Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — SEPT 2023
Tag Archives: Arts & Literature
The New York Times Book Review – August 20, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – August 20, 2023: The issue features “never before told” narrative histories including a tale of the female botanists who surveyed the Grand Canyon in 1938, a recent biography of the 19th-century “abortionist of Fifth Avenue” and the book on this week’s cover: Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip,” which brings into focus a thriving artistic community that existed at the southernmost tip of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.
They Overcame Hazards — and Doubters — to Make Botanical History
In Melissa Sevigny’s “Brave the Wild River,” we meet the two scientists who explored unknown terrain — and broke barriers.
BRAVE THE WILD RIVER: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, by Melissa L. Sevigny
Let’s start this story on a sun-blistered evening in August 1938. A small band of adventurers had just concluded a 43-day journey from Utah to Nevada — although perhaps “journey” is too tame a description for a trip that had required weeks of small wooden boats tumbling down more than 600 miles of rock-strewn rivers. The goal was twofold. First, to simply survive. And then, to chart the plants building homes along the serrated walls of the Grand Canyon.
At New York’s Coenties Slip, an Artist Colony and a ‘Rebellion’
Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip” is a group biography of six visual artists and the work they created on the edge of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.
Exhibitions: Artist Frida Kahlo In South Australia
Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution
THE ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
24 Jun – 17 Sep 2023
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form.
Previews: Country Life Magazine – August 16, 2023
Country Life Magazine – August 16, 2023: This week’s issue features a look at Britain’s sharks, classic posters, nightjars and dramatic wallpaper.
No fin compares to you
Far from being scary, our native sharks are friendly, sleekly swift and even bioluminescent. Helen Scales takes a dip
And all that jazz
The Roaring Twenties saw war-damaged Britain come alive in a swirl of cocktails and flapper dresses, finds Claire Jackson
A dramatic revival
The ruins of Hellifield Peel Tower, North Yorkshire, have been transformed. Jeremy Musson tours a splendid family home
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 21, 2023
How the Writer and Critic Jacqueline Rose Puts the World on the Couch
Enlisting Freud and feminism, she reveals the hidden currents in poetry and politics alike.
By Parul Sehgal
“Psychoanalysis brings to light everything we don’t want to think about,” she said. “If you can acknowledge the complexity of your own heart
The Ukrainians Forced to Flee to Russia
Some are brought against their will. Others are encouraged in subtler ways. But the over-all efforts seem aimed at the erasure of the Ukrainian people.
By Masha Gessen
How Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life
He sorted and systematized and coined names for more than twelve thousand species. What do you call someone like that?
The New York Times Book Review – August 13, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – August 13, 2023: The annual thrillers issue features – a tense murder mystery set aboard a cruise ship; a heist novel involving rough diamonds, crooked lawyers and masters of the double cross; and an especially creepy serial-killer novel, to name just a few.
Being Underestimated Was Her Secret Weapon
In “Flirting With Danger,” Janet Wallach tells the story of Marguerite Harrison, who traded a life of privilege to become America’s first international female spy.
By Chloe Malle
FLIRTING WITH DANGER: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy, by Janet Wallach
Anyone complaining about a canceled Delta flight would do well to channel Marguerite Harrison. The United States’ first international female spy, Harrison crisscrossed the globe by rickshaw, propeller plane, camel, inflated goatskin raft and rail freight car and once brightly described a trans-Siberian voyage, in which she was wedged between sacks of tea and oats on the back of a troika in a blizzard, as “a rare and delightful experience.”
Chasing a World Record, They Endured Storms, Sharks and Freak Waves
In “Completely Mad,” James Hansen tells the stories of two men who in 1969 vied to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
COMPLETELY MAD: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic, by James R. Hansen
The day before the Apollo mission landed two men on the moon, a British man named John Fairfax waded into Hollywood Beach, Fla., greeted by masses of cheering fans, having been the first person to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Eight days later, another Briton, Tom McClean, pulled his dory up a deserted beach in Blacksod Bay, Ireland, having rowed solo across the Atlantic in the opposite direction. While Fairfax was acclaimed and feted, McClean walked to the closest pub, alone.
Artist Profiles: American Painter Shara Hughes
Shara Hughes was born 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
She describes her lush, vibrantly chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as “invented landscapes.” Full of gestural effect, surface tactility and possessing a fairytale mood of reverie, these paintings, as the New Yorker described them, “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.”
Bold, clashing colours and shifting perspectives manifest into dream-like landscapes that push and pull the eye across the canvas, challenging conventions of space. Rather than depicting true to life landscapes, Hughes invites us into a fantastical world offered as a portal for psychological discovery and reflection.
Previews: Country Life Magazine – August 9, 2023
Country Life Magazine – August 9, 2023: The art of the shell seeker; High time – the daring life of a steeplejack; Animal architects; grand rentals and Thelwell’s legacy…
The master builders of the British countryside
Exploring labyrinthine tunnels and forest skyscrapers, John Lewis-Stempel gets lost in the world of animal architecture
Grace and favour rooms
Many grand country houses are now welcoming overnight guests. Rosie Paterson checks in
Always reaching for the stars
Ben Lerwill requires a head for heights as he meets steeplejacks working at the top of their game
Preview: Art In America Magazine – Fall 2023
Meet Suzanne Jackson, Art in America’s Fall 2023 Cover Artist
Suzanne Jackson, whose work a history drawing-cracked wall (2016–19) features on the cover of the Fall 2023 issue of Art in America in a detail of the larger work shown here in full, told A.i.A. the backstory of her creation from her home in Savannah, Georgia. (Jackson is also the subject of a feature profile in the same issue.)
As told to A.i.A. The “history” in history drawing is the history of making the drawing. Over the three years I was working on it—it’s a big drawing—the whole process just happens from day to day: you’re adding something new, building it, working through composition and how elements come into the spaces in different ways. Each time you come back to work on it, something new has happened in your life.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 14, 2023
The Protests Inside Iran’s Girls’ Schools
From the start, women were at the center of the demonstrations that swept Iran last year. Schoolgirls emerged as an unexpected source of defiant energy.
One morning this past winter, the students at a girls’ high school in Tehran were told that education officials would arrive that week to inspect their classrooms and check compliance with the school’s dress code: specifically, the wearing of the maghnaeh, a hooded veil that became a requirement for schoolgirls in the years after the Iranian Revolution. During lunch, a group of students gathered in the schoolyard. A thirteen-year-old in the seventh grade, whom I’ll call Nina, pressed in to hear what was being said. At the time, mass protests against the government were raging across the country; refusing to wear the veil had become a symbol of the movement. An older girl told the others that it was time for them to join together and make a stand.
How Sudan Archives Became the Violin’s Domme
The twenty-nine-year-old musician pursues technical, rather than emotional, manipulation with her instrument. She can coax from it the sounds of an accordion, a drum, or a string orchestra.
“Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. How can one listen to the archives of a country? Sudan Archives is, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old musician—a singer, rapper, producer, arranger, lyricist, and violinist. She creates a “fiddle-punk sound,” as she describes it, that blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition she feels is available for the taking. Sudan (the name that her colleagues, her fans, and, increasingly, her intimates call her) begins composing by striking a riff on one of her five violins, which she uses differently from most other American producers.
What Should You Do with an Oil Fortune?
The Hunt family owns one of the largest private oil companies in the country. Leah Hunt-Hendrix funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels.
Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures.
Boomers Daily 