New Criterion back issues from December 2005:
At last ...(Notes & Comments: December 2005)
Dec 01, 2005 ... At least since the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, observers have understood that there exists a fundamental tension in American society between the passion for freedom and the passion for equality. In recent decades, in many areas of life, the passion for ...
Fire to the rescue.(Notes & Comments: December 2005)(teachers training)
Dec 01, 2005 ... What is the biggest swindle in the educational establishment today? A tough question, that: the contenders for the prize are many. But there is a lot to be said--by which we mean "said against"--the whole teacher-training and teacher-certification industry. It nurtures a closed-shop, ...
The New Criterion on art.(Notes & Comments: December 2005)
Dec 01, 2005 ... In this issue, for the fourth year running, we present a special section on art. Overseen by James Panero (about whom more in the next note), our December issues have become an opportunity for The New Criterion to step back and add to its usual coverage of art a passel of articles on some ...
Some family news.(Notes & Comments: December 2005)
Dec 01, 2005 ... In "A Speech Concerning Episcopacy," Lucius Carey, Viscount Falkland, observed that "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." Good advice, we've always thought, not least because of its implied corollary: that occasionally change is necessary. At The New ...
"Art in crisis".
Dec 01, 2005; ... [Today] we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style," of "unsuspected possibilities," theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weightlifters with cardboard dumb-bells .... What do we possess to-day as "art"? A faked music, ...
The fiasco at Ground Zero.
Dec 01, 2005; ... The last century offers countless examples of how one might treat a great monument destroyed by war. One might repair and rebuild it (as was done with the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino), preserve it as a ruin (Coventry Cathedral), or even replace it with a scrupulous facsimile (the ...
Criticism after art.
Dec 01, 2005; ... Discussions of art criticism never seem to go very well. Perhaps that's because there is no general agreement on what art criticism really is. For those of us who criticize art for a living, as distinct from those who practice art criticism for the university audience, we rather like it ...
Deaccession roulette.
Dec 01, 2005; ... The word deaccession is one of those bureaucratic coinages whose chief purpose is verbal obfuscation. If a museum director tells you he has "deaccessioned" eighteen Cezannes, you think for a second, "Oh, that's nice" while you wonder exactly how to conjugate the verb "to deaccess." What ...
The angelic friar at the Met.(Fra Angelico)
Dec 01, 2005; ... In 1896, a Scottish insurance magnate named Evan MacKenzie set himself to erecting a massive "medieval" castle on a glorious site overlooking the Mediterranean, hard by the outskirts of Genoa. For this extravagant client, a gifted young Florentine architect named Gino Coppede concocted a ...
A flesh look at Van Gogh.
Dec 01, 2005; ... It takes effort to come to grips with the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. Seemingly every aspect of his brief career--roughly ten years--and his short life--he killed himself at thirty-six--has been so thoroughly probed, analyzed, documented, and even popularized that it's almost impossible ...
The Schiele moment.
Dec 01, 2005; ... "Egon Schiele: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections" an exhibition on view at the Neue Galerie, will be one of the most popular events of the 2005-2006 art season. (1) Visitors to the newest addition to the Upper East Side's Museum Mile--the Neue Galerie, dedicated ...
The real Rodin.(Auguste Rodin)
Dec 01, 2005; ... Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), a sculptor I have long admired, can be a difficult artist to come to grips with. His major monument, the Gates of Hell, remained unfinished at his death. With some artists, "unfinished" is not an issue. Cezanne's Garden at Les Lauves in Washington's Phillips ...
Monet in Zola & Proust.
Dec 01, 2005; ... While reading and writing about the Impressionists, I realized that the life and personality of Claude Monet, the most popular artist of all time, remain largely unknown. He seems to have vanished into his pictures. Yet he lives on in two great novels: his friend Emile Zola's The ...
A conversation with Rackstraw Downes.(Interview)
Dec 01, 2005; ... DAVID YEZZI: You came to this country first as a teenager? RACKSTRAW DOWNES: I came here because of jazz, and I went to a prep school in Connecticut. There was a man there who'd freshly graduated from under Josef Albers and was very, very full of this enthusiasm and so on. It ...
"Eurylochus recalls the Sirens".(Poem)
Dec 01, 2005; ... <Pre> "Eurylochus recalls the Sirens" When we returned from Hell, that sorceressWho so loved our captain she set him free,Feasted us with meat and bread and wine,Praising us for our great-heartedness:"In going down alive to the House of Hades,You will have ...
The many faces of Memling.(Art)
Dec 01, 2005; ... The known facts of Hans Memling's (C. 1435-1494) life are few. He was likely born in Seligenstadt, Gcrmany, and almost certainly spent time in Rogier van der Weyden's workshop in Brussels before moving to Bruges, perhaps early in 14-65. As far as we know, he continued to work in Bruges ...
Exhibition note.(Art)
Dec 01, 2005; ... "Right under the Sun: Landscape in Provence, from Classicism to Modernism (1750-1920)" Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. September 22, 2005-January 8, 2006 This show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has an irresistible subject. At the very name of Provence, almost everyone by now ...
In defense of cover-ups.
Dec 01, 2005; ... "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up." That may turn out to be the most overused media cliche of the year. Like so many other morsels of media wit and wisdom it is clever, memorable, worldly-wise and wrong--at best a half-truth. Of course you can make a case that the cover-up is always ...
Jumping the shark.(Verse chronicle)
Dec 01, 2005; ... Kim Addonizio is that New Formalist dream girl, a hot babe who can bang out a sonnet on demand. If your vice runs to forms a little more obscure, how can you resist? Her come-on seems to be, "Wouldn't you like to peek at my sexy little sonnezhino?" The question isn't why sexual intercourse ...
Living with liberalism.(Book Review)
Dec 01, 2005; ... When reflecting on the political options available to us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I often say to myself with a certain resignation, "Liberalism--it's all we've got" What I mean, of course, is that for anyone in the modern world who wants a sane and decent political ...
Mencken No. 3.(Book Review)
Dec 01, 2005; ... Marion Elizabeth Rodgers Mencken: The American Iconoclast. Oxford University Press, 662 pages, $35 One of the most popular television game shows of my youth was a program called To Tell the Truth, whose celebrity panel matched wits with teams of three contestants, all of whom ...
The infamous philosophe.(Book Review)
Dec 01, 2005; ... Roger Pearson Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom. Bloomsbury, 480 pages, $35 In the spring of 1761, an aging Francois-Marie Arouet (a.k.a. Voltaire) took it upon himself to rebuild the small parish church that stood on his sprawling estate at Ferney. The ...
Kathmandu-sur-Rhone.(Notebook)
Dec 01, 2005; ... Here in la France profonde, the riots seem a long way off and scarcely credible. It is not that life here is perfect, far from it, and we have our own problems, albeit of a different order. M. Roux, who came with his mechanical digger to construct a new septic tank in the middle of our ...
Parodies of life.(Letter to the Editor)
Dec 01, 2005; ... To the Editors: Years ago I read Goodbye, Columbus and thought it was a decent book, mercifully short, though not a really compelling story. In later years I tried several other Roth titles, but I never got beyond page fifty. I had no idea why. Brooke Allen's "Roth ...
A ghastly assemblage.(Letter to the Editor)
Dec 01, 2005; ... To the Editors: I was so provoked by James Panero's review of the exhibition "David, Empire to Exile" (June 2005) that I felt compelled to respond to what was a ghastly assemblage of misinformation and diatribe passing as reflection on an exhibition. It is both ...