Category: Art

Posted on

Sunshine

What’s in the Arts+ section of The Official Newspaper of Gil Roth today?

  1. a review of two biographies of Han van Meegeren, the famous Dutch forger of paintings,
  2. a review of Richard Todd’s essays on authenticity (nice complement/contrast to the forgery review),
  3. a review of a biography of Jacob Riis, the man who chronicled the horrors of tenement life in late 19th century Manhattan,
  4. a review of a book on the New Urban Renewal and today’s gentrification,
  5. Otto Penzler’s review of Anton Chekhov’s crime fiction.

Sometimes I think their editors say to each other, “Remember that thing Gil was muttering to himself about in 1997, when he thought no one was listening? We should assign an article on that topic!”

Posted on

This is getting ridiculous

Today, the NY Sun (Official Newspaper of Gil Roth) managed to put out more articles of interest to me than any other paper would in a month:

  1. Revising our views on Arcimboldo in light of the Allegorical Head of the Four Seasons
  2. Revising our views on neoconservatism via World Affairs magazine
  3. Revising our views on Columbus Circle post-TW Center
  4. Edward Hopper: Wanna see my etchings?
  5. Death of a niche magazine shop in NYC
  6. And an art installation by my favorite electronic band, Underworld . . . ?

Talk about an embarrassment of riches! I half-expect tomorrow’s edition to include articles on Miller’s Crossing, Danny Wilson, and Roger Langridge.

Posted on

I think in circles and circles are hard to break

After dropping Amy off at the bus stop this morning, I came home and realized I was on the precipice of nausea and that a 20- or 25-minute drive to the office likely would’ve pushed me over the edge. So I wrote in sick, went back to bed for 3+ hours, and found myself feeling better.

Then I spent the afternoon rereading Camp Concentration, which made me feel worse.

It’s a short, frightening novel about a drug that unlocks genius (at a price). With its unending state of war and secret prison camps, the book has plenty of contemporary resonance (published in 1968). I wasn’t thinking about its political issues when I picked it up; my reason for rereading it was the author’s recent suicide.

Beyond the horrifying vision of America, I was captivated by the romance of art and mortality as portrayed by narrator-poet Louis Sacchetti. I doubt I was too aware of the sheer Germanness of this worldview back when I first read it at the age 18, but 37 is a different story.

After I finished, I decided to sprawl out on a different sofa, so I went downstairs to my library and stared at the wall of books. I picked up Ahead of All Parting, a collection of poetry and prose by Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell), and flipped it open. The poet-narrator of the novel refers to Rilke and quotes him in the novel.

I like Mitchell’s translation of my favorite Rilke poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo, but I was disappointed to find that this collection is set in a font that’s remarkably similar to that of the Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to read as a kid. I found myself looking for breaks like

If you ignore Lou Andreas-Salome’s Freudian analysis of how your mother dressed you in girls’ clothes as a child, turn to page 32

Anyway, I decided to look at the Duino Elegies, which I’ve never read. As it turns out, one of the key passages in Camp Concentration comes from the first elegy:

For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

It sends me back 16 years to my Attic Greek class, where I was first exposed to the word deinos, that which is both beautiful and dreadful (or wondrous and terrible, depending on what my brother offers up by way of translation).

So that’s what I do on my sick days. I’m gonna go get more rest, then embarrass myself or others at our company picnic tomorrow.

Posted on

Sun Roth

Today’s edition of the New York Sun’s Arts+ section continues to defend its title as Official Newspaper of Gil Roth (and several other Roths, as seen in #s 1 and 2):

  1. Roth Time Redux, discussing the impact of Dieter Roth,
  2. a new exhibition on Philip Guston, with a shout-out to Philip Roth,
  3. MoMA’s screening of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West,
  4. Daphne Merkin reviewing a book on the history of crazy-ass women, and
  5. and an absolute smackdown of Benny Morris’ version of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Even better: my coworkers believe the Sun must be “too conservative,” so they avoid reading it in the lunchroom, leaving me a pristine copy! However, since the owner of our company canceled our subscription to the NYTimes, which he believes is “too liberal,” the only other choices are the Wall Street Journal and the NYPost. . .

(BONUS! Today’s Sun also has a John Stossel op-ed piece on why the FAA’s inspections of airlines (and governmental inspections in general) are useless at best.)