New Criterion articles from December 2006

New Criterion archives from December 2006

Milton Friedman, 1912-2006.(Notes & Comments: December 2006)(Editorial)(In memoriam)
December 1, 2006... The death of the economist Milton Friedman last month at the age of ninety-four was commemorated at length across the country, indeed, across the world. We will add only a brief footnote regarding the cultural implications of Friedman's work....

The new criterion on art.(Notes & Comments: December 2006)(Editorial)
December 1, 2006... Since 2001, we have included in our December issue a special section on the visual arts. We continue the tradition in this issue with a wide-ranging series of essays and reviews by Eric Gibson, Marco Grassi, Michael J. Lewis, James Panero,...

S. Lane Faison, 1907-2006.(Notes & Comments: December 2006)(In memoriam)
December 1, 2006... We cannot mention "loss" without thinking of S. Lane Faison, the influential art critic and teacher who died last month a few days shy of his ninety-ninth birthday. As art critic for The Nation in the early 1950S and as a teacher--at Yale in...

T. J. Clark in winter.(The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing)(Book review)
December 1, 2006... If only the wheel of fate rolled smoothly, we could all leap aboard with a good running start. But it does not; it whirls and jerks and spins in place, and to seize it for but a moment is to be lucky. For a very select few, however, it seems to...

Abstraction's moment.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Abstract art has been around for about a hundred years, long enough, you would think, for it to have ceased to be an issue. Yet despite its century-old tradition, abstraction still causes consternation. Unsophisticated audiences continue to be...

The secret history of modern art.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... Venture deep into the hinterlands of modern art history, and you come across the artistic movement of the 1880s and 1890s known as Symbolism. An international, diffuse, idealist, and mystical reaction to the naturalism of the 1860s and 1870s,...

Who owns the past?(collection of art objects)(Viewpoint essay)
December 1, 2006... There was a time--it seems so long ago--when New Yorkers awaited the arrival of their Sunday Times with a distinct sense of anticipation. In the arts, literature, and cultural sections of the bulky package, one invariably found a variety of...

A conversation with Graham Nickson.(abstract art painter)(Interview)
December 1, 2006... DAVID YEZZI: You were born in Lancashire, England? GRAHAM NICKSON: Yes, in an area called the Forest of Bowland. It's very romantic in the sense that you have rolling hills and very rugged moorlands, medieval dry-stone walls, and lush...

Lucretius on optical illusions.(Poems)(Titus Lucretius Catus)(Critical essay)
December 1, 2006... In the first century B.C., amidst the constant turmoil and upheaval of the late Roman Republic, a poet named Titus Lucretius Catus, about whom we know next to nothing, composed one of the unlikeliest masterpieces of Western literature: an...

Truth & lies.(Letter from Hungary)(political conditions in Hungary)(Travel narrative)
December 1, 2006... I did not expect that my annual visit to Hungary would coincide with a major political upheaval, which erupted when the prime minister (Ferenc Gyurcsany) confessed to prolonged lying about the state of the country and especially of its economy....

Cleaning house.(Theater)(Theater review)
December 1, 2006... Grey Gardens originally struck me as a thoroughly grotesque idea for a new musical, almost as low on the taste level as the ill-fated attempt, a few years back, to base a musical on the life and death of the suicidal actress Jean Seberg. I had...

Epics in miniature.(Art)
December 1, 2006... When we think of the artistic accomplishments of the Ancient Near East, it's the great monumental structures that come to mind--the ziggurat at Ur, the barrel-vaulted arch at Ctesiphon, or sprawling temple complexes such as those at Persepolis...

"The Wonderful Art of Oz".
December 1, 2006... "The Wonderful Art of Oz" at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts. July 11, 2006--October 22, 2006 William Wallace Denslow's illustrations for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) bleed pictures across full pages...

"Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings & Drawings".
December 1, 2006... "Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings & Drawings" at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. October 29, 2006-January 15, 2007 Even those who have put off seeing the retrospective of Brice Marden's work at MOMA could not have missed the...

Helene Grimaud.(Concert review)
December 1, 2006... Helene Grimaud, piano Carnegie Hall, New York. November 8, 2006 The French pianist Helene Grimaud hails from Aix-en-Provence, and her relationship to time--nurtured in a town where following the sun from cafe to cafe is the generally...

Biased sensationalism.(The media)
December 1, 2006... Back in 1992, there was a British general election which pitted a still largely Thatcherite Conservative party now led by John Major against an unreconstructed Labour party led by Neil Kinnock--who had also been the Labour leader defeated by...

God's chatter.(Verse chronicle)(Native Guard)(Man and Camel)(Ommateum, with Doxology)(Firstborn)(God's Silence)(Horse Latitudes)(Book review)
December 1, 2006... Natasha Trethewey's well-mannered, well-meaning poems are as confused about race as the rest of us. The daughter of a black mother and white father, she was raised in the deep South of the Sixties, when the civil rights acts had still not...

Life & left-handedness.(The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings)(Book review)
December 1, 2006... What is mathematics about? That is not so easy to explain. With biology, say, we know where we are. Biology is about living things. Linguistics is about language. Sociology is about the social aspects of human life. But it is hard to point to...

Betje life.(John Betjeman Collected Poems)(Book review)
December 1, 2006... A. N. Wilson Betjeman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pages, $27 John Betjeman Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 528 pages, $27 As all the world now knows, Bevis Hillier, whose three-volume life of Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984)...

A walking contradiction.(The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back)(Book review)
December 1, 2006... Andrew Sullivan The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. HarperCollins, 304 pages, $25.95 He's a walking contradiction, Partly truth and partly fiction, Taking every wrong direction, On his lonely way...

Tortured forms.(Hieronymus Bosch)(Picasso: Life with Dora Maar, Love and War, 1935-1945)(Book review)
December 1, 2006... Larry Silver Hieronymus Bosch. Abbeville, 422 pages, $135 Anne Baldassari Picasso: Life with Dora Maar, Love and War, 1935-1945. Flammarion, 320 pages, $75 In The Waning of the Middle Ages, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote that...

Voice of thunder.(Book review)
December 1, 2006... Hans Hotter Memoirs, translated by Donald Arthur. Northwestern University Press, 324 pages, $35 Opera-lovers are as naturally contentious as, if less homicidal than, Iraqi insurgents. Yet on one issue they speak with impressive unanimity....

The bland inquisitor.(Letter to a Christian Nation)(Book review)
December 1, 2006... Sam Harris Letter to a Christian Nation. Knopf, 112 pages, $16.95 If an author who has written a bestselling book then releases, a scant year later, another book on the same topic, it is fair to pause a moment to ponder why the second book...

Parentis gone loco.(Big Babies)(Book review)
December 1, 2006... Michael Bywater Big Babies. Granta Books, 256 pages, 14.99 [pounds sterling] It should've been a joke. There, in my subway car, alongside ads for personal injury lawyers and TOEFL classes--an admonition not to ride on the outside of the...

Logue's odyssey.(Notebook)(Christopher Logue)(Theater review)
December 1, 2006... I was waiting to hear what the English poet Christopher Logue had done to the Iliad, and I was worried. The omens, threatening an evening of eat-your-greens earnestness, would have troubled the most phlegmatic of soothsayers. As for the theater...