#Good done real war our nostalgia series#

Characters in spy and mafia fiction have “hit lists.” What’s at issue in Buffalo is a group of objects being put up for a sale by an art gallery’s board of directors at a time when traditional sources of funding are drying up. The second sentence of his Wall Street Journal essay about the Albright-Knox auction begins, “Included on the hit list,” which suggests where the rest of his essay is headed. According to an Alicia Patterson Foundation Newsletter report, he said he left his job at the Jüdisches Museum because “his expertise hadn’t been appreciated.” There are other versions of that separation. The last three of those jobs came in rapid succession: He spent two years each from 1996-2002 at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin and the Gilbert Collection in London. He worked for the Smithsonian, directed the museum program at National Endowment for the Arts and was director or assistant director at five museums. Nor is it reasonable to spread disinformation in a masked attack on the gallery’s director because he has spectacularly reinvigorated the gallery, opened it to a huge new audience and vastly extended its worldwide reputation as an institution that matters.Īlmost everything written or said in criticism of the deaccession plan has been based, with and without quotation marks, on Freudenheim’s November 15 article.įreudenheim has spent his career in and around museums. Nor is it reasonable or responsible to spread disinformation in a covert attempt to alter the character of an institution in the guise of trying to protect it. But it isn’t at all reasonable or proper to spread misinformation and to malign the character and actions of individuals whose only presumptive fault is to have made a decision someone with the ability and resources to make mischief doesn’t happen to like.ĭisagreement does not translate to venality or irresponsibility or corruption. It is perfectly reasonable and proper for members of a community to disagree about the policies and behaviors of public and semi-public institutions and the officials who lead them, and to express that disagreement in whatever forums they can find. A great deal of misinformation has since been put out as truth, and the personal attacks have become increasingly vicious.

#Good done real war our nostalgia series#

That led to a series of challenges to the sale that more and more degenerated into ad hominem attacks against the gallery’s board of directors and staff. Freudenheim, a 69-year-old resident of Washington, DC, published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal attacking the board’s decision. Coming of age amidst older people who cannot control their own lives, Ali is a balance of youthful immaturity and precocious wisdom that can only come from being outside of the demoralizing tangle that is adult emotions.On November 10, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery announced that it planned to sell a number of objects the directors decided were peripheral to the collection and could serve the gallery better by being auctioned off, with the proceeds going to an endowment fund restricted for acquisitions.įive days later, Tom L. Quinn as Ali stands out, both for her performance and for being the only character who feels fully formed. We have a sense of her fears, but Slate is hammy, whether portraying Dana as comically square or attempting to hit the emotions of love, remorse and precarious uncertainty. We know she likes Hillary Clinton’s fashion, and is generally cold, but, like Ben, she is barely a character and so the emotional turmoil of her partner’s betrayal never coalesces. Pat suffers the most, as she is totally undeveloped. But in such a character-driven film, the biggest problem is the characters themselves. Emotionally charged sex scenes are cringe-worthy. Humour is meagre, leaning too hard on 1990s nostalgia. Article contentĪs a whole, Landline is too slight.

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