Joan Kee
Joan Kee is currently the Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.
There may have been a worse time in US history to be in higher education, but I’m not sure when. Working in art history, a field that faces constant skepticism even among those who claim to love learning, I feel this acutely.
In 2016, Apple replaced the design of its “gun” emoji. Banished from keyboards and screens worldwide was the gray revolver; in its place was a fluorescent green squirt pistol. Other platforms followed suit. For some, the switch amounted to censorship.
From renting studio space in which to live and work to expectations concerning the sale and reproduction of artwork, making decisions with legal implications has been increasingly entrenched in being an artist.
They are images that, once seen, can never be unseen. Three large black-and-white photographs from 1995 show Ai Weiwei dropping a Han dynasty vase allegedly costing thousands of U.S. dollars. Known collectively as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, the photographs have been cited as evidence of a willful iconoclasm, despite their having been made under far more prosaic circumstances (according to one account, Ai was simply attempting to test the speed of his new camera.)