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What Happened to Art?
By Julie Ardery
How the mighty have fallen. From such soul-vaulting achievements as Michelangelo's David, marble buttocks and glowering determination fit to shake the world, the splendor of art has vaporized. Take your own potshot. Here's mine: Last year at the Venice Biennale -- an international showcase of new artwork -- the U.S.A. pavilion featured installations by Robert Gober, several rooms bare but for a few framed news clippings, empty gin bottles, and a toilet plunger stationed on a plank.
The great mudslide
Prospect.org
War is worse than a crime - it's a waste
Eco's writing has a unique ability to dance on the page
and to resonate in the mind, says Andrew Biswell
He agrees with the French writer Jean Baudrillard that the Gulf war represented a turning point: it was the first virtual conflict, in which death became a kind of interactive video game, to be played out on live television, witnessed by a mass audience. Eco claims that the media no longer occupy a neutral place in war as the objective recorders of events. They are now a crucial part of the propaganda machine.
From Fascim to writing as vocation
Telegraph
More on Umberto Eco
modernworld.com
Steinbeck's Legacy Remembered
100th anniversary of his birth
Steinbeck, whose father John was a country treasurer and his mother, Olive was a teacher, died in New York in 1968.
Among the many accolades he received during his distinguished career were the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940 and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
A writer's writer
BBC
Becoming
Zarathustra
Review of Rüdiger Safranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
Thomas Nagel
Nietzsche is so complex that he can be invoked in support of many outlooks, some of them brutal or nihilistic. The Nazis certainly found him encouraging, in spite of the fact that he was an outspoken anti-anti-Semite and an enemy of German chauvinism, and would have despised Nazism as an extreme manifestation of the herd instinct. He is sometimes regarded as a destroyer of the idea of truth and a prophet of postmodernism, though it is clear that he utterly rejected the notion that all perspectives are equal--and that he had at the least a robust sense of falsehood, which is difficult to separate from some conception of truth.
The rationalist madman
Susan Sontag's Where the Stress Falls
By TERRY EAGLETON
Sontag is a devout Europhile, the kind of American who (as T.S. Eliot remarked of Henry James) is European in the way that only a non-European can be. Her roots lie in central European Judaism, a tradition which combines high culture with radical politics, civility with moral passion. Marooned in a United States "which has the most developed anti-intellectual tradition on the planet", she is in love with a Europe "of high art and ethical seriousness, of the values of privacy, inwardness, and an unamplified, non-machine-made discourse". But she is also shrewd enough to recognise that, even as she writes, that fabular continent is giving way to one enormous theme park.
The irrepressible Susan Sontag / Opinion
Ireland.com
Consolation and Melody:
THE LIFE OF ISAAC STERN
Jonathan Kiefer
Isaac Stern was at home in San Francisco, listening to the New York Philharmonic on the radio. Stern, then 21, was already an accomplished professional violinist, and a nascent musical emissary. He was keenly aware, as he later wrote, that "music became a necessary island of peace that, if only briefly, took people away from the enormous strains that were part of everyone’s wartime consciousness." That insight whetted his career, and it makes his death, eleven days after the atrocity often called the second Pearl Harbor, especially poignant.
A necessary island of peace
Gadfly Online
The PostmOdern Paradox
By John Haber
If there is a postmodern condition, it cannot even be stated consistently much less cured. Like a right-wing fantasies of the welfare state, Postmodernism is a hospital where the beds must remain empty.
Modernism demanded one thing: make it new. If I discard it, I have to find something else, something new. And so I am modernist. If I discard the aim of making it new, then I must do something other than Modernism. But that means something new. Instead of the postmodern condition, one ought to speak of a postmodern paradox
Discarding the new for the new...
Post Modernism & Art History / Opinion
SURREALISM REVISITED
By PETER SCHJELDAHL
...stirred by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, which were then just emerging in France, such as the concept of hysteria as a coherent expression of repressed trauma. Writing in 1920, Breton called hysteria "one of the most beautiful poetic discoveries of our epoch." Freudian lingo, wielded fast and loose, peppers Surrealist discourse. Continual references to "the unconscious" suggest a place as tangible as, say, The Hague.
Of "the unconscious" and desire...
The New Yorker
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