Put the words art controversy into Google News at the moment, and you’ll be directed to a couple of articles about an exhibit in Vienna of North Korean paintings.

The canvases are all Socialist Realist propaganda: Kim Il-sung accepts the hysterically grateful embrace of a soldier; happy round-cheeked girls take up their brooms. The pictures burst forth from the walls, big and bright; and their titles tell you exactly what’s up: The Dear Leader Reassures the Nation of His Commitment to its Security and Well-Being.

There’s a pretty impressive market for North Korean Socialist Realist canvases in the west, I suppose because there aren’t many of them (NK releases some of this work to Chinese dealers, but it’s still a closed country, and not much gets out), and because virtually no other countries produce this sort of thing anymore. Sophisticated Europeans and Americans seem to have a taste for what some people call Communist Kitsch; and while one can certainly find postmodern ironists in Europe and America who experiment with the conventions of agitprop, the North Korean product is authentic, part of a living totalitarian world.

The Vienna controversy arises from the exhibit’s total lack of commentary. You go there and see the pictures. There’s no introductory statement from the museum about how these paintings are cult-of-personality propaganda, how they were painted by servants of the state who, should someone buy them, will receive no compensation, since all proceeds go to the state… Nothing at all, apparently, frames this collection of comically stultifying products of arguably the world’s most repressive state.

The exhibition does not include any background explanation on the totalitarian nature of the North Korean regime, a compromise by the museum with authorities in Pyongyang that came under fire from some politicians and artists. But the MAK forcefully denied it was giving a free pass to the regime’s propaganda.

“Visitors know very well that North Korea is the last dictatorship in the world. There is really no need to remind them of this fact. We just want to show North Korean contemporary art, not to talk about politics,” [the exhibit director] told France24.com

The director of the museum says the same thing:

I am neither a politician nor a political scientist. And besides, everybody knows what sort of a regime that is; we don’t have to explain this to anyone,” [he] said, sipping coffee in his office on the same floor as the North Korean artworks.

The exhibit, then, represents a collision of two aesthetic extremes: The most explicit message-bearing art imaginable meets art for art’s sake. The most dire expression of the reduction of human life to ideology meets the nonchalant gesture of the Vienna curator and director: We need say nothing by way of accompaniment to these images. They are art, and that is all.

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And yet they are arguably not art, since they are the entirely conventional work of anonymous hacks done at the behest of a propaganda machine. Further, since they present themselves as political objects with a message, a message intended to inspire the North Koreans and – I guess – convert outsiders, it’s a little strange for the museum directors to take them apolitically, a little unfair to their intention…

After all, the exhibitors’ aestheticist gesture is itself a political expediency, arising as it does from the museum’s compromise with the regime, its willingness to be silent about its nature in exchange for permission to mount the show.

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A Los Angeles Times writer asks:

[Is the show] merely a stage for a regime that uses art not only as a messenger of its political ideology but also as a source of international funding?

It’s not that, as the reporter worries, the museum is a kind of a dupe of the North Koreans, allowing itself to be used as a platform for their social philosophy. No one thinks North Korea is anything other than a nightmare, and bringing its nightmare images of itself to Austria only deepens the darkness. But there is the intriguing matter of the striking popularity of North Korean propaganda images among hip Europeans and Americans.

[The] work has apparently become a profitable export that is able to skirt North Korea’s international isolation, helping to bring cash back home.

Ardent collectors can travel to the country to shop for art, said Rudiger Frank, professor of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna. Or works can be acquired at specialized galleries in more easily accessible locations, such as Beijing. Art can even be ordered directly from North Korean artists or the associations they work for.

The North Koreans themselves “did not understand at first why we would want such an exhibition.” You bet. Why should their trash generate ardency and high prices among people you’d expect to want Rothko or Freud on their walls?

UD asks her readers.

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Update: “What some in the west would call propaganda.” The BBC points out that really it’s a matter of opinion. Some might say what the North Koreans are drawing is propaganda. Others, great art.

… isn’t a satire.

Wall Street Journal: What should one look for when tasting a tea?

[Tea shop chief Thomas] Lee: It’s difficult. For instance, with Long Jing, a green tea, it’s a taste of tastelessness.

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Same crap here.

Raymond Scott is a British book dealer. One night, about ten years ago, he was in Cuba visiting his girlfriend, a dancer at Havana’s Tropicana Club, when his eye fell upon a 1623 Shakespeare First Folio just sitting there at the bar.

O brave new world,
That has such manuscripts in’t!

He grabbed it, hid it in his house in County Durham, and then, last year, flew to Washington’s Folger Library and asked the staff to verify its authenticity.

The staff had him arrested, and now his trial in England begins.

He says it’s all a conspiracy. “[E]xperts desperate to recover the stolen Durham University folio had conspired against him.”

UD is unclear what he means. As the trial progresses, perhaps the basis of his defense will become clearer.

The modestly named Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan’s new flagship education facility, has officially opened in Astana. President Nursultan Nazarbayev presided over the June 28 opening ceremony of the state-of-the-art campus on the outskirts of Kazakhstan’s rapidly developing capital.

“Young people should strive to enter this place. I agreed that the university would be named after me so that no-one would let me down,” said Nazarbayev addressing the university’s first matriculating class…

Yeah. Or, as an observer of Harvard University recently put it:

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

It’s just like the NCAA. People look at the NCAA and they say Why is that organization tax exempt? Why are all sorts of university sports goodies tax exempt? Do you know how much a luxury box costs? Hell of a tax write-off. Do you know how much the head of the NCAA makes? And it’s a non-profit! The tax laws make it easier for universities to pay their coaches four million dollars a year in order to recruit generations of players who leave school in nine months. Etc.

Eventually, people will begin to talk about immense wealth-generating tax exemptions based on all those fine upstanding educational values.

Indeed, because of the tax breaks, schools like Princeton and Harvard have become multibillionaires, a fact their struggling localities have noted… The localities want the schools taxed…

… U.S. municipalities still reeling from the economic crisis turn to their local universities, whose land holdings are mostly tax- exempt, to close budget shortfalls.

But wait just a minute! The schools will point out how they’re struggling too. They used to have 30 billion dollars, and now they’re skidding along on 20!

Princeton used to have 16 billion and now it has around 13 billion… Its neighbors note that it maintains a teeny student body. Why does it need all that tax-exempt-begotten-money? Does each student get a one million dollar scholarship?

… [One dealer] said that the Kansas incident shouldn’t tarnish the reputation of ticket brokers, just as the misdeeds of crooked car dealer or a rogue government official wouldn’t mean their entire professions were tainted.

Las Vegas ticket broker Ken Solky agrees. Yet he said the pressures on campus ticket managers to generate revenue for their schools could lead some to cut corners.

“You’re in a position to (ensure) that there are butts in a seat,” said Solky, president of his industry’s national association. “If I’m doing my job right, and I’m in the athletics department, I’m going to do whatever I can to get fans into the arena.”

The Kansas incident. A tiny drop in the big university sports slop bucket.

He liked to ski, and one of his children attended George Washington University. The couple donated money to the university during the 2008-09 school year.

Details about a husband and wife recently arrested in Boston for spying for Russia.

Feral rabbits on the University of Victoria campus face death or relocation and sterilization if they cross into “rabbit-free zones” starting this summer.

“The ground is just littered with rabbit feces,” said Tom Smith, executive director of facilities management. “There are many places on campus where you don’t even want to walk across a lawn.”

In its latest attempt to control the 1,600 bunnies that run rampant across campus, the university unveiled a population management plan on Monday.

The centrepiece of the plan are two zones – a “safe zone” in the centre of campus and a “dead zone” around residences, sports fields and nearby neighbourhoods.

Two hundred of the fuzzy creatures will be allowed to live in the 40-hectare safe zone within the perimeter of Ring Road. Food will be provided to entice the bunnies to stay within the prescribed space.

Rabbits found outside Ring Road will be euthanized…

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(Background on this post’s title here.)

A new British radio show transforms hedge funds into performance art.

A recent guest explained her view of hedge-fund strategy in her native Armenian, without translation.

Let’s play with all this money from our students and from the government! You get some; we get some…

You remember the Karen Pletz story, the one that started with the news that an obscure osteopathy school boasted one of the nation’s highest-paid college presidents [Scroll down.]…

Well, the lies and resignations and firings and lawsuits are flying, and we’ll follow all of that on this blog, especially if people say amusing things. But here’s an inevitable feature of stories like this (See Benjamin Ladner, American University. Indeed, one of the whistle-blowers in this case “appended [to her ignored letter to the board of trustees] a lengthy article from Washingtonian magazine about extravagant spending by a former president of American University that led to a federal investigation.”) — a lengthy article about how for years tons of warnings, petitions, complaints, rumors, and letters were dumped on the board of trustees.

But – as was the case at AU – when the board of trustees is itself scummy, none of that makes any difference.

University police say three incoming UCLA football players arrested last week face felony theft charges for allegedly stealing a student’s purse.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s much-quoted remark applies as much to university presidents; and it’s especially striking to see this gesture at public universities.

When Connecticut State University Chancellor David Carter came under fire from legislators last month, the head of CSU’s Board of Trustees issued a memo defending him, saying, among other things, that Carter had trimmed central office staff by nearly a third since his appointment in 2006.

And in fact Carter cut the staff by more than 28 percent as of this fiscal year, according to the legislature’s Office of Fiscal Analysis. But personal services costs for the central office still increased by 14 percent in the same period, fueled in part by double-digit raises for Carter and top members of his staff.

The raises far outpaced the rate of inflation and the growth in pay for faculty and other employees. The largest raises went to Carter, whose annual base salary rose from $247,505 in 2006-2007 to $362,733 two years later, a 46.6 percent increase…

Back in the hot lowlands after a week in the mountains, UD spent today inside writing. At one point in the late afternoon she put on the broad-brimmed hat she got in Savannah, plus shades and bug spray, and watered her front garden. Really soaked it. Stood in the scorch and drenched every blade.

Here’s a poem about heat. It’s by D.A. Powell, a UD favorite. We’ve seen him on this blog before.

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graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds
don’t tell me deluge. don’t tell me heat, too damned much heat

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I find Powell’s mix of out-there, messy, visceral emotion — here, for instance, he does nothing to hide the fact that he’s extremely bitter — with a sophisticated, polished, controlled poetic style, exciting. I’ve never seen anything quite like this particular clash. I really like it. Look:

either the postagestamp-bright inflorescence of wild mustard
or the drab tassel of prairie smoke, waving its dirty garments

either the low breeze through the cracked window
or houseflies and drawn blinds to spare us the calid sun

The first two stanzas give you alternatives – either this or that – but all four images on offer are pretty much the same thing: a hot, horrible, dessicated world. Stuck inside my house, blinds drawn against the heat, I can look at this or that, but existence has shrunk to a dry, small, low, drab, and dirty interior.

Calid is such a weird, rare word; its edgy enigmatic feel somehow contributes to the sense we get throughout the poem that the universe has nothing to do with miniscule unimportant us, that we’re small dry trivial plantlife…

one day commands the next to lie down, to scatter: we’re done
with allegiance, devotion, the malicious idea of what’s eternal

There’s nothing to want in these unlivable desert days. Instead of vibrant continuity from one day to the next, we get a sense that even nature knows how untenable it’s become. Nature commits a kind of diurnal suicide, telling each lurid summer afternoon to vanish, lie down, scatter.

We take nothing from these days – no memories, no experiences, only a conviction that we were wrong to love the earth, to feel part of it. We were wrong to assume we would be in a living world forever.

picture the terrain sunk, return of the inland sea, your spectacle
your metaphor, the scope of this twiggy dominion pulled under

crest and crest, wave and cloud, the thunder blast and burst of swells
this is the sum of us: brief sneezeweed, brief yellow blaze put out

Our arid land was once a vast inland sea, and we can picture that. We can at least generate the sort of refreshment that a metaphor represents… Yet all we’ve really generated with this particular picture is a bitter graphic representation of our thin dry twiggy lives, lives easily, promptly, to be pulled under by those deathwaves.

Yes, this is the sum of us. It’s all we are. “Sneezeweed flowers in late summer or fall. The common name is based on the former use of its dried leaves in making snuff, inhaled to cause sneezing that would supposedly rid the body of evil spirits.” We breathe for a few moments in a weedy world and then get snuffed out. Each of us is a small fire, soon extinguished.

Summer is cruel because it makes all of this visible; it makes us see the paltriness of our being, and the morbid reality of our fate. Next to the stark objectivity of the summer world, our metaphors, which try to dress up the world, make it beautiful and meaningful, give it the eternality of art, are really pathetic.

so little, your departure, one plunk upon the earth’s surface,
one drop to bind the dust, a little mud, a field of mud

the swale gradually submerged, gradually forgotten
and that is all that is to be borne of your empirical trope:

Each death, then — yours, for instance, my metaphor-generating friend — is a miniscule event, a raindrop that merely gives the dust of the world a bit more consistency… And then the poet drifts into an image of his friend’s grave, a small indentation in the earth, a swale, though even this, his grave, is “gradually forgotten.”

So much for the grand empirical fact of your having been here. You’re just one more trope, one more tired theme, one more poetic voice trying with various tricks of the tongue to make yourself and the earth come to life.

first, a congregated light, the brilliance of a meadowland in bloom
and then the image must fail, as we must fail, as we

graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds
don’t tell me deluge. don’t tell me heat, too damned much heat

Specifically, your trope is the trope of every life: the organizing of the disparate parts of a personality into a self (a congregated light), blazing youth (a meadowland in bloom), and then the failure of that image, the failure of that self to sustain itself. We’re both awkward animals at odds with the earth (we unmake and befoul our beds), and we’re graceless also in the sense that we won’t be granted any transcendence of this dirty dry globe.

So really – and now the poet goes from bitterness to anger – really, don’t give out with any more of that metaphor-shit. Earth as a deluge, blah blah… What’s the point of imagining it as being anything other than what it is? No more tired, consoling tropes! You see where the flood trope takes you in any case. And no more whining about the heat. As if, when it breaks, things will be any different.

… Dr. [George H.] Udvarhelyi felt that the well-rounded medical student needed to include art, music and literature in his educational repertoire.

His efforts resulted in the establishment at the Hopkins medical school of the Office of Cultural Affairs in 1977 — the first at a U.S. medical school — which brought prominent actors, musicians, artists and authors to the East Baltimore medical campus.

For years, Dr. Udvarhelyi had argued that after bringing the finest academically qualified students to the medical school, “we kill them,” he said in [a] 1995 article.

“Four years as a medical student, six years as a resident — 10 years they have no time to look at a book again, no time to listen to music,” he said in the 1995 article. “If you don’t give them a little free time to think, to enjoy these things, that is bad.”

As a result, he was able to bring such noted artists as Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Aaron Copland, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Richard Leakey, Leo Steinberg and Phyllis Diller to Turner Auditorium…

Phyllis Diller?

Anyway, read the obituary. He had one of those long, bizarre, multilingual, lives …