Tag Archives: Arts & Literature

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (October 6, 2023): The looted Ethiopian icon, AI copyright debate in US, and the end of China’s museum boom.

The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about the Kwer’ata Re’esu, a European painting of Christ that became a revered icon in Ethiopia before being looted by an agent for the British Museum in the 19th century. Martin’s colour photographs of the work—which has been stored in a vault in Portugal—might help us to identify its maker and prompt new calls for the icon’s return to Ethiopia. On Monday this week, campaigners in the US staged an AI Day of Action, amid mounting concerns over the exploitation of artists’ work by corporations behind powerful artificial intelligence tools.

We talk to our reporter Daniel Grant about renewed calls for the US Congress to enact a law that would ban corporations from copyrighting art made by AI. And as China’s economy struggles, some museums in the country are closing or scaling down their ambitions. We talk to our correspondent in China, Lisa Movius, about how the end of the Chinese economic miracle has hastened the end of its museum boom.

Books: Literary Review Magazine – October 2023

Image

Literary Review – October 2023: The new issue features How Bond Was Born; Impressions of Monet; Inequality through the Ages; Adam Smith the Socialist, and more…

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man eBook : Shakespeare, Nicholas: Kindle Store -  Amazon.com

Becoming James Bond By Nicholas Shakespeare

Anthony Powell, two and a half years older than Ian Fleming, remembered him as ‘one of the few persons I have met to announce that he was going to make a lot of money out of writing novels, and actually contrive to do so’. 

The Road to Giverny

Monet The Restless Vision /anglais: WULLSCHLAGER JACKIE: 9780241188309:  Amazon.com: Books

Monet: The Restless Vision By Jackie Wullschläger

You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity. 

Previews: Country Life Magazine – October 4, 2023

Image

Country Life Magazine – October 4, 2023: The latest issue features the silvery spectacle of ethereal mist as it coats the countryside; Autumn’s beauty as a source of inspiration for artists from van Gogh and Monet to David Hockney, and more…

On gossamer threads

John Lewis-Stempel revels in the silvery spectacle of ethereal mist as it coats the countryside, moving in its mysterious ways

Season of mists and mellow artfulness

Autumn’s beauty is a source of inspiration for artists from van Gogh and Monet to David Hockney, finds Michael Prodger

A living fossil

In the first of two articles, John Goodall explores the founding of St Bartholomew’s in London

International Art: Apollo Magazine – October 2023

Image

Apollo Magazine – October 2023: The new issue features Getting ruff and ready with Frans Hals; Sophie Calle takes on Picasso; Can museums cope without dodgy donors?, and more…

Inside this issue

October 2023 | Apollo Magazine
October 2023 | Apollo Magazine
October 2023 | Apollo Magazine

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – October 9, 2023

A woman sits on a subway car as it passes the Williamsburg Bridge.

The New Yorker – October 9, 2023 issue: The new issue features David Kirkpatrick on the right’s legal juggernaut, Gideon Lewis-Kraus on a behavioral-economics scandal, Hannah Goldfield on Kwame Onwuachi, and more.

Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self

Kwame Onwuachi reviews an order with another man in the kitchen at Tatiana.

How the chef at Tatiana brought Afro-Caribbean cooking—and his life story—to the center of New York City’s fine-dining scene.

By Hannah Goldfield

Among the Cabin Fanatics of Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty

A crowd of people sit in a stadium.

For more than a hundred years, the Neshoba County Fair has drawn revellers from all over the country. Why do they keep coming back?

By Paige Williams

The New York Times Book Review – October 1, 2023

Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 1, 2023): This week’s issue features the biography “Larry McMurtry: A Life”….

Larry McMurtry, a Critter of the American West Who Rejected Its Mythos

This black-and-white photo of the novelist Larry McMurtry shows him from a slight angle, seated and looking pensive. He wears heavy glasses and has one hand braced against his mouth and chin; his other arm is bent over his head and the sleeves of his white button-down shirt are rolled up past his elbows.

Tracy Daugherty’s new biography is the first comprehensive account of the prolific novelist who brought us “Lonesome Dove,” “The Last Picture Show” and more.

By Dwight Garner

LARRY McMURTRY: A Life, by Tracy Daugherty


When the art critic Dave Hickey learned that Tracy Daugherty was writing a biography of his friend Larry McMurtry (all three men are Texans), he said to Daugherty: “Knowing Larry, it’s going to be a real episodic book.” Episodic this biography is. It’s also vastly entertaining.

McMurtry, the prolific author of “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment” and “Lonesome Dove,” was a demythologizer of the American West who appeared to live in several registers at once.

The Miracle and Madness of Science That Changed the World

The polymath John von Neumann, center, chatting with students at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947. Von Neumann’s work on the Manhattan Project is a focus of Benjamín Labatut’s novel “The Maniac.”

Benjamín Labatut’s novel “The Maniac” examines the dawn of the nuclear age and the brilliant, sometimes troubled minds behind it.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (September 28, 2023): This week: three big London shows, in depth. As Marina Abramović draws huge crowds to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, we interview her about the exhibition—the first ever dedicated to a woman artist in the Royal Academy’s main galleries.

At the National Gallery, meanwhile, is a remarkable survey of the paintings of the 17th-century Dutch master Frans Hals, which will tour next year to Amsterdam and Berlin. We take a tour with Bart Cornelis, curator of the National’s incarnation of the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Peter Paul Rubens’s Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia of around 1625 to 1628 (painted with Frans Snyders). In the collection of the Prado in Madrid, it is one of a number of major loans to the exhibition Rubens and Women at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Amy Orrock, one of the curators of the exhibition, tells us more.

Marina Abramović, Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 1 January 2024. You can hear our interview with Marina during the Covid lockdown in our episode from 8 May 2020, and a conversation with Tate Modern’s Catherine Wood about Ulay, following his death in 2020, in the episode from 6 March that year.

Previews: Country Life Magazine – Sept 27, 2023

Image

Country Life Magazine – September 27, 2023: The new issue features The Need For Tweed; A perfect pre-trained gundog; A new Jacobean drawing room is the crowning glory at Shilstone, Devon, and more…

The need for tweed

A true Hebridean hero weaves his magic to create an ‘estate’ Harris tweed for David Profumo

Here’s one I trained earlier

Has your over-excited pup left you red-faced on a shoot day? Katy Birchall has the answer: a perfect, pre-trained gundog

Loved to life

A new Jacobean drawing room is the crowning glory at Shilstone, Devon, discovers John Goodall

Los Angeles Review Of Books – Autumn 2023

Image

LA Review of Books (Autumn 2023) – The latest issue features The Funny Thing About Misogyny; The New Scarcity Studies: On Two New Socioeconomic Histories and Endgame Emotions: The Melting of Time, the Mourning of the World…

The Funny Thing About Misogyny

By Katie Kadue

THE FUNNY THING about misogyny is it’s structured like a joke. Not a very good joke—a groaner, a dad joke. Why are they called “women”? Because they’re a woe to men. Get it? Woman is a container for man; language engenders gender subordination. As Mike Myers recites on stage in his role as a moody slam poet in the thrillingly zany 1993 Hitchcockian send-up So I Married an Axe Murderer, “Woman! Whoa, man. Whoaaaaaa. Man!”

The New Scarcity Studies: On Two New Socioeconomic Histories

By Scott R. MacKenzie

Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis by CARL WENNERLIND

WATER FALLS FROM the sky, literally. It is the most abundant chemical compound on Earth, and yet many people buy it in plastic bottles. Nestlé and other corporations source water cheaply and add labels that depict something other than heavy-industry and fossil-fuel derivatives, as though you’re drinking straight from a pristine spring. By bottling this natural resource and selling it as a commodity, Nestlé creates a form of scarcity. 

Preview: London Review Of Books – October 5, 2023

Image

London Review of Books (LRB) – October 5, 2023: The new issue features Animal Ethics; Orca Life – We may understand less about orcas than they do about us, and Why Weber? – Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. 

Let them eat oysters

By Lorna Finlayson

We may be tempted to throw up our hands and say: fuck it, I’m having a burger. Peter Singer would think this illogical: we should endeavour to do the least harm we can. But we might wonder whether something is wrong with the ethical approach that has led us to this point.

Animal Liberation Now 
by Peter Singer.

Justice for Animals 
by Martha Nussbaum.