• Following the death of French artist Françoise Gilot last week, the original New York Times The obituary title foregrounded not his creative interests and accomplishments, but his relationship with Pablo Picasso. Shock. For THE Guardianauthor Katy Hessel commemorates Gilot’s work and dissects the media’s obsession with women artists’ relationships with men:

The New York Times caption originally read: “An accomplished painter (and memoirist) in her own right, she did what no other of her mistresses had ever done: she walked out. The caption has since been corrected from “mistress” to “lover”, given that their relationship lasted nearly a decade, and the words “on her own” were removed. But I want to address these four words. This unnecessary parenthesis appears far too often, especially among women. It is used to highlight something that is “other” than what the establishment sees as the flaw: patriarchy.

This is not to delete or cancel certain stories and details. Sometimes they are important. But we have to be respectful of someone’s life and how they lived it, what they accomplished. If we need to root people to something else, in order to guide readers, wouldn’t it be the social and political context?

• Paul Kodjo was considered the “father of Ivorian photography”, with considerable influence on future generations of artists, but his works were nearly lost. Tiana Reid writes For Opening:

Self-presentation, modernity, aspiration, self-propulsion, confession, and the politics of respectability are at the heart of studio photography practices. Studio photography draws the line between self-determination and conformism, private and public life, performance and the mundane. In contrast, Kodjo’s pictures of nightlife and youth culture in particular are edgy and resist the cultural norms of the time. “Crazy, unbridled, carefree and joyful,” Léki says in the documentary, narrating over a slideshow of Ivorians dancing, partying, flirting, touching, swinging, smoking, shaping, hugging and posing. Kodjo also worked for the press, photographing the political elite, and he was the only black African photographer to cover the May 1968 revolution in France, commissioned by a government news agency created by President Félix Houphouët Boigny.

• Remember Maurizio Cattelan, whose banana artwork “Comedian” recently fell victim to a hungry Art Basel visitor? A judge has just ruled that Cattelan did not infringing the copyright of artist Joe Morford, who sued him in 2021 and claimed he had plagiarized one of his earlier works. Amanda Rosa has the story for the Miami Herald:

In 2001, Morford made “Banana & Orange”, an artwork of a fake orange and a fake banana glued to a green background with silver tape. Almost two decades later, Cattelan has achieved international fame and infamy for his work entitled “Comedian”, which was a real banana stuck to a wall.

Dana Susman, one of Cattelan’s attorneys at the Kane Kessler law firm, said she and her client were happy with the court’s decision. “This is an important case because it sits at the intersection of copyright and art law at a critical time in the art world,” she told the Herald. “We think the court is absolutely correct.

The Internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer-run and donation-based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Whenever a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is ultimately destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could to be what Usenet was meant to be, an internet-scale discussion center on every topic imaginable, if it weren’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting the discussions look like somehow to a profitable business.

We are living the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private forums, with the public web increasingly filled with LLM-generated trash bearing only stylistic resemblance to useful information.

• And to THE New YorkerKyle Chayka writes about how the internet is also turning us all into “content machines”:

Once upon a time, the internet was all about user-generated content. The hope was that ordinary people would take advantage of the low barrier of the web to post great things, motivated simply by the joy of open communication. We now know it didn’t quite turn out that way. User-generated GeoCities pages or blogs have given way to monetized content. Google made the internet more searchable, but in the early 2000s it also started selling ads and made it easy for other websites to integrate its ad modules. This business model is still what much of the internet is built on today. Revenue does not necessarily come from the value of the content itself, but from its ability to attract attention, to draw attention to advertisements, which are most often bought and sold by companies like Google and Facebook. The rise of social media in the 1920s only made this model more dominant. Our digital publication focused on a few global platforms, which increasingly relied on algorithmic feeds. The result for users was more exposure but a loss of agency. We generated content for free and then Facebook leveraged it for profit.

• Want to guess which New York City populations were most affected by air pollution from wildfires last week? Arya Sundaram has this report for gothamist:

About 70% of asthma-related visits during the period were in ZIP codes with predominantly Black or Hispanic residents. And 60% were in ZIP codes with higher poverty rates than the city as a whole.

• As trans femicide continues across Peru, an initiative called Féminas aims to provide health services and resources to trans women, writes Nicole Froio for Them:

Féminas is also working to simplify costly name change and gender marker processes on official documents, which often involve lengthy and costly legal back and forth between courts. While Huerta points out that some trans people are able to cover the cost of social transition, she challenges the idea that being able to afford it is the solution. For her and for Féminas, the right to social transition must be an inherent right of citizenship.

“Being a trans woman in Peru is difficult, and it’s also very complex,” says Huerta. “Because many trans women are able to earn money as sex workers, many believe they are treated as citizens because they are able to buy goods. Capitalism makes us think we are citizens because we are consumers, but it is not citizenship to be discriminated against when there is no legal protection against transphobia.

I support Ukraine in its self-defense against the Russian invasion. I don’t understand part of the left’s infatuation with the USSR or Putin’s Russia, nor their bizarre assertion that Russia, currently invading a sovereign nation, is anti-imperialist. I can understand why Gilbert’s Ukrainian fans would be upset by The snow forest, as it exists in their imagination. But I can think of better ways for Gilbert to have responded, starting with “I think you’ll be surprised when you actually read the book.”

As for Hitler, should people really have stopped reading German literature when the Nazis came to power, let alone any book, by anyone in the world, set in Germany – at n any period? My mother, who was Jewish, studied German at New Utrecht High in Brooklyn in the 1930s. Did memorizing Heine poems make her a Nazi sympathizer?

• Earlier today, India’s Child Welfare Act was upheld by the Supreme Court after months of uncertainty over the future of this crucial legislation. For the Washington PostAnn E. Marimow and Robert Barnes report:

The tribes and their supporters argued that the law was based on political, not racial, distinctions, and that Congress decided the law was necessary in part to secure a future for the tribes. They said the law was intended to rectify a past in which, according to studies, about a third of Indigenous children were taken from their parents to be placed in foster care or adopted. Over 85% of placements were in non-Aboriginal homes.

Tribal leaders called the decision “a major victory for indigenous tribes, children and the future of our culture and heritage”.

“We hope this decision will put an end to political attacks aimed at diminishing tribal sovereignty and creating instability in Indian law that has persisted for far too long,” said a statement from leaders of the Cherokee Nation, Morongo Band of Indians. Mission Indians, Oneida Nation and Quinault Indian Nation.

Compulsory reading is published every Thursday afternoon and includes a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth checking out.