Tag Archives: Arts & Literature

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 23, 2023

Daniel Clowess “Quiet Luxury”

The New Yorker – October 23, 2023 issue: The new issues cover features Daniel Clowes’s “Quiet Luxury” – The artist discusses patronage, in-home pillars, and what he’d do with a billion dollars.

Beyond the Myth of Rural America

Grant Woods sister Nan Wood Graham and his dentist Byron McKeeby stand by the painting for which they had posed...

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

By Daniel Immerwahr

Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States.

When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby

In many states, lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.

American ChroniclesBeyond the Myth of Rural America

Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.

What Happened to San Francisco, Really?

It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask.By Nathan Heller

The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle

Offsetting has been hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change—but the market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren’t real.

Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — Nov 2023

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The New Criterion – November 2023 issue:

The burden of the humanities  by Wilfred M. McClay
A lyrical populist revolt  by Victor Davis Hanson
Blanquette de Bard  by Anthony Daniels
Polymorphous Peretz  by Myron Magnet


New poems  by David Mason & Ian Pople

The New York Times Book Review – October 15, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 15, 2023): This week’s issue features  a fabulous historical novel, the Janet Malcolm-like account of an Australian murder triala sprightly history of the Oxford English Dictionary, a homage to “The Haunting of Hill House”,  historical fictionthrillerscrime novelsromancehorror & Gothic fictionscience fiction & fantasy.)

A Fitting — and Frightening — Homage to ‘The Haunting of Hill House’

Apparitions, black hares and time warps festoon the pages of Elizabeth Hand’s “A Haunting on the Hill,” set in the same moldering mansion as Shirley Jackson’s classic horror novel.

The Wife Has Committed Murder but It’s the Husband Who Scares Her Lawyer

In Marie NDiaye’s new novel, “Vengeance Is Mine,” a woman is haunted by a decades-old trauma she feels, but cannot quite remember.

The book cover of “Vengeance Is Mine” is designed like a ripped sheet of paper. The image features a blank surface with a triangular cutout running down from the top. The layer underneath the tear is red and reveals the author’s name and the novel’s title.

By Lovia Gyarkye

VENGEANCE IS MINE, by Marie NDiaye. Translated by Jordan Stump.


The characters in Marie NDiaye’s novels are an unsettling brood. They fret and pace around their homes, tormented by their pasts. Their minds trap and trick them. A daughter can’t shake memories of her mother’s murder; a man gropes for the truth about his imprisonment in a deserted vacation town; a chef pursues culinary perfection at any cost; a woman — reminded of a friend, a schoolteacher or was it her mother? — fatally chases an apparition in green.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (October 13, 2023): The Frieze art fair has turned 20 this week, and is only growing in its ambitions, having acquired the Armory Show fair in New York and Expo Chicago.

So what should we make of Frieze’s continuing expansion and what’s the mood at Frieze London and Frieze Masters this year? We talk to Tim Schneider, The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, who is over from New York for the fairs. In Reykjavik in Iceland, the artist-run Sequences Biennial opens on Friday. A former curator of the event is Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, who will represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Tom Seymour went to the Icelandic capital to talk to her about Venice, Sequences and the Icelandic scene.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Open Window, Collioure (1905) by Henri Matisse. The painting is a highlight of the exhibition Vertigo of Colour: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. We speak to Dita Amory, co-curator of the show, about this landmark painting in Matisse’s career.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, Regent’s Park, London, until 15 October.

The Sequences Biennial, entitled Can’t See, begins on 13 October and continues until 22 October 2023.

Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 13 October-21 January 2024; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 25 February-27 May 2024.

Preview: London Review Of Books – Oct 19, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – October 19, 2023: The new issue features Camus in the New World; Charles Lamb’s Lives; The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary and At the Met: On Cecily Brown….

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint

On Nagorno-Karabakh

Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census by Dan Bouk

Previews: Country Life Magazine – Oct 11, 2023

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Country Life Magazine – October11, 2023:  The latest issue features the rise of the super cottage, autumn berries and how to win at conkers.

Conkering heroes

Simon Lester swings into the win-at-all-costs world of that old playground chestnut: conkers

Last call for the corncrake

This small and secretive bird is becoming ever-more rare, but there is hope, finds Vicky Liddell

Doing it by the book

Independent bookshops are thriving against the high-street odds. Catriona Gray selects a few of her favourites from the shelf

Interiors

Giles Kime picks 10 blasts from the past that are back in fashion, Eleanor Doughty marvels at Nels Crosthwaite Eyre’s light touch, Bee Osborn hails the rise of the super cottage and Amelia Thorpe visits a resurgent Pimlico Road

Nine centuries of service

In the second of two articles, John Goodall focuses on London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital

Native breeds

The ‘picturesque’ New Forest pony is central to centuries-old grazing rights, finds Kate Green

Colour supplements

Fiery autumn tints catch the eye of Jane Powers in the secluded Cliff House Garden in Co Dublin

We reap what he sowed

Katherine Cole hails campaigner Miles Hadfield, who fought to save a host of historic gardens

Having a gourd time

Pumpkins and squashes have long been an inspiration to chefs and artists, reveals Lia Leendertz

The good stuff

Brown is the colour this season, so it’s chocs away for Hetty Lintell

Classical Guitar: Laura Lootens Plays Albéniz

Deutsche Grammophon – DG (October 10, 2023) – Laura Lootens, a winner of the Andrés Segovia Competition in Spain, performs here Malagueña, from the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz’s work España.

This work was originally written for piano, but Laura Lootens has arranged it herself for solo guitar. Born in 1860, Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz was mainly a pianist and wrote primarily for the piano. More than any other musician, he succeeded in incorporating the Spanish guitar idiom and folklore into his style.

Thus, for instance, his works contain allusions to rasgueado, a guitar technique that strums all six strings percussively in rapid succession, as we often hear in flamenco. So it is no wonder that many of Albéniz’s piano works have also been performed on the guitar.

This piece is a track from Laura Lootens album of works by Albéniz on CAvi music. Laura Lootens – Albéniz: España, Op. 165: No. 3, Malagueña. Allegretto (Arr. Laura Lootens) Laura Lootens / Albéniz: Suite Española, Malagueña and Other Works

Album page: https://dgt.link/lootens-albeniz

Video direction: Jure Knez

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 16, 2023

Five people on a gondola drifting through New York's subway.

The New Yorker – October 16, 2023 issue: The new issues cover features Yonatan Popper’s “Service Changes” – the delightful and dreadful parts of riding the subway.

Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat

A photoillustration of Jake Sullivan with a map of Ukraine.

Inside the White House’s battle to keep Ukraine in the fight.

By Susan B. Glasser

On a Monday afternoon in August, when President Joe Biden was on vacation and the West Wing felt like a ghost town, his national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, sat down to discuss America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. Sullivan had agreed to an interview “with trepidation,” as he had told me, but now, in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, steps from the Oval Office, he seemed surprisingly relaxed for a congenital worrier. (“It’s my job to worry,” he once told an interviewer. “So I worry about literally everything.”)

The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat

Video of a squid ship from above

China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.

By Ian Urbina

In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships.

Chicago Exhibitions: ‘Caravaggio In Rome’

The Cardsharps - Wikipedia
The Cardsharps, about 1595
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

The Art Institute of Chicago (October 8, 2023) – Whether for his large dramatic canvases or his larger-than-life persona, the name Caravaggio evokes images of turmoil and violence, both sacred and profane. Born in Milan in 1571, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio entered the robust Roman art scene around 1592 and, over the next 14 years, developed an original and captivating painting style that attracted eminent patrons and passionate followers, thrusting him into the public eye. 

Among Friends and Rivals: Caravaggio in Rome

Sep 8–Dec 31, 2023

Martha and Mary Magdalene (Caravaggio) - Wikipedia
Martha and Mary Magdalene, about 1598
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. 

Caravaggio’s followers, known as the Caravaggisti, embraced the stylis­tic hallmarks of the painter’s intensely naturalistic work. Like their trailblazing idol, they used models from real life, boldly depicting their quirks and flaws in dynamic compositions whose turbulent movement was revealed in dramatic extremes of light and dark. The themes and individual artistic approaches of Caravaggisti often depended on their direct or indirect relationships to Caravaggio—some knew the artist personally, while others knew him only through his work.

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Museum Exhibition Tour: ‘Manet/Degas’ At The Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 6, 2023) – Stephan Wolohojian, John Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge, and Ashley Dunn, Associate Curator, explore Manet/Degas. This exhibition examines one of the most significant artistic dialogues in modern art history: the close and sometimes tumultuous relationship between Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

Manet/Degas

September 24, 2023–January 7, 2024

Manet/Degas - Yale University Press London

Born only two years apart, Manet (1832–1883) and Degas (1834–1917) were friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists who worked to define modern painting in France. By examining their careers in parallel and presenting their work side by side, this exhibition investigates how their artistic objectives and approaches both overlapped and diverged. Through more than 160 paintings and works on paper, Manet/Degas takes a fresh look at the interactions of these two artists in the context of the family relationships, friendships, and intellectual circles that influenced their artistic and professional choices, deepening our understanding of a key moment in nineteenth-century French painting. On view: September 24, 2023–January 7, 2024