Editor’s Letter
2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/08992363-2683603
ISSN1527-8018
Autores ResumoSearching for memorable images is one of the great pleasures of editing Public Culture, and finding them is even better.We take pride in the visual culture that we routinely share in this journal, but this issue, which features a series of articles on cultural production in the public sphere, is especially rich.We lead off with two beautifully illustrated Forum essays, by Vicki Mayer and Noah Arjomand, that explore everyday life in two cities still undergoing fraught recoveries from Hurricane Katrina and the war in Afghanistan, respectively.In "Signs of Home," Mayer describes how the film and media industries' transformation of New Orleans into Hollywood South has privatized public space and reoriented residents' relationships with their physical environment.In Arjomand's essay, the libraries of Kabul, sites of ongoing conflict between culturally divergent conceptions of public access to information, are a microcosm of the international capacity building project in Afghanistan.The issue's first set of research essays begins with Rachel Sherman's "The Art of Conversation," an ethnographic study of artist Tino Sehgal's "constructed situations" that also considers the possibilities for and challenges to participatory political culture in public spaces -both in and beyond the museum.Turning attention instead to recent Russian lawsuits accusing artists and curators of "inciting religious hatred," Anya Bernstein seeks to explain why the Russian intelligentsia proved conflicted about the issue, by demonstrating how an emergent configuration of visual signs, sacrality, and humanity has been put to political work in postsocialist Russia.Bernstein's essay features images of the controversial artwork in question -including several works following their defacement by right-wing vandals -rarely seen outside Russia.Varieties of violence committed in the name not of orthodoxy but of progress and expertise are at the heart of the second set of research essays, which
Referência(s)