Culture Wars Revisited at the Philadelphia Art Museum

Prompted by the Smithsonian Institution’s removal of a controversial artwork from an exhibit about homosexual identity, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted a photography exhibition that looks back to the so-called culture wars of the late 1970s through the 1990s, when social conservatives fought to prevent tax money from supporting art that dealt with homosexuality, feminism, racism or other contentious issues.

Patti Smith’s “Memoir” Paints her Youth with Mythic Brush

Whether a memoir or an act of romantic self-mythologization, Patti Smith’s book is a sensitive evocation of her and Robert Mapplethorpe’s entwined histories in the sixties and seventies as they struggled to make their way as artists. The Bildungsroman seems destined for the screen.