Items of Interest, Power of Images Edition
“Our worldviews are shaped by real, physical images, and by the way we view them, handle them, and write about them."
Paul Gessell, At Canada’s National Gallery, Ideological Enforcers Are Pushing Out Veteran Curators. “Rembrandt would undoubtedly be the one stumped if he could see his lovely painted lady stuck in the middle of ongoing controversies over ‘Indigenization’ and ‘decolonization’ within the impressive glass and concrete National Gallery building designed by star architect Moshe Safdie. In recent months, fears have been expressed by former senior staff to the effect that the gallery is heading toward irrelevance as a cultural institution. This includes two-term (2009–2019) National Gallery director Marc Mayer, a contemporary-art specialist from Montreal, who concludes that the place is ‘an absolute mess.’”
Curtis Yarvin, The Nihilism of the Ruling Class. “No, they do not believe in democracy or oligarchy. They believe in nothing. Nothing is true to them, unless it is useful. Nothing is useful, unless it makes them powerful. History and law and logic and the Constitution and morality have one lesson for them: Might makes right.”
Helen Dale, From Witchcraft to Wokecraft. “Doyle starts with the now-familiar claim that Wokery is a Christian heresy, with its concern for victims and exaggerated stories of oppression. However, he soon deviates from the standard theological template and draws on his expertise in Renaissance and Early Modern literature (he has an Oxford doctorate in the field, and once tutored it at the university’s famously gay college, Wadham). He moves deftly onto an argument running thus: what is variously called ‘the successor ideology,’ ‘critical social justice,’ and ‘identity politics’—‘woke’ for short—blends Protestant religious fundamentalism with mass hysteria, as in the Salem Witch Trials.”
Fred Bauer, Immerse Yourself. “Sustained attention to a work of literature is both a contemporary heresy and a therapy. Against the constant diffusion of attention, meditative reading calls for slow breaths and deep immersion.”
Christiane Gruber, An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. “These incidents, statements and actions at Hamline will be for others to investigate further. As a scholar specializing in Islamic representations of Muhammad, however, it is my duty to share accurate information about the painting at the heart of the controversy. I will provide a visual analysis and historical explanation of the image in question, in essence reconstituting the Hamline instructor’s classroom activity. I will then explore these types of depictions over the course of six centuries, with the aim to answer one basic question: Is the Islamic painting at the heart of the Hamline controversy truly Islamophobic?”
Joshua T. Katz, Hand Over Your Money and DIE. “If you are paying attention, you have read Heather Mac Donald’s account of what is happening at the Art Institute of Chicago and will decline to donate. If you are paying attention, you have read Mac Donald on “classical music’s suicide pact” (parts one and two, so much there is to say) and will decline to donate to the Los Angeles Opera. And if—to move to colleges and universities—you are paying attention, you have read Mac Donald on the alleged systemic racism in academia and will decline to donate to Middlebury College or whatever your alma mater may be. Basically, anyone who reads even a sampling of Mac Donald’s brilliant essays will direct his or her money elsewhere.”
Mark K. Spencer, The Power of Images. “Our worldviews are shaped by real, physical images, and by the way we view them, handle them, and write about them. By examining the role of images in ordinary life, Pfau is able to show how his book’s genealogy of modernity is true, as compared to other books in this genre. Happily, the book is lavishly illustrated so that the reader can directly see the changes in ways that Western people have seen the world. It is a marvelous history of Western visual culture, packed with fascinating analyses of artworks, and of philosophical texts about them, from Plato and Plotinus to Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso.”
Nick Riggle, How Henri Matisse (and I) Got a ‘Beautiful Body’. “Matisse might have been expected to see his new condition as a sort of tragedy, a reason to give up. He didn’t. Instead his loss was transformative: ‘My terrible operation has completely rejuvenated and made a philosopher of me. I had so completely prepared for my exit from life that it seems to me that I am in a second life.’”
William Deresiewicz, Why I Left Academia (Since You're Wondering). “Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it). The whole concept of literature—still more, of art—has been discredited.”
, the Wikipedia article on impossible color and on color synesthesia groupings.Elizabeth Ellen, Alex Perez on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Baseball, Growing Up Cuban-American in Miami & Saying Goodbye to the Literary Community. “What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.”
Peter Jacobsen, Norm Macdonald and the Economics of Comedy. “A picture hung on the wall of our parlor. In it, a woman was taking a shirt from a clothesline. She had clothespins in her teeth and it was windy and a boy was tugging at her dress. The woman looked like she was in a hurry and the whole scene gave me the idea that, just outside the frame, full, dark clouds were gathering. But that was not what it was. It was paint. So I decided right then and there to see the picture as it really was. I stared at the thing long and hard, trying to only see the paint. But it was no use. All my eyes would allow me to see was the lie. In fact, the longer I gazed at the paint, the more false detail I began to imagine. The boy was crying, as if afraid, and the woman was weaker than I had first believed. I finally gave up. I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is.”
Coming soon: “Mary Dill Henry: The Gardens (Paintings from the 1980s)” at Berry Campbell Gallery.