The Ghettos of Eastern Europe

Posted by on May 23, 2013 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured | 0 comments The first ghetto was a Jewish neighborhood in Venice located on an island that had been set aside for a foundry (getto in Italian). The 1,000 Jews who lived there in the early 16th century had free rein during the day but were locked in at night. There was very little space on the island. When more Jews arrived there to escape persecution elsewhere in Europe, the ghetto had to build upwards,...
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The City and the City

Posted by on May 22, 2013 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured | 0 comments Kosice is not simply one city. Like any Central European metropolis worthy of the name, many urban incarnations coexist cheek and jowl in this charming capital of eastern Slovakia. In the Old Town, a medieval church overlooks a beautifully preserved Renaissance palace that abuts an Art Deco hotel from the Czechoslovak era. The more than a dozen names of the city over the last 800 years –...
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Playing Catch Up

Posted by on May 20, 2013 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized | 0 comments Many people I’ve interviewed in East-Central Europe have talked about their initial expectations in 1989-90 that their countries would soon leap the development gap and join Europe proper. Within a few years, they thought they’d be living in the equivalent of Austria or Italy. When several years went by, and then several more, and they were still not living in these Austria-like countries,...
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Bulgaria’s Political Future

Posted by on May 18, 2013 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured | 0 comments On May 12, Bulgarians went to the polls and gave the nod to the party — Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) — they’d just ousted from government in demonstrations a few months before. The party that came in second, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) was the successor of the Communist Party that had earlier generated a huge wave of protests in 1989-90. Faced with...
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Curating the Curators

Posted by on May 17, 2013 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized | 0 comments There is an art to curation. Curators must not only choose the works for an exhibition, which involves making aesthetic judgments about “good” and “bad” as well as what fits together according to the exhibition’s theme. Curators must also provide a context for understanding the art. They put texts on the wall that identify histories, genealogies, themes. They produce catalogs that...
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The Artist as Bullhorn

Posted by on May 16, 2013 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized | 0 comments We quickly become inured to stimuli. We put on a shirt and immediately feel it against our skin. But then, unless we have a neurological disorder or something in the shirt causes a chemical reaction with our skin, we no longer feel the shirt. The same holds with other senses. We become accustomed to the odor of our offices. By the fifth spoonful of an ordinary bowl of soup, we are no longer...
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