Even no. 7
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The summer issue of Even travels from Seoul to São Paulo, from Paris to the Pacific, to wrestle with the force of art in an age of civic discontent.
Issue 7 of Even is on newsstands now. Visit evenmagazine.com to subscribe.
Essays
The Stettheimer Set
Florine Stettheimer, painter of parties and department stores, is a modernist master. And today’s artists know it, says Matthew J. Abrams.
“One of Stettheimer’s smartest and most subversive achievements was to create a salon-like space for artists and others, and then to use painting to map and theatricalize the social space she had built.”
Arrested Development
South Korea‘s first female president is behind bars. For the directors of the country’s cult film scene, Seoul is a viper pit and gangsters are in charge, writes Michelle Cho.
“In films like New World, Inside Men, or Asura: City of Madness, all domestic box office successes produced during Park’s presidency, the characters are drunk on power…. The primary drama, throughout, is not whether or not crime will be punished or characters will reform themselves. It is, rather, how individuals suffer in a double bind, where unveiling the true coordinates of power leads to catastrophic instability.”
Ordinary Beauty
Who would miss the National Endowment for the Arts most? Author Emmett Rensin visits the museums of central Iowa.
“I want the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities not for their excellence, but for their mundanity. I want them because they represent, in small ways, the constant churning baseline of American culture.”
Two interviews with editor Jason Farago
Charline Von Heyl on dirty pastels and Cologne’s bar scene:
“When I started out I wanted the paintings to basically torture people. [Laughs] What I want now is something that seduces more than it angers.”
Christodoulos Panayiotou on Cyprus’s carnival and the Sun King’s ballet slippers:
“You have here an art which is regarded as a highly sophisticated emotional expression—ballet—that is radically central to a political project: the governance of Louis XIV. The world is ballet, and he is in the center of it. Ballet seems to work as a façade for every form of power.”
Reviews
In New York, Paris, and Moscow, three views of a Soviet century, by Zoë Lescaze
Jimmie Durham and chocolate statues from the Congo, by Joanna Fiduccia
China at the museum and the multiplex, by Kanishk Tharoor
The art of war from Goya to Jason Rhoades, by Travis Diehl
Negatives
Judith Thurman of the New Yorker speaks about Rei Kawakubo, and what wearing a Comme des Garçons wedding dress might do to your marriage.
Plus: the cultural obsessions of Emmanuel Macron, São Paulo’s Trumpist mayor and his wife’s dubious art, the Chinese historical museum Hong Kong would rather not build, and a postcard from Eurovision in Kiev
Even More
Our picks for the summer’s most important shows, including “American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith,” in Washington, and “Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia,” in Tokyo.
Portfolio
A 13-page exploration of the art of Hawaii’s Jane Chang Mi, and what you can find underwater.