New Criterion articles from December 2002

New Criterion archives from December 2002

Tenured adolescents. (Notes & Comments: December 2002).(recent exchange between United States Air Force Academy cadet and Peter N. Kirstein, tenured professor of history at Saint Xavier University in Chicago)
December 1, 2002... For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of `is country" when the guns begin to shoot;... --Rudyard Kipling, "Tommy" (1890) We have been reminded of Kipling's poem "Tommy" a good deal...

Meanwhile, at Cornell ... (Notes & Comments: December 2002).(debate on whether to sell vibrators)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2002... While Saint Xavier busies itself with damage control over a history professor who cannot distinguish between protest and pedagogy, Cornell University's health service is debating the important question of whether to sell vibrators in its...

Starting out.(painting)
December 1, 2002... This past summer I focused on buttercups in tall green grass. I have been attracted to this motif since the mid-1950s. There is no perfect solution. If I settle for the tone differences, the green becomes dead. If I settle for the correct...

Does abstract art have a future?
December 1, 2002... It is hard to tell if abstract painting actually got worse [after the 1960s], if it merely stagnated, or if it simply looked bad in comparison to the hopes its own accomplishments had raised. --Frank Stella, Working Space, 1986 It must...

The art of collecting.(art collecting)
December 1, 2002... When asked to say something about "collecting," the first thought that enters my mind is a negative one: it is not "accumulating" And a second negative: it is not "investing" What then, stated positively, is collecting? It is acquiring objects...

Art history, Oxford style.(Oxford History of Art series)
December 1, 2002... Rumors of the death of the Western canon have been greatly exaggerated, and no more so than in the field of art history. There Giotto and Michelangelo, Cezanne and Picasso soldier bravely on, holding the high ground, and they will continue to...

Architecture & ideology.
December 1, 2002... "The problem of architecture as I see it... is the problem of all art--the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form" --Professor Otto Silenus, in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall This meticulous observance of...

Bonnard's "Butterflies".
December 1, 2002... A glamorization of modern art as revolutionary runs the risks, first, of neglecting what modern art may share with the past and, second, of promoting the myth of alienation from the past as an explanation of modernist fragmentation and...

Adolf Gottlieb.
December 1, 2002... For years a wonderful little etching has hung near my desk. It commemorates an evening in 1933 when a group of young artists in Brooklyn Heights, three men and three women, celebrated their friendship, ambition, and dedication to modernism by...

The writings of Henry Moore.('Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations')(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... "It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job" cautioned Henry Moore in 1937, relatively early in his career. "It releases tension needed for his work." Strange, then, that over the next fifty years (he...

Teaching poetry at the school for the blind. (New poems).(Poem)
December 1, 2002... Teaching poetry at the school for the blind Their struggle to meet the image in the dark is one we know--the storms, the hesitation--but the shifting bridge they walk between idea and braille's brief physical translation ...

Love song. (New poems).(Poem)
December 1, 2002... Love song There's poetry in this business of love, in the slow dancing fall into bed, when, after all our false attempts, the earnest lines we've heard and said, two clumsy, rambling, unlike things are finally,...

Unused lines. (New poems).(Poem)
December 1, 2002... Unused lines While words we pamper and protect march off in search of meager fame, these lines like bastard kids collect, skulking through our notes in shame, the discards of our intellect, false starts, limp...

Fight club. (Dance).(Twyla Tharp's 'Movin' Out')(Dance Review)
December 1, 2002... Twyla Tharp has been choreographing dances for almost forty years, and by this time she should be a mature artist, yet she is not. If your subjects are aggression and apocalypse, how much can you mature? The filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who made...

Gallery chronicle. (Art).(New York art exhibitions)
December 1, 2002... I was one of those people unself-consciously entranced by the Modern's 1993 Robert Ryman retrospective. Yes, its extremism was almost comical: having restricted his palette to white since the early sixties, he filled the museum's galleries with...

"Masterpieces of European Painting from the Toledo Museum of Art" at The Frick Collection, New York. October 29-January 5, 2003. (Exhibition note).
December 1, 2002... Were one to stroll through The Frick Collection, bedazzled by its many masterpieces and paying only nominal attention to the requisite wall labels, one might mistake the twelve paintings included in the exhibition "Masterpieces of European...

They still don't get it. (The media).(media coverage of sniper attacks in metropolitan Washington, D.C. area and other gruesome events)
December 1, 2002... Although, to judge by what one reads, real levels of literacy continue to decline in America, there is one sense in which we may be said to be a hyperliterate culture. This is in the challenge taken up by an apparently ever-increasing number of...

The real language of men. (Verse chronicle).
December 1, 2002... The dreamy, sotto voce poems of Book of My Nights (1) might lure babies to sleep, or butterflies. They're "simple," "lyrical," "honest"--their graces come with little scare quotes attached, not because Li-Young Lee is ironic but because it's...

The lessons of Wellington.
December 1, 2002... Perhaps with the exception of Churchill, England has produced no more a remarkable man of action than the Duke of Wellington, who put an end to the Napoleonic Wars at Waterloo--nearly six million dead and twenty-three years after France's mad...

What went wrong?(B. R. Myers, Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose)(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... B. R. Myers Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose. Melville House, 149 pages, $9.95 Why is unmerited praise so annoying? The opposite sin, unmerited censure, we consider unjust and meet...

Beyond morality.(Constance Brown Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life)(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... Constance Brown Kuriyama Christopher Marlowe: a Renaissance Life. Cornell University Press, 304 pages, $35 Christopher Marlowe's life lasted for twenty-nine years and three months, that is, about 10,670 days, and more attention has been...

Honor wagered.(W.S. Merwin, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation)(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... W.S. Merwin Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. Knopf, 171 pages, $22 The image on the cover of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--the new translation of it by the poet W. S. Merwin, and just published by...

Flamboyantly humble.(Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity)(Book Review)
December 1, 2002... Dave Eggers You Shall Know Our Velocity. McSweeney's Books, 376 pages, $21 Dave Eggers, flamboyantly humble, ashamed of his success, wallowing in that same success, the biggest dork of all, has second-order vanity, bad. He has had it since...

Relatively speaking. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2002... To the Editors: Keith Windschuttle's contributions to your magazine have often proved edifying, but his denunciation of Clifford Geertz ("The ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz" October 2002) so egregiously misrepresents Geertz's work and...