Weekly Meanderings, 2 Nov 2019

Good morning from cold and snow covered Chicagoland.

Cancel Culture, President Obama speaks (well):

Which brings me to what Obama said at an Obama Foundation event Tuesday about young people, social media and the demand for absolute purity of belief in all things. Here’s the key bit:

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy, there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids. And share certain things with you.“

Obama went on to note that he is bothered by a trend he sees “among young people particularly on college campuses” where “there is this sense that ‘the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that’s enough.'” Added Obama: “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. if all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”

It would be easy to see Obama’s comments as a shot at President Donald Trump. Because, well, Trump’s entire presidency is about sending tweets and casting stones.

But I think Obama is up to something much more complex — and important here. The rise of “cancel” culture — particularly on the left and particularly on social media — is one of the defining hallmarks of our culture in the post-Obama presidency. Say something wrong, tweet something people disagree with, express an opinion that is surprising or contradicts the established view people have of you, and the demands for you to be fired, de-friended or otherwise driven from the realms of men quickly follow.

A 10-inch painting that hung in a French woman’s kitchen for so long she had no idea how it came to be in her family’s possession was found to be the work of Italian artist Cimabue earlier this year. It was expected to sell at auction for upwards of $6 million, but this weekend it ended up selling for $26.8 million instead.

The painting was discovered during a valuation of the contents of a house owned by a Frenchwoman living north of Paris by auctioneer Philomène Wolf who immediately suspected it was more than just your average religious icon. Wolf consulted Eric Turquin, an art historian based in Paris, who, along with other researchers and colleagues, concluded the piece, called “The Mocking of Christ,” was painted by the Italian artist Cimabue sometime around the year 1280.

The historians used traditional techniques like infrared photography to analyze brush strokes and confirm they all came from the same hand, as well as comparing the piece’s gold ornamentation to other known works by Cimabue, who’s considered one of the father’s of the Italian renaissance art movement. The painting is also believed to be part of a larger multi-panel piece, of which only two other panels exist: “Flagellation of Christ,” in the Frick Collection in New York, and “Madonna and Child Enthroned Between Two Angels,” at the National Gallery in London. As a result, the historians were able to compare the patterns of holes made by worms in the painting’s poplar wood frame to the other two panels and found that many of the holes lined up, which helped further confirm the piece’s authenticity.