Though the advent of social media has created a brilliant democratic openness, those same social media also carry a lot of destructive tendencies. Many of us remember that we once received thoughtful letters from people who agreed or disagreed with what we may have voiced in an essay, an exhibition, or a lecture; and we knew that those complimentary or dissenting responses each required a certain amount of time to compose.
Melissa Chiu has been the director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden since 2014. During that time, she has focused on bringing the museum and its collections into the twenty-first century, with direct attention to what she terms “radical accessibility.”
We like to think of culture as providing a balancing and healing element for the human condition. And the present political circumstances all over the world make us all the more aware of how important such balance is—how important it is for us to act in harmony with, and with consideration for, each other.
Having followed Edmund de Waal’s work as both a writer and an artist ever since the publication of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), and Atemwendeb, his first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in 2013, I’ve come to realize how Edmund has managed to maintain a remarkable balance between on one hand the making, and on the other hand the writing.