New Criterion articles from December 2004

New Criterion archives from December 2004

The new criterion on art.(Notes & comments: December 2004)(Column)
December 1, 2004... In this issue, as has been our practice for the past three Decembers, we offer our readers a Special Section on art. This is over and above our usual coverage of the visual arts, which, though a regular feature, may still be described as...

The whys of art.
December 1, 2004... The troubles that beset the arts, though perhaps less amenable to diagnosis than those besetting the political and social order, may be thought relevant to the whole question of civilization. And their particular phenomena often seem to be...

MOMA reopened.
December 1, 2004... One weakness of modernist architecture that was not recognized at first was the question of the addition. For the great buildings of the past this was not a problem. Organized along a lattice of monumental axes, they could simply thrust those...

A conversation with Philip Pearlstein.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Editor's note: Earlier this fall, David Yezzi, The New Criterions poetry editor, interviewed the painter Philip Pearlstein at his apartment and studio in Manhattan's Garment District. DAVID YEZZI: Where do you find the objects that you...

Reflections on taste.(art criticism)(Column)
December 1, 2004... Not long ago, I enjoyed a spirited conversation with a highly perceptive and well-informed observer of our contemporary cultural landscape--a conversation mostly concerned with the quality of art criticism as practiced today in the principal...

Recollections: Greenberg & Frankenthaler.(Clement Greenberg)(Helen Frankenthaler)(Excerpt)
December 1, 2004... Editor's note: The distinguished art dealer Andre Emmerich was an urbane and civilizing force in the New York art world from 1954, when he opened his first gallery in his apartment, until 1998, when he retired from his gallery on Fifty-seventh...

Pictures from an institution.(art history and criticism)(Column)
December 1, 2004... [T]he absurdities of Benton were so absurd, and I myself was so thoroughly used to them, that they had come to seem to me, almost, the ordinary absurdities of existence. Like Gertrude, I cherished my grievances against God, but to some of them...

In the home of my sitter.(New poems)(Poem)
December 1, 2004... In the home of my sitter Mrs. Duane Krauss, sure of her solitude, grimaced between the kitchen alcove's cryptic lesser motifs of Elvis and Saint Jude, herself the central subject of the triptych: her young-old country...

Long live rock.(New poems)(Poem)
December 1, 2004... Long live rock I lived for so long in that edifice, that house of decline, where all my dreams of rock stardom, never really mine, existed like radioactive ghosts, hyperexcitable and glamorous. Electric guitars, I...

Route 17.(New poems)(Poem)
December 1, 2004... Route 17 The ancient evening is distempered by a brutal wash of luminescence that is Route 17 during Christmas --a highway and a holiday well-matched, a place and time profitably bound up in a storm of white fight...

Maillol at Marlborough.(Art)(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2004... There are still restaurants in the smaller cities of France where local functionaries and dignitaries lunch every day--places where the regulars have their own napkin rings. There are no surprises in these solid, reassuring establishments. The...

"The Art of Romare Bearden" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.(Exhibition notes)(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2004... "The Art of Romare Bearden" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. October 14, 2004-January 9, 2005 The Romare Bearden retrospective that Ruth Fine organized for the National Gallery of Art has now arrived at the Whitney Museum of...

Cutting moral corners.(The media)
December 1, 2004... Last month I wrote in this space about the "Two Nations" contained within America's borders--not the rich and poor nations of John Edwards's anachronistic fancy, but the clever and the stupid, the complicated and the simple, the sophisticated...

One if by land.(Verse chronicle)(Danger on Peaks)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Gary Snyder was a marquee poet in the Sixties, when his eco-Buddhist paeans were read in every commune from Maine to Baja. Decades later, their misty imagism, indebted equally to Ezra Pound and Japanese haiku, seems cloying and sentimental,...

Barbarity without vigor.(The Strange Death of Moral Britain)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... A civilization, or at least a way of life, collapsed around the time I was born. Unfortunately these two events, which were not causally related, occurred in the same country: Britain. Naturally, civilizations do not collapse overnight....

Our Black Jeremiah.(Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Cornel West Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism. Penguin, 229 pages, $24.95 Cornel West is known as a fiery professor intellectual who brings bookish learning and argumentative rigor to political and social issues. Few...

Composer on the couch.(Stuart Feder Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Stuart Feder Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. Yale University Press, 353 pages, $39.95 In July 1910, the fifty-year, old Mahler--at the apex of his renown and creative gifts, despite the omnipresent threat of heart disease--discovered that...

Summer reading.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Michael Dirda Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education. W. W. Norton, 556 pages, $29.95 The sortes Virgilianae is an old form of do-it-yourself divination: you open the Aeneid at random, put a finger on a verse, and...

Peter H. Wood Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Peter H. Wood Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream. The University of Georgia Press, 128 pages, $24.95 In my book The Rape of the Masters, I devote one chapter to the critical sabotage practiced upon Winslow Homer's...

Natan Sharansky & Ron Dermer: the Case for Democracy: the Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Natan Sharansky & Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. Public Affairs, 279 pages, $26.95 Critics harp on the "hubris" of the Bush administration's plan to democratize the Middle East. It...

Robert McCrum Wodehouse: A Life.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Robert McCrum Wodehouse: A Life. Norton, 530 pages, $27.95 Do we need another biography of P. G. Wodehouse? Probably not. Richard Usborne, David Jasen, and Frances Donaldson have already done the heavy lifting, and Norman Murphy, Barry...

The saddhu of sodomy.(The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... There are some people whose desire to write, or at least to see themselves in print, exceeds by far the urgency of anything they might have to say. They are, in essence, attention-seekers, rather than seekers after the truth. For this...