Welcome to Musée des Beaux Arts
Twelve years after its launch in 2011, Musée des Beaux Arts is back—on Substack. A warm welcome to all my readers!
Dear reader,
“Musée des Beaux Arts” was the title of my first blog launched in 2011. I used it to post news of published articles, reviews, short stories, and updates on my “writing life”.
In those days, I was writing mainly for a Turkish audience and the site allowed me to share my Turkish work in unedited form. Because they featured an extra paragraph, a more creative headline, or a more interesting picture, my posts would be interesting to readers, I thought. The blog was my atelier: readers could take a peak at my process. Mostly editors, fellow writers and readers of my debut novel, Macera, followed Musée des Beaux Arts. We formed a community, I believed, that wanted to introduce interesting, and at times radical ideas to Turkey’s literary culture, via essays, articles and profiles.
Like most things in the digital age, that blog no longer exists. (Archive.org’s Way Back Machine has thankfully archived it, though.) I remember switching from my blog to Twitter around 2014 to communicate with readers. Those were Twitter’s interesting, inspiring years. Then Elon Musk came along.
My original blog, Musée des Beaux Arts, in its archived form on the Way Back Machine
His ownership inspired me to read more about the disturbing aspects of surveillance capitalism over the past year, and I became convinced that social media wasn’t a neutral tool between my work and readers, and it poisoned our interactions through the extraction and monetization of data.
Substack comes in the old-fashioned newsletter format, but also allows me to interact with readers. This is why I picked it as the new home for my writing. Substack’s owners don’t wage war against George Soros, or the trans community and don’t brand the progressive and thoughtful people “woke”. Enough reason to be here.
I will post newsletters on the revamped Musée des Beaux Arts about new articles, essays, books and events. (Of course, you can also continue to follow my work from my website.)
I write mostly about the decline of democracy in Turkey, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s assault on human rights and freedom of expression, and the various intersections of literature, culture and my personal experiences for a variety of publications, including The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Dial, The Point and Index on Censorship where I work as contributing editor. I review art shows in Istanbul for Artforum and review books about Turkey for The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Republic.
I cover tough subjects, from the Armenian Genocide to the oppression of Turkey’s Kurds and Erdoğan’s anti-LGBTQI campaigns. As a result, I can no longer write for Turkish literary magazines and book reviews—the extermination of our publishing scene has sadly made that impossible.
I published two books with IB Tauris/Bloomsbury Academic: Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey, and The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey, which will soon be reissued in paperback with a new foreword. I have a new book in the pipeline from Harvard University Press.
The paperback edition of my latest book, The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey will feature a new foreword
If you’re interested in any of that, Musée des Beaux Arts will help you get the latest!
As a parting gift, here is The Fall of Icarus (1558), the painting by Pieter Bruegel, and Musée des Beaux Arts (1940) the poem by W. H. Auden that inspired my writing over the years as well as this new newsletter. We can never understand the lives and pains of others—yet there is nothing wrong with trying.
See you soon!
—Kaya
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”, 1558
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
(London: Faber and Faber, 1940)