Tag Archives: Arts & Literature

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine- January 30, 2023

Christoph Niemanns “Highway and Byways”

The New Yorker – January 30, 2023 Issue:

The Mayor and the Con Man

Bishop Lamor Whitehead and Eric Adams stand while speaking at a bar.

Eric Adams’s friends and allies have puzzled over his relationship with Lamor Whitehead, a fraudster Brooklyn church leader.

After Bolsonaro, Can Lula Remake Brazil?

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, photographed by Tommaso Protti.

Following a prison term, a fraught election, and a near-coup, the third-time President takes charge of a fractured country.

What’s the Matter with Men?

A girl leap-frogging over a boy in a superhero costume.

They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex.

Top 2023 Art Exhibitions: Sholto Blissett – Rubicon

Sholto Blissett Rubicon I, 2022 oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in. (200 x 300 cm.)
SHOLTO BLISSETT: RUBICON
January 25-February 22, 2023

Bodies of water act as both borders and conjunctions, where societies are delineated and defined. Further contradictory meanings bubble through to the surface as Blissett’s imagined landscapes become psychological spaces for meditation where the river is an obstacle to be crossed and considered.

Installation view of Sholto Blissett: Rubicon (January 25-February 22, 2023) at Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo: Dario Lasagni

In Rubicon, Blissett’s upland rivers are framed by bridges that run perpendicular to the body of water. The artist’s central placement of the bridges, Roman architectural embellishments in linear perspective, and urge to repetitively revisit similar yet increasingly foreboding environments reveals an attempt to organize or frame the scene. Yet, this organization is a fiction as from this positioning, the bridges cannot encompass the swell, the rugged topography, and the cloud-blemished skies. While bridges connect lands and cultures, from this frontal viewpoint, the ends of the arches depicted in Blissett’s paintings are rendered inaccessible

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Jan 22, 2023

Illustration by Anthony Gerace

The New York Times Book Review – January 22, 2023:

A New Novel Confronts the Scale and Gravity of Climate Change

As catastrophe approaches, Stephen Markley’s “The Deluge” considers its many facets.

A Documentarian Travels the World Asking: ‘Have You Eaten Yet?’

From the Arctic to the Amazon, Cheuk Kwan traces a diaspora through Chinese restaurants owned and operated by immigrant families.

Read Your Way Through Newfoundland

Michael Crummey, an award-winning author whose poetry and prose explore the region and its capital, St. John’s, shares book recommendations, local vocabulary and where to find a good pint.

Arts & Culture: The New Criterion – February 2023

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The New Criterion – February 2023 Issue:

Caesar & the republic  by Adrian Goldsworthy
Otto von Habsburg’s legacy  by Edwin J. Feulner
Garshin: a genius at suffering  by Gary Saul Morson
Saarinen & starchitecture  by Michael J. Lewis


New poems  by Rachel Hadas, Ryan Wilson & Duncan Wu

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

January 20, 2023: Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Tokyo are the subject of a legal claim in the US relating to Nazi loot.

The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent and resident Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey tells us why Sunflowers (1888-89) is at the centre of the dispute, 35 years after it was sold for a record price at auction, and why the heirs of the German Jewish banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who owned it until the 1930s, now value it at a staggering $250m.

Our editor-at-large Georgina Adam has just returned from Singapore, where the first Art SG art fair took place last week. How successful was this new event in the art market calendar, and what does it tell us about Singapore’s ambitions to become an art hub?

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Portraits in a Chinese Studio, a photographic work by the artist Grace Lau. In the project, which marks Chinese New Year, Lau is subverting the tradition of colonial 19th-century portrait studios in a shopping centre in Southampton on the south coast of the UK.Grace Lau: Portraits in a Chinese Studio, Marlands Shopping Centre, Southampton, UK, 21 January-12 February

Books: New York Review Of Books- February 9, 2023

February 9, 2023 issue cover

The New York Review of Books – February 9, 2023:


Beyond the Pale

After the Russian Revolution, Jews had to navigate a new identity: aspiring muscular worker and New Soviet Man.

How the Soviet Jew Was Made by Sasha Senderovich


Going to Extremes

For Matisse art was a perpetual emergency, a matter of testing boundaries, breaking through.

Matisse: The Red Studio – an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 1–September 10, 2022; and SMK–National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, October 13, 2022–February 26, 2023

Matisse in the 1930s – an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 20, 2022–January 29, 2023; the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, March 1–May 29, 2023; and the Musée Matisse Nice, June 23–September 24, 2023


Reckoning with Silence

Dionne Brand’s poetry has the weight and sonority of prophetic utterance without a hint of melodrama.

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand


Arias of Despair

What can opera elicit from The Hours that the page and the screen cannot?

The Hours – an opera by Kevin Puts, with a libretto by Greg Pierce, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, November 22–December 15, 2022


Books: TLS/Times Literary Supplement – Jan 20, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (January 20, 2023) features an extract from Lawfare by Geoffrey Robertson KC (published tomorrow by TLS Books); @NoreenMasud and Jade French on H. D.; Michael Hofmann on Shirley Hazzard; Gwendoline Riley on Michael Bracewell; Jenny Uglow on Anthony Gross – and more.

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 23, 2023

A truck seen through fog drives down a city street.

The New Yorker – January 16, 2023:

Can 3-D Printing Help Solve the Housing Crisis?

A row of houses being printed by a large machine.

Standard construction can be slow, costly, and inefficient. Machines might do it better.

A Reporter at Large

The Getty Family’s Trust Issues

A family tree with with colorful coins as leaves, sprouting out of a base of tax forms.

Heirs to an iconic fortune sought out a wealth manager who would assuage their progressive consciences. Now their dispute is exposing dynastic secrets.

Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?

tiny books all stacked up to create a scholarly looking building

Literature departments seem to provide a haven for studying books, but they may have painted themselves into a corner.

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Jan 15, 2023

Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath

The New York Times Book Review (January 15, 2023):

‘Terrorist’ — to Whom?

V.V. Ganeshananthan’s novel “Brotherless Night” reveals the moral nuances of violence, ever belied by black-and-white terminology.

The Highland Heroine Who Helped Rescue a Prince

Since her daring mission in 1746, Flora Macdonald has lived on in myth. A new biography by Flora Fraser attempts to sort fact from fiction.

Where Adventurous, Curious Women Rule

In three new historical novels, female protagonists defy odds and push limits.

Books: London Review Of Books – January 19, 2023

Contents · Vol. 45 No. 2 · 19 January 2023 · LRB

London Review of Books (LRB) – January 19, 2023:

Puzzled Puss

Buster Keaton by James Curtis

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis.

From acclaimed cultural and film historian James Curtis—a major biography, the first in more than two decades, of the legendary comedian and filmmaker who elevated physical comedy to the highest of arts and whose ingenious films remain as startling, innovative, modern—and irresistible—today as they were when they beguiled audiences almost a century ago.

READ AN EXCERPT

Look Inside

I want to be queen

The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Polizzotti

Poet, prodigy, precursor, punk: the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith.

‘Everyone is terribly kind’


The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler 
by Kathryn Olmsted

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War by Deborah Cohen