Good Morning,
The Book of the Month Club turns 100 this year, and its growth strategy is almost a provocation: human curation. The service has added members every year since it dropped “Club” from its name, now past 400,000, on a simple premise — “We don’t depend on algorithms to determine your next book” (Publishers Weekly). Houston’s Menil is making a slower version of the same idea, reopening its long-shuttered fresco building for site-specific commissions that will sit for five years each (Houston Chronicle).
The harder question underneath the day is who pays for any of it. The Obama Foundation raised its presidential center on six donations of $50 million or more, then declined federal library status altogether — privately capitalized cultural memory, on the donors’ terms (Chicago Sun-Times). Against that, the public sector is thinning: the Louvre’s director told the French Senate his museum is “running on fumes” (ARTnews), the BBC is cutting 550 jobs (The Hollywood Reporter), and a House committee voted to axe the Education Department’s only arts-education grant (Hyperallergic).
Meanwhile, Trump’s repainted Reflecting Pool came out not flag-blue but Packers-green (The Atlantic). Not quite the look anyone was going for.
All of our stories below.
Doug
