The more things change…In preliminary excavations for a new campground at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, archaeologist Mark J. Lynott and colleagues unearthed artifacts showing that “people camped for short periods of time in this area for the last three thousand years” (Singing Sands Almanac, Summer).
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“While plenty of people make money from art-related activities and the American public consumes the by-products as ‘Culture,’ artists are doing their historic thing: starving and praying for fame,” writes Montana painter Karen Kitchel in the Chicago-based New Art Examiner (June/Summer). “The art world is a huge aesthetic and economic system, with thousands of players at every level. Consider this partial list: galleries, collectors, curators, museums, art schools, other ‘arts-related’ businesses (including: critical and visual publications; grant-writing guides, workshops and advisors; professional organizations; public relations material and experts; documentation services, equipment, and materials; artist self-help workshops and consultants; art appraisal, insurance, storage, packing, and transport; installation, etc.), oh, yes, the public, and finally, artists. Like all fields, ours is a pyramid– a food chain. It’s not a mistake that artists appear at the bottom of this list. We are the plankton. It seems everyone is making a buck from the culture business, but how much of it have you seen lately?
“What began as a radical idea–that reform was a woman’s business– became corrupted by dismissive men into the notion that reform was only a woman’s business,” writes James Krohe Jr. in Chicago Enterprise (July/August). “This association is a prejudice of long standing in Chicago, largely due to the conspicuousness of Hull House as a model….Indeed, the sniggering contempt for reformers that oozes from the experts gathered at WBEZ radio’s ‘Inside Politics’ sounds a lot like little boys everywhere who have managed to put one over on the nuns, the teachers, the mothers of the world. They ain’t ready for reform, but they are ready for a good spanking.”
We do guarantee there will be weather of some kind. Mark Fernau and David South of Argonne National Laboratory in ANL’s publication Logos (Spring), on the uncertainties in computer models used to predict global warming: “For the Great Lakes region, for example, the models cannot even agree on whether summer rainfall–of importance to agriculture–will increase or decrease.”
