“I actually checked to ensure this was not a leftover April Fools’ story.” That was how my colleague Christopher Wilk, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, sent me word of a “Brexit Museum” now being mooted in the UK.
Fallen Idylls
Ruins in the American collective consciousness
Critical thinking/Difficult issues: Bearing the weight
The field of decorative arts reflects the inheritance of patriarchy in ways that are rarely acknowledged.
A Fighting Chance
The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia opened on April 19th.
And that’s the way it isn’t
Anxiety about fake news has also been greeted with bemusement by historians, who note that the phenomenon is hardly new.
Matters of Taste
David Remnick, in a post-election piece in the New Yorker, went so far as to describe Trump as “vulgarity unbounded.” Are we about to have a four-year crash course in this topic? Maybe it’s time to take a closer look.
How we see refugees, yesterday and today
In April 1914 the Modernist Studios in New York City held an “Exposition of Bad Taste.” Wallpaper patterns that had been popular in the 1880s served as the backdrop for a crowded display comprising “marble-topped furniture, seaweed, wax flowers, and other treasures under glass; samplers, homemade paintings, ornate chinaware of every description, and countless articles such as were considered extremely genteel in the old days.”
Critical Thinking: Confederate Flags and Monuments
There’s trouble on Monument Avenue. This grand boulevard in Richmond, Virginia, is the symbolic heart of the city. It is leafy and quiet, and lined with grand architecture dating largely from the early twentieth century. As its name suggests, it also features a series of monuments. One is dedicated to the tennis player Arthur Ashe. All the others pay tribute …