In the past few months, Chinese activist artist Ai Weiwei once again entered the spotlight, albeit for a less dire reason than he has in years past. Ai, hoping to use Legos for an art exhibit, found his request for a bulk purchase denied by the company. The Lego corporation,
Month: November 2015
M.I.A is an artist known for her controversial songs that address critiques of first world perspectives on the outside world. Most known for her 2007 mega hit “Paper Planes”, she recently put out a new song that focuses on the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis that is wracking the world. While
November 25, 2015 was United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Over in China, a group of activist artists planned to open up an exhibition highlighting the fight against domestic violence in support of this day. However, when the group of feminist artists had gone to
Is removing history a crime? What if that history is a crime within itself? The gum wall in Seattle, Washington located by the famous Pike’s Place market has been a part of the city’s culture since 1993 and grew to be inches thick, fifteen feet tall, and went the length
History has a tendency of repeating itself, especially within the political realm. Rage Against the Machine is a metal rock band, formed in 1991 whose songs mainly focus on political activism and revolution against the government. Almost sixteen years ago, they released the song, “Sleep Now in the Fire” off
Violent video games have been extremely popular in our society since the first wave of them were released throughout the 90’s. In fact, in 2008 the Pew Research Center estimated that 97% of teens played some sort of video game, and two-thirds of them included violence. Along with these findings,
Literature is filled with authors who used pseudonyms in an effort to get their work published. Often, members of minority factions have changed their names in order to seem more like the supposed mainstream ethnicity. So one can easily imagine a situation where an author, fearing that their name will
It sounds like the start of a bad joke: an art forger, after having stolen massive numbers of pieces, discovers that his own forgeries have also been stolen and replaced by an even worse forgery. Yet nevertheless, it happened. To summarize: Xiao Yuan, who was working at a librarian at
Until recently, performance art had not been widely accepted as a form of expression. However, one woman was able to change this public opinion in the mid-1970s. Born in Belgrade, Serbia, Marina Abramović’s first well-known performance piece proved that calling herself the “grandmother of performance art” is anything but inaccurate.
The line between cultural appropriation and appreciation is thin, but some things just can’t be argued. Cultural appropriation is a highly contested issue, and yet again we see another example of this with the Inuit people. The Inuit are a people living in the North, whose clothing consists of parkas,