New Criterion articles from December 2005

New Criterion archives from December 2005

At last ...(Notes & Comments: December 2005)
December 1, 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...

Fire to the rescue.(Notes & Comments: December 2005)(teachers training)
December 1, 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...

The New Criterion on art.(Notes & Comments: December 2005)
December 1, 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...

Some family news.(Notes & Comments: December 2005)
December 1, 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...

"Art in crisis".
December 1, 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...

The fiasco at Ground Zero.
December 1, 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...

Criticism after art.
December 1, 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...

Deaccession roulette.
December 1, 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...

The angelic friar at the Met.(Fra Angelico)
December 1, 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...

A flesh look at Van Gogh.
December 1, 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,...

The Schiele moment.
December 1, 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...

The real Rodin.(Auguste Rodin)
December 1, 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...

Monet in Zola & Proust.
December 1, 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...

A conversation with Rackstraw Downes.(Interview)
December 1, 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...

"Eurylochus recalls the Sirens".(Poem)
December 1, 2005... "Eurylochus recalls the Sirens" When we returned from Hell, that sorceress Who 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...

The many faces of Memling.(Art)
December 1, 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...

Exhibition note.(Art)
December 1, 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...

In defense of cover-ups.
December 1, 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...

Jumping the shark.(Verse chronicle)
December 1, 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...

Living with liberalism.(Book Review)
December 1, 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...

Mencken No. 3.(Book Review)
December 1, 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...

The infamous philosophe.(Book Review)
December 1, 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...

Kathmandu-sur-Rhone.(Notebook)
December 1, 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...

Parodies of life.(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 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...

A ghastly assemblage.(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 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...