New Criterion articles from April 2001

New Criterion archives from April 2001

Notes & Comments: April 2001.
April 1, 2001... On "moral equivalence"... The American Historical Review is widely considered the preeminent English-language journal for the discipline of history. The journal, a publication of the American Historical Association, is also conspicuously...

How civilizations fall.
April 1, 2001... How do civilizations fall? Islamic thinkers had an image for it. Consider a civilization based upon a court in a thriving city--Baghdad, for example. Arts and the intellect flourish. But over several generations, as the great Islamic...

The perils of designer tribalism.(evaluation of certain modern views of culture)
April 1, 2001... A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of...

Gardens for the sleeves.(Review)
April 1, 2001... In A.D. 751, not quite thirty years after the Prophet Muhammad had made his epochal flight, or hijrah, from Mecca to Medina, and less than twenty years after his death, the conquering Muslim armies in the East defeated the Chinese governor Kao...

Discovering La Rochefoucauld.(Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld)
April 1, 2001... I remember the day I discovered La Rochefoucauld; or rather, to put it the way round that is now de rigueur among historians of the Spanish conquest of America, the day La Rochefoucauld discovered me. I was twelve years old, and I had been sent...

The lightning & the key: a letter from William Franklin to Joseph Priestley.(Poem)
April 1, 2001... June 7, 1802 Exile to exile, England to America, Driven hence by nothing more than faith In our convictions, we commune once more, Old friend, man of science, man of God. Here they torched your house, there they...

Rome away from Rome.(Royal Academy's exhibit of Baroque artists)
April 1, 2001... Anyone fascinated by the Metropolitan Museum's recent exhibition of paintings by Evaristo Baschenis, the Northern Italian inventor of the still life of musical instruments, needs only the most minimal excuse to arrange a trip to London. The...

"John Walker: Time and Tides".(art exhibition of landscape and war paintings)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... "John Walker: Time and Tides," at Knoedler & Company, New York. January 18-March 3, 2001 An English-born resident of Boston, John Walker paints on the littorals of abstraction, informed by its history and aims, but not willing to forsake...

"Nell Blaine: The Abstract Work".(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... "Nell Blaine: The Abstract Work" at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. January 27-March 10, 2001 Like Walker, the American artist Nell Blaine (1922-1996) was also concerned with the interplay of abstraction and representation, although she...

"Jules Pascin: Important Works".(art exhibit)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... "Jules Pascin: Important Works" at Forum Gallery, New York. February 8-March 10, 2001 That someone would try to revive the reputation of Jules Pascin (1885-1930) is a welcome and not entirely surprising occurrence: both his subject matter...

"Edvard Munch Paintings 1892-1917".(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... "Edvard Munch Paintings 1892-1917" at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery, New York. February 7-March 10, 2001 The masterly Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944), whose paintings were exhibited in a rare show in New York in March, never...

Filling the Philharmonic's podium.(conductors of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra)
April 1, 2001... Orchestras, like people, lead lives, and the histories of orchestras inevitably become the histories of a series of lives. In the confined world of the American symphony orchestra, the lives of its putatively top members have therefore a...

The shock of the few.
April 1, 2001... You'd think the media would get tired of it. It's more or less the same story every time some deranged youth takes a gun to school and starts shooting the place up--like Kipling's Kurrum Valley scamp "who knows no word of moods and tenses" ...

From Englishmen to Americans.(Review)
April 1, 2001... One evening in the summer of 1787, during the Constitutional Convention, a group of old friends gathered in Philadelphia for dinner. The talk turned to General Washington, now presiding with implacable dignity over the convention's sessions. As...

A Century of Recorded Music.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Timothy Day A Century of Recorded Music. Yale University Press, 306 pages, $35 A few years ago a friend played for me a tape copy of an Edison cylinder recorded by Johannes Brahms in Vienna in 1889. Edison's agent in the city, Theo...

The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Martin Davis The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing. W. W. Norton & Co., 237 pages $26.95 "Every morning I would sit down before a blank sheet of paper. Throughout the day, with a brief interval for lunch, I would stare at...

The Computer and the Brain.(Review)
April 1, 2001... John von Neumann The Computer and the Brain. Yale University Press, 112 pages, $9.95 "Every morning I would sit down before a blank sheet of paper. Throughout the day, with a brief interval for lunch, I would stare at the blank sheet....

The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Francis Haskell The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. Yale University Press, 208 pages, $25 The precipitous decline in museum standards over the course of the last quarter century has many sources,...

Museums in the German Art World.(Review)
April 1, 2001... James J. Sheehan Museums in the German Art World. From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism. Oxford University Press, 258 pages $35 The precipitous decline in museum standards over the course of the last quarter century has...

Letters.
April 1, 2001... P.C. medicine To the Editors: When Anthony Daniels reviewed my book Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, Health and Human Evolution (February 2001), he got me badly wrong. Many of us started out with ideas rather like his, but research over the...