CHICAGO CARLESS

(Photo: The light of illumination goes dark at Chicago’s Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies.)

[Note: Late on Friday, the Chicago Tribune article I discuss in this post was heavily updated to include additional details about the "Imaginary Coordinates" exhibit and the criticisms that led to the Spertus Institute's decision to cancel it early. Primary among those criticisms: essentially, that merely thinking about the borders of the Holy Land is somehow "anti-Israel". So the moral of this story seems to be, as far as the Spertus Institute is concerned, it's OK for there to be only one side to a story...]

As reported in today’s Chicago Tribune, this week, downtown Chicago’s Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies bowed to pressure from Jewish United Fund (JUF)/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago president Steven Nasatir and closed its multimedia exhibition on Holy Land boundaries, “Imaginary Coordinates”, three months early.

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(Photo: Sometimes art can really pull your chain. Credit: Looper.)

If you aren’t anal retentive, you shouldn’t be curating art exhibits. If the idea of dropped apostrophes, mis-attributed dates, and dog-eared inscriptions doesn’t keep you up at night, you shouldn’t be responsible for the hanging of museum shows in major metropolitan areas. I cannot stress this point strongly enough.

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(Photo: Chicago’s Looper photoblog zooms into its second anniversary. Credit: Looper.)

Today, Devyn Caldwell’s Looper photoblog celebrates its second anniversary. For the past two years Looper has focused intently on downtown Chicago, featuring edgy, insightful, and often unexpected images of the city’s urban core for a loyal and growing audience. Browse Looper and see for yourself why I consider Devyn to be Chicago’s best urban photographer since the seminal work of the mid-20th century’s Charles Cushman.

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(Photo: Casas Grandes vessel. Credit: Yale University Press.)

From the way the Art Institute of Chicago talks about its latest temporary show, Casas Grandes, you might decide to give the exhibition of ancient North American pottery a pass. You’d miss out on some surprisingly modern fun–as, apparently, did the show’s curators.

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