New Criterion articles from December 2003

New Criterion archives from December 2003

Notes & comments: December 2003.(Editorial)
December 1, 2003... Reviving the bard Longtime readers of The New Criterion will recall that in years past we often had occasion to criticize the National Endowment for the Arts. Lurching from a demotic populism, on the one hand (Elvis Presley, folk art,...

"All sail, no anchor": architecture after modernism.(Lengthened Shadows: IV)
December 1, 2003... When architecture gets a hall of fame, it needs to find a niche for a certain amiable rogue I will refer to as Palladio of the Wastepaper Basket. He made his mark during the 1960s at Yale's school of architecture. There it is the monthly task...

A conversation with William Bailey.(Interview)
December 1, 2003... Editor's note: In Chicago this fall, the poet Mark Strand interviewed the figurative painter William Bailey about the genesis and direction of his art. MARK STRAND: What was the art like in the late sixties and seventies when you were...

In the kitchen of art.
December 1, 2003... Ernst van de Wetering, the Dutch art historian, recently remarked, perhaps only partly in jest, that in today's world a few thousand people earn their living touching works of art while earnestly preventing untold thousands of others from doing...

The rape of the masters.
December 1, 2003... HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? POLONIUS: By th' mass and 'tis--like a camel indeed. HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel. POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel. HAMLET: Or like a whale. ...

What is strange about the Dahesh Museum?
December 1, 2003... There was a spiritual director, an oracle, in these parts who daily filled a famous column in one of the local newspapers. Once, in days of family piety, it bore the title Aunt Lydia's Post Bag; now it was The Wisdom of the Guru Brahmin,...

Romanticism at the Met.
December 1, 2003... Sex, violence, horror, period costume dramas, bucolic idylls, terrifying cataclysms of nature, and grisly recent events. No, that's not, as you might think, a list of current offerings at the movies. Rather, these are subjects that visitors...

The dream made real.
December 1, 2003... J.-K. Huysmans, the most brilliant and penetrating art critic of Degas's time, recognized Degas's revolutionary achievement and called his statue of The Little Dancer "the only really modern attempt that I know in sculpture.... All the ideas...

New realities for the art museum.
December 1, 2003... The past few years have seen significant changes in the museum field, with some developments that will mark the field for decades to come. One interesting, and very. effective, development has been the noticeable increase in double-barreled...

White phalaenopsis.(New poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... White phalaenopsis The protocol of orchids lies in subterfuge swarming petals form a curve's cortege where slant diplomacies of lip engage the winter-dociled bee. Such grace is made of tasseled rhetoric, arced only...

Daybreak at the straits.(New poems)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Daybreak at the straits 1 The clouds that lie in cinnabar striations are juggled by a nimble waterspout too distant for significance. The dim pink of daybreak binds the sky with dark barely distinguishable from...

The art of getting in touch.(London journal)
December 1, 2003... There has been a marked change in the British political climate. The Conservative party was heading for disaster--quite possibly irreversible disaster--under a weak leader, Iain Duncan Smith. Now it has replaced him with a strong leader, or a...

The Comedie-Francaise, Gauguin & Botticelli.(Letter from Paris)
December 1, 2003... Is there anti-American sentiment in France? And did I experience it? The simple answers are "yes" and "no," but the questions must be viewed within a broad historical context. The affection between the French and Americans has a long and...

The "Blue Rider" imbroglio.(Art)
December 1, 2003... Like many of the avant-garde groups that broke away from existing institutions in the early years of the twentieth century, the circle of modernist painters that came to be known as the Blue Rider in Munich in 1911 owed its existence to a...

Start the revolution without them.(Music)
December 1, 2003... The saga of Nicholas and Alexandra, Russia's last royal couple, is inherently fecund material for the operatic stage. A Shakespearean quality surrounds their doomed fives, which continue to fascinate us despite the passing of years. In real...

The story the media missed.(The media)
December 1, 2003... Although I have noticed in myself a decline of interest in sporting competition which seems to have proceeded pari passu with the decline in my ability to take part in it, I got hooked in October on the World Series--nowadays a misnomer, left...

Out on the lawn.(Verse chronicle)
December 1, 2003... I should have reviewed Billy Collins's Nine Horses months ago, but I couldn't stand the excitement. (1) Collins is that rarity among American poets, one with popular appeal, easy to read as a billboard, genial as a Sunday golfer, and not so...

John Clare: freedom & enclosure.(Books)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... The life span of John Clare (1793-1864) runs from Pitt to Palmerston, Washington to Lincoln, Blake and Burns to Trollope and Tennyson; yet the essential features of his world were contained within a few square miles clustered around his...

Delusion & inhumanity.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Richard Drake Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition. Harvard University Press, 288 pages $45. Revolution was a topic supremely exercising intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In one country...

Leap of faith.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... John E. Ferling A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic. Oxford Press, 576 pages, $30 Pessimists, as the saying goes, see the glass half empty, optimists see the glass half full. John Ferling's new book, A Leap in...