Books and Arts Archives

Tuesday

August 30, 2022

The faulty towers of higher education

One of the few issues about which the American left and right agree is that higher education is, as Orwell would say, in a bad way. But even in that source of agreement lurk countless points of dispute, regarding the sources of dysfunction (corporate greed, grade inflation, libezoomers?) and possible solutions (ending tenure, forgiving debt, creating safe spaces?). In After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It, Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that the cause of the higher-education crisis is conceptual: we see higher education as a personal privilege rather than a public good, something to be earned rather than a right that is owed.

William Murchison

Frank Buckley’s right direction

You think life is complicated enough now? Try factoring in the arguments and counter-arguments that adorn — or something like it — the drive to define conservative instinct and policy. I mean, once upon a time, a true conservative subscribed to National Review and wore an “AuH2O in 64” lapel pin to tout the presidential aptitudes of Senator Barry Goldwater. (Pssst: I did both.) Ah, well. Today, as everyone presumably knows, we have libertarian conservatives; we have common-good conservatives; we have constitutional conservatives; we have integralist conservatives — all generally identified with the Republican Party. Amid this mélange of the outspoken, as well as the agreeably entertaining, the law professor Francis H.

Nicky Otis Smith

The time trap of Irma Vep

In April, director Robert Eggers told GQ that “every time period interests me except for the one we’re living in.” The director of The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman will never make a movie set in modern times: “I get enough of the kitchen sink in my kitchen sink... For whatever reason, it just does not inspire me. And you can’t shoot something that doesn’t inspire you.” That’s a good attitude for a director to have, but it’s alarming how many American filmmakers are either uninterested, unwilling or unable to make work that speaks directly, not only to our present moment, but to our future and its possibilities, however limited and grim. Who can blame anyone for being hopeless now?

Amber Duke

Country music finds its independent streak

Have you tuned in to a country radio station the past few years? You might have been surprised at some of the sounds coming through your speakers. A famous old-school Webb Pierce tune is chopped and screwed into an up-tempo hip-hop beat. Lyrics about an Applebee’s milkshake are accompanied by a booming bass. P!nk and Justin Bieber croon alongside Country Music Award winners. You’d be forgiven for thinking that all mainstream country really has to offer is saccharine, trope-filled pop music with a Southern accent. Nashville’s stranglehold on country radio has given the genre a bad rap (sometimes literally — here’s looking at you, Lil Nas X).

Mario Naves

Chroma chameleon

"Who knew the Greeks had such bad taste?” This comment was overheard at the preview for Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, a head-turning exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This slight wasn’t targeted at the current denizens of Greece, but, rather, their ancestors of yore. You remember the type: chiton-clad Athenians — let’s not forget the ladies in their peploi! — sauntering through the agora, pondering the nature of reality or, perhaps, the role of hoi polloi within a democratic society. They’re the folks whose aesthetic sensibilities were found wanting, at least to one denizen of twenty-first-century museum culture. What most of us know about life in antiquity is, I dare say, as broadly conceived as the above description.

Jane Coombs

Not your average Jo

She appears in one of the most beloved paintings in Washington’s National Gallery of Art — “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl” (1862) — but few people know her name. No longer. Joanna Hiffernan is now at the center of The Woman in White, an exhibition at the NGA that explores the close working relationship between James McNeill Whistler and his Irish model and mistress that produced some of the most beautiful and enigmatic paintings of the 1860s. “The White Girl” is a haunting full-length portrait of a young woman, with large blue eyes and Titian-red hair, in a white linen dress. She stands on a rug made from the pelt of a wolf (or is it a bear?

Bill McMorris

Closing the curtain on Norm Macdonald’s comedy

The biggest threat to the comedian of yesteryear was penury, but today even the most famous must dodge slaps, tackles and professional ruin. As a result, many have assumed a defensive posture. But on September 15, 2021, the court jesters were more defensive than ever. Norm Macdonald had perished twenty-four hours earlier, defeated by leukemia, and a chorus of his peers donned headsets to reassure the podcast world they’d “had no idea he was sick.” The one who spoke loudest was Conan O’Brien. Three months before O’Brien had wrapped his three-decade run on late night without a peep from the best guest he ever had: the man who gave us the Moth joke, “b-o-r-e-d,” Swedish-German and “that means he had sex with Madonna without a condom.

Gavin Smith

Crimes of the Future is David Cronenberg at his best

Canada’s all-time greatest writer-director has come a long way since his film Videodrome proclaimed “Long live the New Flesh” nearly forty years ago. Because his films are often horrifying, many mistake David Cronenberg for a purveyor of horror films, and to be sure he singlehandedly invented the now-fashionable “body horror” genre. But only a few of his films are horror movies per se, and they are way in the past. The subsequent fifteen aren’t so much scary as disturbing: think the experimental gynecological implements in Dead Ringers. And a couple are unapologetically transgressive: think the death-by-car-accident fetishists in his 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash.

Monday

August 1, 2022

William Boyd

Evelyn Waugh’s sincerest form of flattery

T.S. Eliot once made the significant point, in an essay on Philip Massinger, that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Eliot knew exactly what he was talking about (himself). However, change “poets” to “novelists” and the same pertinence applies. In fact, this wholesale, covert purloining may be true of all artists in all ages in all the seven arts. Let’s start with some backstory. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), as they say, needs no introduction. William Gerhardie (1895-1977) is almost wholly forgotten today, but in the 1920s he was the luminous young wunderkind of English literature — a kind of Donna Tartt or Sally Rooney of his times.

James Snell

Henry Kissinger’s likely last book is on leadership

Leadership, Henry Kissinger writes in his latest book, is a medium by which a society moves from the past of its memory to the future of imagination. It is “indispensable.” As Kissinger says, “Decisions must be made, trust earned, promises kept, a way forward proposed.” Without leadership, ordinary people are, he argues, incapable of “reach[ing] from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going.” But leadership is also, in Andrew Roberts’s phrase, “a ‘protean’ thing with little fixed definition.” Leadership is ultimately what leaders do; it goes in whatever direction they choose.

Francesca Peacock

Mary Gaitskill and the body electric

A man bites a woman’s breast with the aim of drawing blood, before taking a cigarette lighter to her stomach. The woman’s lack of arousal at this cruelty causes the man to enquire angrily why she lied when she told him she was “a masochist.” A young secretary is spanked by her boss for mistakes in her typing, before he masturbates over her naked behind. In a conversation between two young adulterous lovers, a woman casually admits to “flirting... like wild” with a man after she discovered he had “broke his girlfriend’s jaw.” These snapshots of masochism, warped desire and sexual depravity made Mary Gaitskill famous when her short story collection Bad Behavior first appeared in 1988.

Andrew Stuttaford

Berlin as the unreal city

"Berlin has too much [history]." Sinclair McKay cites this rueful observation in the preface to his new book about the city. Given that he is not simply discussing Berlin between the wars, or during the second of those wars, or in the Cold War that followed, but all of it, this may come off as a cry for help. History may — in those words attributed to, well, take your pick — be “one damned thing after another,” but when it came to Berlin, those things hurtled through time in a horde, colliding, overlapping and refusing to form an orderly line. And, in Berlin’s case, they had a way of mattering. Not for nothing does this book’s subtitle refer to Berlin as “the city at the center of the world.” Bad news for a writer aiming, presumably, at a degree of concision.

Andrew L. Shea

Philip Guston in the padded room

It was once a cliché of modern art that its principal aims included shocking its audience. Aesthetic aggression was the correlative of class warfare. It’s no accident, as the Marxists say, that avant-garde comes from the military lexicon. In painting, Gustave Courbet’s 1866 “L’origine du monde,” a rudely realistic, closely cropped view of an anonymous woman’s nude genitals, is often hailed as an early shot across the bow. Five years later, the artist would lead the Paris Commune in toppling over the Napoleonic Vendôme Column. For pugnacious creatives like Courbet and his descendants, consciousness-raising was always going to be a little bit uncomfortable. One can imagine how easily this gets out of hand.

Nicky Otis Smith

Sinking into the pixels

More than two decades into internet ubiquity, we’re finally seeing the rise of a generation raised by screens as much as by their parents and peers. Smartphones and social media may not have reared their ugly heads completely until the 2010s, but even in the lead-up to the millennium, computers and the “World Wide Web” were a frequent topic of pop cultural conversation. Within those conversations was always an enormous amount of anxiety. Chatroom “stranger danger” and scammers posing as Nigerian princes seem quaint now compared to the overflowing sewers on display daily in the most craven corners of the web. Digital anxiety is done.

Timothy Jacobson

Ukraine in black and white

Displays of wanton brutality and heroic resistance in the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 have prompted some in the West to proclaim a moment of “moral clarity.” Some caution might be wise here, since moral clarity in world affairs is not always as clear or as moral as its claimants think. It was Soviet ideology, succeeding czarist imperialism, that for so long smothered Ukraine, along with the other captive nations consigned to Stalin at Yalta. As Ukraine may now be slipping captivity at last, the West rejoices. But how clear is the clarity? History’s players sometimes switch roles even from one act to the next. It has not, for example, always been brutal Russians that heroic Ukrainians went up against. Eighty-one years ago, it was brutal Germans.

Alexander Larman

Arcade Fire: the last of the art-rockers?

After I saw the Canadian band Arcade Fire on tour in London in late 2010, I began my review of the gig by quoting Psalm 98: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.” My abiding memory of the evening was that it was fun. Despite the apparent solemnity of many of the act’s songs — several of which had been taken from their debut album, Funeral, and revolved around death and despair — the concert had a celebratory and upbeat aspect. It concluded (as virtually all of their shows had done) with a euphoric singalong of what has become their signature song, the cathartic “Wake Up.” A decade later, matters have changed. The world is in a considerably more anxious state than it was.

Jacob Heilbrunn

The underrated Kenny Dorham

Kenny Dorham was one of the jazz greats. The closest player in modern times to his intimate sound is probably Roy Hargrove, who, like Dorham, hailed from the Lone Star State. But despite all the accolades from the jazz cognoscenti, there is something plaintive about his career, down to the liner notes for his own albums. Indeed, right from the first sentence. Take the 1956 album Kenny Dorham and the Jazz Prophets on the ABC-Paramount label: “Kenny Dorham is one of those artists who have not as yet been accorded their deserved share of recognition.

Mario Naves

SoHo’s downtown drawings

Pity the poor Drawing Center. Founded in 1977 — or, rather, “born into the petri dish of the SoHo art scene in the 1960s and 1970s” — the Center was the pet project of Martha Beck, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She felt that the medium of drawing, being underserved by the arts establishment, needed its own specialized venue. Over the years, this downtown gallery has proved its mettle, mounting a variety of historical and contemporary exhibitions, as well as making a point of reaching out to working artists, some of whom later went on to greater recognition. But that petri dish? It’s changed mightily since the heyday of industrial lofts rented on the cheap.

Thursday

July 7, 2022

David J. Garrow

The rise of gay Washington

Anyone under fifty may be unaware of how largely invisible gay Americans were until at least the 1980s. James Kirchick’s incredibly rich and impressively thorough Secret City does not mention Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the criminalization of gay sexuality, but only post-Bowers did the push for gay equality, and eventually same-sex marriage, rapidly become what he rightly calls “the most successful social movement in American history.” In 1992, a Gallup poll indicated that 43 percent of Americans said they knew a gay person — double the figure from just seven years earlier — and across all of America it was that growing knowledge of the presence of gay people that allowed such a dramatic political transformation to take place.

Alexander Larman

The circus that was 80s literary Britain

Many years ago, when I mistakenly thought that I stood a chance of embarking on a career in publishing, I went for an interview at an independent publisher to be editorial assistant and all-around dogsbody. I remember the interview well, because it was the shortest I ever had. The first question was, “How do you like to be managed?” I replied, “sternly, with a large whip.” The second was “What would your ideal role in publishing be?” and I answered, “running Jonathan Cape in the Eighties.” It became clear that our paths were not to join, and I left the room with thanks and smiles. I don’t believe that I was ever actually rejected for the job.