaponized drones prolongs and exacerbates a war waged by a racist, far-right, nuclear armed, apartheid regime, one to which the U.S. continues to pledge unwavering support.

It seemed all could agree that, as Adam Tooze, writing for the London Review of Books observes:

“We should be under no illusion: there has been nothing like this level of threat since the dangerous final phase of the Cold War in the early 1980s. With China committed to a rapid buildup of its nuclear arsenal, we are well on the way to an unprecedented 3-way nuclear standoff.”

 The characters in Reap What You Sow recognized pivots in their relationships and their interactions, and they assiduously preserved caring relationships. Powerful elites in our world have comprehensively failed to find means for collaboration, opting instead to demonize enemies for their own political gain, pouring energy and resources into the coffers of people whose “top crop” is weaponry. President Biden refuses to negotiate with Putin, and Ukraine has already fired long range missiles, supplied by the U.S., into Russia, sowing ominous seeks which Putin has stated could yield a nuclear exchange.

I hope the play will awaken numerous people, in audiences across this country and beyond, to the crucial question: how can we learn to live together without killing one another? And the follow-up: how can we abolish war?

Reap What You Sow, Don’t Lose Heart is the first production of the Rising Together Talkback Theater Company. The production is available, for FREE, to churches, schools, peace and justice organizations, and other community groups. The company is booking dates for a Summer 2025 “Reap!” Tour. For more information, contact Zool (zoolTheArtAndPolitics@hotmail.com) or text 718-964-7643.

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School Girl, St. Croix, 1963 (Detail), by Consuelo Kanaga. Brooklyn Museum.

If you’re like many of my friends and neighbors in liberal Democratic San Francisco, you may be shaking your head in disbelief and muttering that you don’t understand the results of the election. If that description fits you, you might chill or gaze at the photographs of Consuelo Kanaga which are now in an exhibit titled “Catch the Spirit” at SFMOMA. “See the Work of This Critical Yet Overlooked Figure in the History of Modern Photography,” the museum’s website proclaims.

Kanaga’s indelible photos are also reproduced in a book titled Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer, which offers snippets of her biography which began in Astoria, Oregon in 1894 and ended in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1978. At her death, her entire estate was valued at $1,345, her name largely erased from the annals of photography, though she had been a contemporary and a friend of luminaries such as Imogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti, Alfred Stieglitz, and Dorthea Lang. No major exhibit of Kanaga’s work took place until 15 years after her death when she began to be appreciated as an artist, and not simply as a documentary photographer of archival interest.

With a name like Consuelo Kanaga you might think she was a Latino or a Native American. In fact, she was descended from old European stock. She had as much talent and as much energy as her better known peers and also a unique style with the camera. She took extreme close-ups of the people she photographed, especially the poor and African Americans as though she wanted to enter their lives, merge with them and share their plight, perhaps because she was born to privilege.

Kanaga’s father worked as a lawyer and judge, her mother as a real estate agent, but by the time she was in her early 20s she shifted from the world of her parents and worked as a reporter, feature writer and freelance photographer with exceptional darkroom skills for The San Francisco Chronicle, the paper owned by newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst.

In the 1920s she moved back and forth restlessly from California to New York and then back to California, searching for a place where she might put down roots, and find a man with whom she might feel sympatico. Married three times she survived a canceled engagement. Her restlessness took her across America and to Europe and to North Africa.

In the late 1930s she joined the Photo League, a cooperative of New York photographers that was placed on a Justice Department blacklist. She worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and sold pictures to the lefty publications of the day including the New Masses, the Labor Defender and the Sunday Worker, the paper of the US Communist Party, which she joined and embraced some of its causes. In one photo, which might be described as socialist realism, she depicted three heroic workers: one Black, one white and another Asian, all of whom gaze into the distance. The caption might read “Unite and Fight.”

Her best known photo, which isn’t overtly political, is titled “She is a Tree of Life to Them.” It depicts a poor Black woman who holds her children close to her own body. It was included in the 1955 exhibit Family of Man. Kanaga photographed white immigrants from Russia and white workers but she was drawn to Black men and Black women, to black bodies and black faces, and to Black writers such as Langston Hughes whom she befriended.

Near the end of her life she said, “I wasn’t in a group, nor did I belong to anything ever. I wasn’t a belonger.” Her biography and her work suggests otherwise; indeed for decades she meant her work to convey messages to the masses. Art for art’s sake was never part of her credo.

Kanaga noted of the famed photographer, Edward Weston, “His whole life was built around his work. I was much more interested in living.” She did live, and lived to the fullest, whether she was in California, New York or North Africa, and yet it seems fair to say that her life was inseparable from her work and her work inseparable from her life. Intensely political throughout her life, but not ideological, she joined the Sixties civil rights movement and was arrested in Albany, Georgia.

A decade or so before her death, her photos of protesters were included in a book titled Prison Notes by Barbara Deming, a feminist and a non-violent activist who traveled to Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Kanaga remained true to her ideals until the end of her life, though in some of her late work she seemed to turned away from realism to symbolism and photographed sunflowers and old wagon wheels, one of which she titled “The End of an Era.” Perhaps she recognized that she had survived the era that had informed her best work which honors the beauty and the dignity of Black Americans.

Had she been Black she might have enjoyed more fame and prestige than she did. Like the novelist and short story writer, Tillie Olsen, and like Sanora Babb, who wrote about Dust Bowl refugees in her novel, Whose Names are Unknown, Kanaga’s work was eclipsed by male photographers until women teachers and critics like Sally Stein came along and recognized her originality and her artistic compassion. In the wake of Trump’s victory at the polls, we might remember Kanaga’s resilience and endurance all through the crisis of 20^th century capitalism. She’s a role model for our own spirited times.

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Still from Hard Truths.

According to its mission statement, “AFI FEST… showcase[es] the best films from across the globe to captivated audiences in Los Angeles. With a diverse and innovative slate of programming, the film festival presents a robust lineup of fiction and nonfiction features and shorts… along with panels and conversations featuring both master filmmakers and new cinematic voices.” The American Film Institute’s annual film fete is taking place through October 27 at the TCL Chinese Theatre (that iconic movie palace formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, with stars’ cement footprints in its famed courtyard) and the nearby TCL Chinese 6 Theatre, located beside Hollywood Blvd.’s fabled “Walk of Fame.”

Mike Leigh: The Truth About Hard Truths is that It’s Hard to Take

This year my AFI Fest-going got off to a promising, auspicious start with my very first movie of the Festival, Hard Truths by Mike Leigh, one of Britain’s best filmmakers ever. With few exceptions – notably 1999’s Topsy-Turvy, about the fabled Gilbert and Sullivan musical team, and 2014’s Mr. Turner, about the great painter J.M.W. Turner – Leigh’s outstanding oeuvre has focused on ordinary people and working class heroes/heroines. A prime example of Leigh’s admirable emphasis on everyday people is 1996’s sublimely beautiful Secrets & Lies, which received five Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Director.

In 2015 I was lucky enough to catch up with Leigh at the Zurich Film Festival and asked the maestro: “Hollywood movies largely feature superheroes and movie stars. Why are the protagonists of your films about common people?” Dismissive of Tinseltown’s film franchise fetish and obsession with comic book characters, Leigh defiantly replied: “Everybody has a story to tell.”

Truly an admirable, egalitarian sentiment, bit if true, this doesn’t necessarily mean that every single individual’s saga is worthy of their personal story being told and dramatized for the public at large, onscreen or onstage or on the page, et al. Along these lines, a strong case, alas, could be made against Hard Truths, which is a sort of thematic follow up to the infinitely superior Secrets & Lies, which also stars the excellent actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste (co-star of the FBI TV series Without a Trace), who was Academy Award-nommed for Best Supporting Actress for the stellar Secrets & Lies.

Related by title (I’m sure that’s quite intentional), whereas Secrets & Lies was a poignant film full of hope and love, Hard Truths is a dark, dreary, depressing drama. Eighty-something writer/ director Leigh’s downer opens with Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) awakening with a start – in fact, for some reason, she does so three times throughout the movie that feels much longer than 97-minutes. To make a long story short, the homely, stocky Pansy has a totally negative disposition and is universally critical of everyone she encounters, from her long-suffering husband Curtley (whom she is indeed very curt to, as played by a tearful David Webber) and her 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), to total strangers.

The disputatious Pansy becomes embroiled in completely unnecessary arguments with cashiers and fellow shoppers on line with her, employees at a furniture store, and even her dentist and doctor, who Pansy has made appointments with in order to try explain and solve her unending series of aches and pains. Her kvetching is so annoying and unwarranted that characters in the drama actually laugh at her for being so absurdly ridiculous – but make no mistake about it, Hard Truths is no comedy, indeed far from it.

Viewers can’t figure out if Pansy’s infinite agonies are due to her resoundingly negative disposition or the other way around. The film provides precious little background to explain her woes, although there’s some dialogue with his younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) that intimates Pany had an unhappy childhood. (Well, you certainly don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to deduce that.) BTW, Chantelle is an upbeat person (except when fretting about her miserable big sister) and there’s a scene or two between the solo mom and her exuberant, full of life daughters Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson) goofing around that may seem gratuitous at first, but in retrospect totally fit. Chantelle’s lively adult children are in stark contrast to the glum, withdrawn, videogame-playing, bullied, perpetually headphone-wearing Moses, always trying to distance himself from his hyper-critical mother and the misery she has inflicted upon her household.

Why is Pansy (who is unable to work) so unhappy? The entire milieu of Hard Truths is the contemporary British Black middle class. The hard-working if, as said, long-suffering Curtley seems to make a decent living as a plumber, providing decently for his family, who live in the three-story attached house with a backyard that Leigh’s melodrama opens and closes with. Leigh has made moving movies about the underdog, such as his previous fact-based historical epic about a proletarian rebellion, 2018’s Peterloo. But – unless because I am a Caucasian American and not finely tuned to British Blacks – as far as I could discern, there’s only one scene in Hard Truths that seems to explicitly deal with racism and the ethnic power hierarchy: When Kayla’s white female boss is rudely dismissive of her pitch of a product to push at the company where she works (and tellingly lies about later over drinks with her sister).

As suggested, Pansy’s backstory is largely untold. Where did her forebears come from before they alighted in England? The Caribbean? Africa? Who knows? What made Secrets & Lies so superb and such a joy to behold (in repeat viewings, BTW) is that while those characters had problems, there was a quite beautiful resolution. No, not a phony-baloney “happily-ever-after” one, but a very, profoundly human denouement, with an affirmation of life, love and family that’s largely lacking in Hard Truths. British cinema was known for Kitchen Sink Dramas, realistic depictions of working class existence, and for “Angry Young Man” movies, like 1959’s Look Back in Anger and 1962’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Pansy is a lonely middle-aged woman who, for some reason viewers smarter than I may be able to explain to me, is ceaselessly suffering.

I suspect that sitting through this hard to take cry-fest requires super powers found in those flicks Leigh scorns and is mainly for hardcore Mike Leigh fans (among them this critic), fans of tragedies, and people interested in the contemporary conditions of the British Black middle class.

For info about AFI Fest see: https://fest.afi.com/.

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