Justice & Injustice
Peter Schjeldahl thinks through the recent sale of a Roy Lichtenstein painting to start a criminal-justice reform fund by Agnes Gund, who has been “bettering New York for more than half a century, since she arrived, from Cleveland, as a banking heiress with a deep love of art, later bolstered by a master’s degree in art history from Harvard and a gnawing social conscience.” [The New Yorker]
“Hobby Lobby, the private Oklahoma company that won a landmark Supreme Court case by pleading that its business was run according to rigorously moral Christian principles, has been caught importing millions of dollars worth of smuggled Iraqi antiquities.” Among the reasons, according to Hobby Lobby itself: “the company’s mission and passion for the Bible.” [Los Angeles Times]
Inspirations
Take a close look at a curious volume kept by the storied 19th-century Parisian photographer Félix Nadar, the subject of Adam Begley’s new book The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera. [The Paris Review]
A new video essay considers ways that David Lynch might be paying tribute to Magritte, Francis Bacon, Edward Hopper, and more. [IndieWire]
British photographer Ivar Wigan chronicled his heady, bass-intensive times “amid the hustlers, dancers, and sound systems of Jamaica’s dancehall scene.” [The Guardian]
Up in the Air
A Smithsonian curator is skeptical about a photograph that purports to show ’20s/’30s-era aviator Amelia Earhart alive past the point when many thought she’d crashed into the sea. [Smithsonian]
Trends
A list of nine young creatives to keep eyes on in the New York Times Styles section includes among its artistic ranks Juliana Huxtable, Michael Xufu Huang, Grace Ahlbom, and Lexie Smith. [The New York Times]
Should art historians pay closer attention to comics? [JSTOR Daily]
Misc.
Giovanni Garcia-Fenech chronicles the time in art school when playwright Edward Albee almost bought one of his paintings but didn’t “because I used to be too cool to care.” [Hyperallergic]
“Christian Boros, the art collector who lives in a Nazi-era bunker.” [The Financial Times]
“Are Witches the Ultimate Feminists?” So wonders the new book Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. [The Guardian]